hy don't we do something nasty to antisocial tenants? Hold on now – before you run out of the office, attack your least favourite tenant and then blame me for inciting you to violence, read on for a while.
The need to do something to address this "corrosive impact on communities", as David Blunkett would put it, has surfaced once again. Some of my mediation clients might think a physical assault is the only answer to antisocial behaviour, but the law does not. On your better days, I suspect – before the phone starts ringing – you might well side with the law, so I think we all accept that we can't hurt these people. Despite the various anecdotes from times gone by of friendly bicycle-riding coppers clipping wayward youngsters around the ear and marching them back home, we can't really hold such physical admonishment up as a measure of best practice that ought to be disinterred.

What about good old-fashioned humiliation, then – naming and shaming, in other words? In previous columns I've made my feelings clear about employing this tactic with children and antisocial behaviour orders: convictions become spent after a certain amount of time, while a name and photo in the local paper has an effect that doesn't just disappear after a suitable period.

At a recent Midlands Mediation Network meeting, we looked at the media image of young people. I asked everyone in the room to recount the naughtiest thing they had done as a child. Judging by our stories, if we were that age today, we'd be in the paper every week. Try recreating that exercise at your next residents' association meeting or community safety group. It should focus the discussion a little.

With physical harm and humiliation out of the picture, then, what else is there? What about eviction? After all, if you get them off your books then you've done your job, haven't you? Hang on a minute, we can't do that any more. Social inclusion is the order of the day; you can't just move the problem.

When I used to work at Stoke Citizens' Advice Bureau, I remember a parallel debate in government around disability benefits and the widely held opinion that too many people were in receipt of them. It wasn't the done thing to just kick them off the system, so ministers came up with self-assessment – letting people remove their own entitlement. Even the utility companies caught on.

Give people gas and electric meters, and non-payment would result in them disconnecting themselves.

Everyone in the meeting recounted the naughtiest thing they’d done as a child. Judging by our stories, if we were that age today, we’d all be in the papers every week

Hey, I think there's a good idea here. Why not find a way of getting antisocial tenants to evict themselves? If we were to find a way of making it clear to these people that if their behaviour didn't improve then, oh, let's say for example we'd take away their housing benefit, then the really persistent offenders would no longer be able to afford their rent.

And where does social inclusion fit in here? At this point I must bow to the expertise of Frank Field MP who has come up with the brilliant idea of housing these intentionally homeless people in "small, secure units … that would have to be indestructible". I must admit that despite the title of my column this week, I am a little concerned by this phrase – especially by the use of the word "small".

If "small, secure and indestructible" is not a thinly-veiled reference to some kind of prison, then I can only guess that he is suggesting we somehow shrink people and put them inside black box flight recorders.

Perhaps we'd better rethink this. Doing something nasty to antisocial tenants looks like it's going to become putting benefit recipients into Frank Field's indestructible isolation units. I don't think we need to be that nasty, do we?

Well, whatever the government eventually decides to do to antisocial tenants, and whether we agree with it or not, we have to at least be sure we'll be getting to the right people. Just to check this, I had a look on a government website to see how it defines antisocial behaviour.