Governing through vulnerability in austerity England
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Author | Francesca Menichelli |
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370819880154 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370819880154
European Journal of Criminology
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370819880154
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Governing through
vulnerability in
austerity England
Francesca Menichelli
University of Surrey, UK
Abstract
Drawing on interviews with practitioners, the article reconstructs how and why vulnerability
has become an organizing principle in community safety work in England and Wales. Decreasing
crime rates, growing awareness of risk and harm, loss of political salience of volume crime and
modifications to the structure of incentives all contributed to making the move away from crime
and disorder possible. The article shows how vulnerability is now used to facilitate partnership
working to maintain existing levels of service provision, but also to ration the amount of support
made available to citizens at a time of austerity. This is potentially problematic and open questions
remain on the solidity, orientation and reach of this shift. The article concludes by discussing the
research findings in light of their broader implications for European criminology and comparative
research.
Keywords
austerity, community safety, England and Wales, partnership working, vulnerability
Introduction and structure of the article
The notion of vulnerability has gained considerable currency in recent years across a
number of disciplines, from critical social policy to disability studies (Brown, 2015;
Hollomotz, 2009) and critical legal studies (Fineman, 2008, 2013; Mackenzie et al.,
2014). Fineman’s work on vulnerability as an inherent, and universal, feature of the
human condition has proved particularly stimulating in imagining new ways in which the
relationship between the state, citizens and civil society might be conceptualized.
Sparked by the strength of the academic interest in vulnerability, seminars and work-
shops have been organized by several prominent British organizations in the last few
Corresponding author:
Francesca Menichelli, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, AD Building, Guildford, GU2 7XH, UK.
Email: f.menichelli@surrey.ac.uk
880154EUC0010.1177/1477370819880154European Journal of CriminologyMenichelli
research-article2019
Article
2021, Vol. 18(5) 695–712
years, addressing issues as disparate as vulnerability and the politics of care (British
Academy, February 2017), the implications for law of positive accounts of vulnerability
(University of Oxford, July 2017), professionalism and vulnerability (University of
Leeds, October 2017), and vulnerability and the law (University of Southampton, April
2018). Looking at this flurry of activity, it is hard to counter the claims that we are in the
middle of a vulnerability zeitgeist (Brown et al., 2017).
Criminology has, to a large extent, remained quite peripheral to debates on the rising
relevance of vulnerability. Although the notion does play an important part in some cor-
ners of the discipline, not much attention has been paid so far to how growing concerns
about vulnerability are reshaping the actions of those working in the realm of crime
prevention. In my own research on the changing nature of community safety in England
and Wales, I have found that a discourse centred around the notion of vulnerability could
be identified in community safety agreements and partnership plans published by local
authorities across the country (Menichelli, 2018), which has led me to conclude that
community safety work should be understood more and more in terms of the protection
of vulnerable people, rather than exclusively preoccupied with acquisitive crime and
antisocial behaviour (ASB).
However, the argument that was presented in that article relied almost exclusively on
the analysis of national and local documents, and was therefore unable to shed much
light on the possible reasons why such a reorientation is taking place and how, or what its
consequences might be. This is what this article seeks to do. More specifically, I wish to
answer three distinct, yet related, questions. First, how and why has a concern with vul-
nerability become central to community safety work in England and Wales? Second,
what work does vulnerability ‘do’ in the context of community safety? Third, what are
the implications of the emergence of vulnerability for community safety partnerships
(CSPs) and partner agencies involved in the provision of services in this area?
In order to do this, the article draws on a body of in-depth semi-structured interviews
conducted between 2016 and 2017 across England and Wales with 47 individuals work-
ing in community safety in local authorities, Fire and Rescue Services, several Offices of
Police and Crime Commissioners and police forces in the following roles: 3 CSP data
managers (DM), 32 community safety managers (CSM), 8 assistant directors with com-
munity safety portfolios (AD), 4 policy managers for the Office of the Police and Crime
Commissioner (OPCC).1
Two decisions informed the selection of interviewees. First, conscious efforts were
made to include respondents from a wide range of agencies so as to reflect the ubiquity
of partnership working in this domain, and most importantly to understand if, and to
what extent, the movement towards vulnerability is affecting different agencies in the
same way. Second, respondents with strategic and operational responsibilities were fea-
tured equally, owing to a desire to pay attention to two distinct, yet related, processes: the
definition and evolution of strategies and policies, and their implementation.
Although quotes have for the most part been left untouched in order to preserve their
authenticity, readers should be aware that some minimal editing has been carried out in
order to conceal identifying markers (typically, names of individuals and place names)
and therefore preserve the anonymity of the interviewees. Along with interview data, the
analysis presented here also relies on, and is strengthened by, publicly available survey
696 European Journal of Criminology 18(5)
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