2nd opinion: Tiers for fears

When I’m at conferences, much of what I hear enters via one ear, exits by the other and has remarkably little impact on the grey matter in between – unless, that is, I’m chairing the proceedings.

So, two months after I took the chair at the National Housing Federation supported housing conference, I’m still reflecting on our debate on antisocial behaviour.

It set some persistent alarm bells ringing in my head. The first was the clear indication that many of us in supported housing haven’t yet grasped the NHF’s In Business for Neighbourhoods agenda.

We’re good, as we need to be, on the rights and expectations of our service users. But “the neighbourhood” is something that we react to as a threat.

We presume that the people we are serving, and their friends and relations, are more likely to be on the punitive end of strategies to combat antisocial behaviour than to benefit from them. We’re too defensive to notice the opportunities that are there for us if only we could see “the neighbourhood” as a positive.

My next alarm concerns public perceptions. As a liberal intellectual working in the social sector, I’m prone to imagine that because the fear-mongering over antisocial behaviour we read in the tabloids flies contrary to most of the hard evidence, it can be either denied, ignored or treated with contempt.

I’m learning, though, that ill-founded fear is no less pernicious and persistent than racism or homophobia. We need deep and serious strategies to counter it and we don’t have them at present.

Which leads neatly to my final and greatest alarm: our conference speakers’ bar charts showed one single cause of public concern way ahead of all the others. It was headed simply “young people congregating”. Never mind drugs, noise or crime, what really strikes fear into the hearts of Mr and Mrs UK Punter is the sight of teenagers in groups.

That bothers me because I think I can see why it is, that it needs to be challenged, and that confronting it won’t be easy.

Put me in a group of middle-aged men in purple shirts and chunky jewellery and I know where I am. Their facial expressions, gestures and body language are familiar.

I don’t suspect they are about to mug me, and were they moving in that direction I’d spot a number of intelligible verbal and other signals warning me in advance.

In a group whose behaviour and culture I don’t understand, my fear goes beyond reality to encompass a whole range of unpredictable things that might be visited on me.

We fear what we don’t understand and fears of youth are escalating at a time when society is becoming more layered by age than ever before. Ironically, though most of us spend more of our time in mixed-race, mixed-gender and openly mixed-sexuality groups than did previous generations, modern patterns of work and leisure mean we spend less time with those who differ from us by age.

The antisocial behaviour agenda isn’t about to go away; the general election campaign next year will have it as a significant focus. As housing providers, we need to understand the agenda and treat it seriously.

We must move from the role of reluctant observers to join those leading the debate and develop models of good practice that show how we tackle the realities and the perceptions. If we don’t, others will continue to take the debate in directions that undermine our work and the people who depend on us.