Troubling Times for Young People and Families With Troubles – Responding to Truancy, Rioting and Families Struggling With Adversity

Abstract

The Big Society was one of the UK Prime Minister’s flagship policy ideas prior to his election in 2010 and has since become part of the UK coalition government’s legislative programme. A key aspect of the Big Society is to mend ‘societally Broken Britain’ by supporting families, as ‘strong families are the foundation of a bigger, stronger society’. However, in the aftermath of the riots of August 2011 in London and other parts of England, the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, has suggested that parents of children who regularly truant need to be confronted and challenged and has proposed penalizing parents of truanting children by cutting their benefits. This article considers whether withholding benefits from families is an effective means of tackling antisocial behaviour or does this plan represent an ideological view of welfare recipients as being irresponsible and a commitment to the penalization of the socially excluded? This article will consider whether the Big Society truly offers the prospect of a new approach to young people and families deemed to be ‘in trouble’ or whether the August 2011 riots created the environment for justifying cuts in public spending by shifting responsibility for crime and crime control from the criminal justice system onto vulnerable young people and low-income families.

Truancy in Europe: Does the type of educational system matter?

“…Interestingly, the strongest effect was found among students in the lowest educational tracks in which lower‐class pupils are over‐represented. The latter strategy contradicts the choice of many policy‐makers to tackle truancy primarily through sanctioning and calling for increased parent responsibility (e.g., making parents legally accountable for their truanting behaviour and financial penalisation) (Arthur, ; McIntyre‐Bhatty, ; Zhang, ). Against this background, McIntyre‐Bhatty () and Reid () warn that a shift in the responsibility for truancy from the educational, psychological and social work system to the adolescents themselves and their families might lead towards situations where local authorities were only concerned about truancy rates, without analysing and intervening the underlying reasons.…”

Explaining and Understanding State Intervention into the Lives of ‘Troubled’ Families

“…A culture of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through generations. (Cameron, 2011c) Linked to the inheritance of disadvantage, the welfare system -and in particular benefit dependency -was also identified as a source of malaise at the heart of the broken society (Arthur, 2015). Not only were families identified as a cost to government finances, but they were identified as a source of low aspiration inciting laziness (Crossley, 2015).…”

Present absences : Exploring the posthumanist entanglements of school absenteeism

“…Om skolfrånvaro tidigare associerades med avvikande beteenden och enbart med vissa elever (se exempelvis Arthur 2015;Ekstrand 2015;Jönsson 1990;Reid 2015;Strandell 2009;Sutphen, Ford & Flaherty 2010) producerar den digitala registreringen skolfrånvaro inte bara för de frånvarande eleverna, utan för alla elever, varje dag. Samtidigt verkar den digitala registreringen fungera bäst för vissa elever.…”

“…However, a review of the recommendations and results within 155 research reports on absenteeism from a number of different countries published during the 21 st century, shows that most studies continue to focus on individual factors (Ekstrand 2015). Although several studies (see for example Reid 1999;Corville-Smith et al 1998;Weinberg & Weinberg 1992) highlight the importance of understanding school absenteeism as a complex, multi-faceted or 'multifactorial' problem consisting of a combination of background factors (such as family relations, socioeconomic variables, residential areas, and gender; see for example Arthur 2015), 'personality' (such as school phobia, learning disabilities, poor school performance; see Sutphen, Ford & Flaherty 2010) and school context (see Sälzer et al 2012), I would -like Corville-Smith et al (1998) and Sutphen, Ford and Flaherty (2010) -argue that research on school absenteeism tends to focus on only one of these many aspects at a time. With the intention of not (re)producing this separation, that according to Sutphen, Ford and Flaherty (2010) has significant impacts on truancy interventions, I weave together in the following studies focusing on individual factors, background factors (that have somewhat also an individual focus) and studies focusing on structural or school related explanations.…”

“…Whereas school absenteeism used to be associated with a few students and concepts such as school phobia, learning disabilities, poor school performance (Sutphen, Ford & Flaherty 2010), socioeconomically exposed regions or problematic family relations (Arthur 2015), deviant behaviour or abuse problems (Jönsson 1990), or hallway ramblers and home sitters (Strandell 2009), digital registration includes all students, whether or not they are absent. These practices produce absences not only for the absent students but for all students, every day.…”