THINKING THE PROBLEM OF YOUTH VIOLENCEAND FAMILIES

Judith BessantAustralian Catholic University

Richard HilDepartment of Justice Studies

Queensland University of Technology

Rob WattsRoyal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Ruth WebberAustralian Catholic University

Paper presented at the Children and Crime: Victims and Offenders Conferenceconvened by the Australian Institute of Criminology

and held in Brisbane, 17-18 June 1999

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The hardest thing we will ever have to do is to think what we do.Hannah Arendt, 1974: 4

Have you read any criminology texts? They are staggering. And I say this out ofastonishment, not aggressiveness, because I fail to comprehend how the discourseof criminology has been able to go on at this level. One has the impression that it isof such utility ... for the working of the system that it does not even need to seek atheoretical justification for itself.Michel Foucault 1980: 47-8

In March 1999 the Commonwealth Government's National Crime Prevention project teamreleased its report, Pathways to Prevention. The report (National Crime Prevention 1999: 2-3)'confirms' what talk-back radio show hosts and press editors already 'knew', namely that'juvenile crime' is a 'serious problem' especially given that the rate of juvenile violence and'crimes against the person' is 'continuing to increase'. The authors of the report, theDevelopmental Crime Prevention Consortium, stoutly resist a conservative 'law and order'diagnosis based on mono-causal explanations (like bad genes or dysfunctional parenting) alongwith law 'n order' policy responses (eg., more police or mandatory sentencing). Instead theauthors argue for a 'progressive' crime prevention framework informed by an enlightened socialscientific theoretical framework committed to social inclusion and citizenship (National CrimePrevention 1999: 5).

Their analysis is solidly grounded in the very modern discourse of risk. The Crime Preventionproject team argues that:

... the roots of criminal offending are complex and cumulative ... embedded in social aswell as personal histories. To uncover significant risk factors that are the facilitatingconditions for entry into a criminal career requires a life course perspective that viewseach young offender as someone who is developing over the life course and in specificsocial settings.

In their table of risk and protective factors the team identifies, under the heading of ‘FamilyFactors’ such things as family form, structure and functioning as well as significant eventsassociated with family life (separation, bereavement etc.) and the nature of school experience(‘deviant peer group’, ‘poor attachment to school’ and inadequate behaviour management).1

On this basis they run the case for 'crime control' strategies based on the promise, revealed by:

... scientifically persuasive evidence ... that interventions early in life can have long termimpacts on crime and other social problems such as substance abuse (1999: 5).

Criminologists have long identified 'family breakdown', single-parent households, lack ofparental control and discipline, poor ‘intra-family’ relationships and large family size as keyexplanatory factors in the juvenile crime rate (see Silva & Stanton 1996; Farrington 1997).The National Crime Prevention project belongs to what has been called an 'actuarialcriminology' (van Swaaningen 1997). This emphasises the discovery of 'risk factors' that lead

1 The authors (National Crime Prevention 1999) identify under the heading of ‘Child Factors’ a long list ofpsycho-bio-medical antecedents. (This includes such things as: prematurity, low birth weight, disability, lowintelligence, difficult temperament, insecure attachment, poor social skills, lack of empathy,hyperactivity/disruptive, impulsivity). Under ‘Community and Cultural Factors’ the authors cite a number ofstructural considerations (socio-economic disadvantage, neighbourhood violence and crime etc.) and culturalmatters such as male portrayals of violence and other forms of support for violent expression.

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to juvenile crime and the need for early interventions to enhance 'resiliency' and deflect thedescent into criminality (Haggerty et al 1996: 150-167). Together the older search for causalor probabilistic variables and the more recent fad for identifying 'risk factors' are an expressionof a modernist tradition in criminology (and related disciplines like psychology and sociology)to link 'the family' to delinquent and criminal tendencies.

How should we think about this project of 'crime prevention and the scientific task ofidentifying 'at risk' young people? Is it to be accepted, as the authors no doubt hope it will be,as a 'progressive' intervention in a policy field all too frequently shaped by regressive, evenconservative values and inclinations? We think not.

