Troubling Times for Young People and Families With Troubles – Responding to Truancy, Rioting and Families Struggling With Adversity
| Author | Raymond Arthur |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663914559239 |
| Published date | 01 September 2015 |
| Date | 01 September 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Troubling Times for
Young People and
Families With Troubles –
Responding to Truancy,
Rioting and Families
Struggling With Adversity
Raymond Arthur
Northumbria University, UK
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 envi-
ronment 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.
Corresponding author:
Raymond Arthur, School of Law, Northumbria University, City Campus East, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE1
8ST, UK.
Email: raymond.art hur@northumbria.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
2015, Vol. 24(3) 443–464
ªThe Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663914559239
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Keywords
Family support, parenting, truancy, youth offending
Introduction
The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, has described the Big Society as a means of
building ‘a bigger and stronger society’ (Cabinet Office, 2010), and he identified parents
and families as fundamental to achieving the aims of the Big Society. He has argued that
societal renewal in the Big Society should involve ‘empowering and enabling individu-
als, families and communities to take control of their lives’ and emphasized the need to
help ‘build a society where families and communities are stronger’, as ‘strong families
are the foundation of a bigger, stronger society’ (Cameron, 2011a). Indeed, David
Cameron has promised to do ‘all we can to support every family – and every kind of fam-
ily’ and to be the ‘most family friendly government you have ever seen in this country’
(Cameron, 2010a), as ‘what matters most to a child’s life chances is not the wealth of
their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting’ (Cameron, 2010b). However, in the
wake of the August 2011 riots, which were described as ‘the worst bout of civil unrest in
a generation’ (Lewis et al., 2011), the Prime Minister stated that discipline and rigour
were now needed to mend the ‘broken society’, and parents need to know there will
be real consequences to their inactions if their children continually misbehave (Cameron,
2011b). David Cameron blamed the riots on a lack of proper parenting, upbringing,
ethics and morals (Cameron, 2011c). The Prime Minister now believes that challenging
families and parents is the starting point for ‘mending the broken society’, and he iden-
tified single-parent families as a specific target, as he has judged that:
...many of the rioters ...have no father at home. Perhaps they come from one of the neigh-
bourhoods where it’s standard for children to have a mum and not a dad, where it’s normal
for young men to grow up without a male role model. (Cameron, 2011d)
In addition to single-parent families, the welfare system was also identified as a
source of the malaise at the heart of the broken society. David Cameron believes that the
welfare system ‘encourages the worst in people ...incites laziness that excuses bad
behaviour that erodes self-disciple that discourages hard work ...above all that drains
responsibility away from people’ (Cameron, 2011d). He characterizes this as a moral
hazard in our welfare system, which encourages people to behave irresponsibly as they
know the state will always bail them out (Cameron, 2011d). In response to these con-
cerns, the Prime Minister established social policy review groups to identify plans and
programmes to deliver the change needed in the country. These plans would be subject
to a ‘family test’ which means that ‘[i]f it hurts families, if it undermines commitment, if
it tramples over the values that keeps people together, or stops families from being
together, then we shouldn’t do it’ (Cameron, 2011d).
One plan that has been suggested by the social review group, and supported by the
Prime Minister, is that parents of children in England who regularly truant could have
their benefits cut. This is a plan which should enjoy public popularity. In August
444 Social & Legal Studies 24(3)
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