Vigilance and Vigilantes
| Author | JESSICA EVANS |
| Published date | 01 May 2003 |
| Date | 01 May 2003 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480603007002416 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Vigilance and vigilantes:
Thinking psychoanalytically about
anti-paedophile action
JESSICA EVANS
The Open University, UK
Abstract
This paper applies a psychoanalytic approach to the protests of
members of ‘Residents Against Paedophiles’ on the Paulsgrove
estate in Portsmouth, UK, in August 2000. It sets these in the
context of the strains existing in the British government’s policy on
sexual offenders. It is argued that the protests demonstrate the
existence of links between a vigilante state of mind and the ‘mind
of state’ that makes community members responsible for crime
management. Evidence is provided by the protesters’ fabrication of
a ‘mental list’ of convicted sex offenders that mimicked the official
register. The paper concludes that access to information does not
always have the effect of containing adults in such a way that
enhances their capacity to act as ‘responsible’ citizens.
Key Words
anti-paedophile campaigns • community • information
• psychoanalysis • responsibilization • vigilantism
There is no list [. . .]. They said to me the list’s all mental. I think then it did
hit me what we were doing.
(Jackie Rampton, Paulsgrove protester, quoted in Gillan, 2000: 5)
Paulsgrove is an estate built in the 1950s as part of a policy of slum-
clearance on the edges of Portsmouth on the south-west coast of England.
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There is only one road in and out of Paulsgrove and a recent account
(Silverman and Wilson, 2002) describes it as a ‘beleaguered enclave’ that
has a high degree of social problems.1On 23 July 2000, the national
tabloid News of the World launched its campaign for ‘Sarah’s Law’ in the
wake of the murder of Sarah Payne. Its naming of convicted sex offenders
and its printing of their police identity photographs was an indication of its
wider aims: to provide open access to the location of all paedophiles in the
UK. In the evenings of the first week of August 2000, about 100 adults and
children, calling themselves ‘Residents Against Paedophiles’, marched
through the Paulsgrove estate. They torched cars and firebombed flats and
houses where suspected sex offenders and paedophiles were thought to live,
including one Victor Burnett, who had the previous week been ‘named and
shamed’ by the News of the World. Five families, unconnected to sex
offenders, fled the estate and a policeman was injured. At least 50 people
were arrested according to newspaper reports (Hill, 2001). Similar events
occurred in other areas of the UK such as the Southway area of Plymouth,
Whitely in Berkshire, Manchester, London and Wales. In this article, the
Paulsgrove protests and their protagonists form the centrepiece for a
psychoanalytic study that, it is argued, demonstrates the existence of links
between the vigilante state of mind and the ‘mind of state’ that places
communities at the centre of crime management.
Vigilantism is all too often understood by political and academic com-
mentators as a simple expression of a latent moral authoritarianism in the
popular ‘masses’ incurred through an admixture of endemic mental frailty
and suggestibility—hence the key role attributed to populism’s agent, the
tabloid press (see Riddell, 2000, 2002). Expressions of outrage, aggression
and anxiety abound as a response to ‘crime’ but they should not be
regarded as archaic, timeless responses of the prototypical ‘mob’, which is
largely how the national press saw it. For example, more than one
newspaper article used the archetype ‘rough music’ in relation to the
Paulsgrove protesters (Ferguson, 2001), referring to Grose’s Dictionary of
the Vulgar Tongue (1796), which describes women beating saucepans and
pokers in procession in order to humiliate or scare a neighbour. Mentions
of Salem, witches and the ‘violent stupidity of the mob’ in reporting were
frequent (Ferguson, 2001). But the contextually specific form of vigilantism
that is the subject of this article can be more subtly understood as also
contingent upon the contemporary politics of active citizenship in which
the ‘victim’—actual or potential—is called upon to play an authoritative
role.
Anti-paedophile ‘vigilante’ campaigns unconsciously manifest the strains
existing in the Blair government’s dual approach to sexual offenders. These
strains are consequent upon the Government’s deployment of the admin-
istrative techniques of neo-liberal governance and, at the same time, its
continuing attachment to the rhetoric of contemporary punitive populism,
reinforced by other agents in the public sphere such as the popular press.
From the point of view of community actors, this distinction may not be as
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