In this paper we outline the leading considerations we think that must underpin any seriousengagement with the problem of violence and the relations between families and juvenile'crime'.2 Good policy depends on there being an enlightened public and a willingness andcapacity on the part of the intellectually trained to offer prudential advice to governments andto help inform the public. Regrettably and this is the burden eg., of Foucault's critique ofmodernist social science, complicity in the project of governance and an inability to reflexivelymove past key constitutive discourses (eg., about 'anti-social behaviour' or the existence of an'underclass') has meant that disciplines like criminology tend to be caught in a vicious cycle ofrepeating and recycling ad nauseam metaphors and concepts which keep missing the point. Inthis regard the theoretical vacuity and the ethical nihilism of modernist social sciences, whichSchutz (1986: 7) so famously identified in 1940 continues to plague criminology in particular.One sign of the absence of social and ethical reflexivity on the part of criminology is itsnotorious preoccupation with insignificant forms of domestic forms of violent crime and thenear total refusal to recognise state sponsored violence which has been the chief health hazardof the twentieth century).

We begin with some long overdue conceptual clarifications about what might sensibly bemeant by violence, before turning to the literature on the links between families and juvenilecrime. As we argue below, criminological studies in this area produce narrow and theoreticallydubious conclusions about the links between certain ‘types’ of families and crime-delinquencyand in the instance examined here, violence. The near-complete absence of theoreticalreflexivity in most of these empirical studies means the continuing 'common sense' appeal ofthe otiose claim that one of the 'causes' of crime is to be found, first and foremost, in the nexusbetween ‘dysfunctional’ family life and delinquency.

Theoretical Prelude

Twentieth century criminology sits squarely in the framework of modernist social science.3

That is also to say that the body of research and theoretical work on the problem of juvenileviolence and its causal links to family rests on several 'meta-theoretical' assumptions.

2 This paper is part of an ongoing research program by the authors (see Bessant and Watts 1996). (We do notpresent here any of the findings of our own research process based on interviews with young people which isproceeding at a slow rate).3 One important implication of this is that distinctions between 'progressive' criminologists and 'conservatives'are not always as clear cut as the protagonists of these perspectives like to believe; while the policy implicationsof progressive and conservative criminologists' s research may be different, they may also cohabit more of thesame analytic, epistemological and ontological territory than they weould perhaps think seemly. For a criticalaccount of modernist criminology see Bessant, Hil and Watts (forthcoming) .

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The first is the proposition that there is a single, objective and coherent social and moral realitycalled 'society' against which transgressive behaviours that constitute juvenile violence or moregenerally 'deviance' and crime' can be defined. Secondly it is argued that transgressive andcriminal conduct is sufficiently stable, objective or observable to make these phenomena eitheramenable to study or to conceptualising within the canons of social science established asproperly 'scientific'. (This is part of the postulate of phenomenalism central to empiricism).Thirdly it is assumed in much of this literature that the qualities defining certain patterns ofconduct as 'transgressive' or 'criminal' are inherent in those forms of conduct or behaviour itselfand not eg., in the relation between the behaviour and some normative system. That istransgression and 'deviance' are somehow observable, fixed and determinate markers of theconduct itself because the alleged social deviations or criminal behaviours are in fact breachesof a dominant single, unitary and coherent moral code.

Yet as an increasing number of writers have noted these assumptions no longer possesscommonsense status even in sociology -though we cannot be sure of criminology. Sumner(1994: 309-310) eg., insists, that there are vital problems with these assumptions.

While it may be comforting to suppose that there is a single, unitary and coherent social andmoral consensus against which transgression can be defined or benchmarked, it has never beenestablished or even properly investigated, why or how it was that alleged social deviationswere in fact breaches of a dominant single, unitary and coherent moral code (cf. Braithwaite1989). Secondly assuming that transgression or even 'crime' implied the existence of such adominant moral consensus, it was a bit of an embarrassment for the theory that this consensuswas never found or even the likelihood of its existence established. Indeed in any kind oflarge-scale society it most likely does not and could not exist. So what was 'deviance' deviantfrom? If labelling theorists were right and deviance was whatever some people said 'it' was,then 'it' lacked any kind of stability that made it either amenable to study or to conceptualisingwithin the canons established as properly 'scientific'.

Worse even if there had been a materialising of the dominant consensus, there was no logicalreason why the transgression should ever be said to inhere in certain forms of conduct orbehaviour itself and not eg., in the relation between the behaviour and some normative system.The labelling theorists eg., understood that it made more sense to look for 'deviance' amongthe groups -and their codes- who detected and treated 'deviance' rather than assuming thatdeviance was somehow an observable, fixed and determinate marker of the conduct itself.That is after the labelling theorists had finished with concepts like 'crime' and 'deviance', it wasclearly understood that identifying some conduct as transgressive involved a semiotic practicewhich distinguished between the thing itself and its meaning. That is there is an importantdistinction to be drawn between the thing itself, in this case, an action or pattern of conductthat only becomes 'criminal' or 'deviant' after it has been interpreted as such, and the criteriaand meanings which certain groups impose on the action.

Finally the conceptual and 'real' relations/distinctions between 'crime', 'deviance' and 'difference'were in fact totally incoherent. Some crime was clearly not deviant, while some minordifferences were clearly deviant while more serious ones were not. In spite of Durkheim'smagisterial intervention the relation between these three dimensions was never made clearly orcoherently. The difference and the relationships between crime, deviance and differencelooked to be suspiciously arbitrary.

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We will show later that one problem with the literature on juvenile violence (surveyed eg., inIltis 1995) is that it relies on a theoretical and research heuristic that is modernist to the core,especially in the way much of this work treats the core categories as 'self-evident' or as'observables'. That is, this research canon invariably rely on the common-sense idea that ourknowledge is based on observable phenomena situated in the world. We begin by questioningwhether the treatment of 'violence' as an unequivocal representation of naturally occurring anddistinct types of social conduct is defensible.

What is violence and how has criminology constituted it?

Many people are likely perhaps to think about violence in terms like this lightly-fictionalisedaccount of a fight in a back lane in the 1950s between some young working class Anglo-Australians and their opponents, recently arrived Italian-born boys, who are the 'dagos'). It ispresented here as it is remembered by one of the participants (Dick 1965: 164):

After beating the dago's mates to a pulp and leaving them lying there unconscious, ourgang went up the lane to where the dago was holding two of the boys at bay with hisknife ... Knuckles became enraged and lost all reasoning ... he threw away all caution andcharged at the dago. It was a courageous but foolish move. The dago swung his knife inthree fast successive blows and stabbed Knuckles three times low in the stomach.Knuckles' first two punches smashed into the dago's face as he was stabbing him and thedago reeled back ... With all this happening so fast, the boys rushed in and commencedsmashing and punching [the dago] until he was lying on the ground in a pile of blood.Even as he lay there, they continued to kick him about the head and body until he wasscarcely recognisable as a mate at all.

The immediacy, the physicality, the sheer bloodiness of what commensensically is understoodas violence is well represented here. But does this mean there is a simple immediacy aboutviolence that renders its operations and effects both transparent and self-evident? We doubtit.

Firstly it may be testimony to the sense that violence has such an obviousness that it does notrequire thinking about that may explain the general tendency to avoid puzzling about violenceand to assume that everyone just knows what it looks like.4 Thus whole texts (like Bender1992) can proceed without the most basic conceptual clarification, while reams ofcriminological research likewise operate on this taken-for-granted basis.5 Eggar eg., (inChappell and Eggar 1995: xi-xxiv) notes the 'socially constructed definitions of violence', butthere is no clarification of what this entails. As Michael Levi (1997: 859) notes, also withoutdoing anything himself to redress the problem:

The conceptual issue of 'what counts as violence' does not cause too many difficulties forcriminologists in practice because they usually ignore it.(his stress)

4 Even a classic treatment by Ellul (1970) simply assumes that violence is such an 'obvious' category that itneeds no conceptual exegesis even though his analytic treatment stresses the diverse and competingrationalisations found within the Christian apologetics variously for 'just wars', non violence and thoseoccasions when violent resistance by individuals to oppression is to be justified.5 Treatments by Polk (1994) and Polk and Warren (1996) suggests the ineluctable limits to otherwise reflectiveand nuanced treatments of 'criminal violence' by respected Australian criminologists ie., violence that isdefined and proscribed within the discourse of the criminal law.

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This is a serious weakness. In what follows we argue for the following propositions that wesuggest will go some way to clarifying a murky characteristic of modernist criminology.

• Any theory of violence must encompass both interpersonal violence and state- sponsoredand highly systematic violence;

• Distinctions conventionally drawn between 'legitimate force' and 'illegitimate violence' willneed more convincing ethical clarification than has so far been offered;

• Violence is perspectival and social. Violence as a form of social action necessarily involvessocial relations and any number of prospective evaluations which seek to address both theexternal signs of violence and the experiential or phenomenological dimensions of violenceon the part of perpetrators and victims and observers.

• Some attention will need to be given to developing an adequate semiosis of violence ie.,clarifying the signs by which it is to be recognised

• Explaining violence will need far more attention to its expressive and phenomenologicalaspects.

The language of violence

Priestland (1974:11) can perhaps be thought to have summed up one commonsense view aboutthe way we understand violence when he wrote:

... the essence of violence is that physical power is deliberately employed, with theultimate sanction of physical pain, and little choice but surrender or physical resistance.

Arblaster (1975: 227) indicates that while this, and like approaches seems to make a good dealof sense, it is not without its problems. Arblaster suggests that the 'image of violence' most ofus have in mind when we think about 'violence' involves some physical act of violence thatsomeone does to another, usually out of an emotional or rationally calculated attempt to causeinjury like punching someone on the nose or stabbing them. His own definition suggests that:

... a violent action is one which involves doing harm, injury or damage to a human being,or to a non-human being, or perhaps, but more dubiously, to things, notably (in commonspeech) to things which are owned, ie., property and the harm or injury conceived of ischaracteristically physical, or at least quasi-physical (I have in mind here forms of torture,or 'ill-treatment', which may leave no bodily mark) causing suffering and affecting health.

His own clarification however introduces one minor wobble of his own. Clearly alluding tothe fact of state sponsored violence, he suggests that the most typical acts that involve 'physicalharm, injury and killing in the twentieth century are quite impersonal', by which he intends tomean that the:

... the most responsible persons are normally quite remote from the harm and killingcaused by their decisions and orders (1975: 228).

Arblaster acknowledges the problem of relating our commonsense notions and expectations ofpersonal agency and responsibility to the fact that states and other legal authorities have all toofrequently given orders to people to kill, maim, torture or harass citizens of the state whichhave then been carried out. Yet is not our understanding of what is properly understood to be'violence', dependent on the notion that the person who does the violence has also to bear thefull and/or sole agential responsibility for the act? Yet if Arblaster is right who in hisframework is responsible? How do we even frame the question of ethical responsibility, giventhe social or political connections which link those who are giving orders to do violence, tothose agents of the state, who proceed to carry out the orders.

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Are decisions taken by powerful people or organisations to act, or not act which have thedirect effect of causing great harm including death to be included in the notion of violence? Forexample was the decision of British governments in the 1840s not to intervene as the Irishpotato crops failed, to be included in an understanding of 'violence'? When eg., a powerfulperson or organisation pays starvation wages to a group of workers, or blocks public access toa food depot or a water supply in a period of famine and drought are these, and like actions tobe understood as violence when the intention of the key actor was to make a profit or simplyprotect their interest? We should recall the distinction American governments eg., insisted onduring the course of their 1991 invasion of Kuwait and Iraq, namely that the physical violenceand harm inflicted on Iraqi civilians was only 'collateral damage' done along the way toachieving other, different and more legitimate goals. As Howard (1992: 8) reports:

... the estimate of 170,000 infants deaths in Iraq due to the collapse of hospitals andsewage systems this summer as a direct result of such 'crafted' targeting calls even thispolicy into question.

There is the important observation to be made that frequently when large-scale deaths fromstarvation and famine occur, as in a string of food crises in parts of Ethiopia in the 1990s, toexplain this as the consequence of 'natural' factors like insufficient rain, crop failure, excessiveheat etc., Recourse to 'natural' explanations has the useful effect of displacing attention awayfrom such social and political factors as the failure of local or international governments tointervene, or political squabbling between government factions or international power plays byvarious 'superpowers' or transnational agencies like the IMF.

In each of these cases we need to ask with Arblaster (1975: 229), where is the line to be drawnbetween violence, and other forms of power or coercion through which death or injury wascaused, though these consequences were neither the prime, nor even possibly, an imaginedconsequence?

This is only to say there are complex issues of whether and indeed how we might distinguishbetween legitimate 'force' and illegitimate 'violence'.

It is hardly a surprise that different languages represent and mean 'violence' differently, andfrequently do so for reasons that come out of the long-standing attempt to distinguish betweenlegitimate 'force' and illegitimate 'violence'. Mackenzie (1975: 117-122) addresses thedistinction between 'legitimate' 'force' and 'illegitimate' 'violence':

It is not ... quite safe to say that in its use the word 'force' is neutral. It is distasteful,though not perhaps as distasteful as violence; when it comes to the use of force we salveour consciences by adjectives, its 'proper' or 'legitimate' use.6

In English this distinction between legal 'force' and illegal 'violence' depends heavily on theliberal political tradition (Benjamin 1920/1978: Curia 1988). Even the French radical theoristGeorges Sorel (1936: 256-7) made this distinction in French between la force and la violencewhen he suggested in 1912:

6 In English as Mackenzie 1975: 120) notes:

Force-violence seem to be used as a 'we-they' pair, like 'we are patriotic, they are jingo', 'we areresolute, they are fanatic's ... 'We' use force, 'they' use violence'.

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We use the terms force and violence in relation to acts of authority and to acts of revolt.... I think it would be helpful to adopt a terminology free from this ambiguity and to keepthe word violence for the latter case, that of revolt. We should then say that to use forceis to impose a social order ruled by a minority, to use violence is to destroy that order.7

In the German however the word gewalt (which derives from the verb walten meaning 'torule or preside') does double duty. The German gewalt designates the coincident meanings of'force' or 'power' as well as 'violence'. That is gewalt signifies both 'sovereign rule', 'legitimatepower' involved in 'the maintenance of rule' as well as 'assault' or 'violence'. Both walten andviolate derive from the same Latin root uir or uis denoting 'strength' or 'force'. Thus as Weber(1997: 83) points out, there is no difficulty in the German construction of the idea of staatlicheGewalt meaning something like 'State Violence' or 'state power'. In English we wouldnormally speak of 'state power' while avoiding the idea of 'state violence' altogether. InEnglish the idea of violence is frequently deployed to catch the idea of an 'assault 'against theself, an 'attack' on personal autonomy or private property involving strength or 'force'. TheEnglish words 'violence', 'violation' and 'violent' point to the idea of external infringement byillegal force of a person or of their property. In effect between the German and the Englishthere are potentially almost exactly contradictory linguistic connotations.

Even so English is not devoid of ambiguity. In English, to be 'violent' is to compel by force, toconstrain or force by violence, presumably to compel a person or persons to do things theywould not otherwise do. Yet the Oxford English Dictionary defines 'violent', 'violence' and'violation' in ways that cannot entirely escape the problem of legitimacy and the ambiguitieswhen attempting to set limits on what is a 'reasonable' exercise of state power and where thisbegins to slide over into violence as something no longer normal or reasonable even if it isformally still 'legal' . 'Violence' can thereby be rendered as the somewhat anodyne notion ofsimply a quality capable of producing a marked or powerful effect. This begins to looksuspiciously like Weber's (1947) treatment of the category of 'power'. Here power isunderstood as something that is intense, strong, very strong or severe, as in 'violent winds','violent language' or a 'violent personality'. It also holds out the possibility of injury ordiscomfort, via some notion of people, acting with or using physical force, or violence in orderto injure, control or intimidate others -as in committing harm, acting illegally, or taking illegalpossession.

On the one hand there is the notion that to violate is 'to break, infringe or transgressunjustifiably' or to fail to keep or observe duly' from the Latin violare ie., 'to treat withviolence'. It is found eg., in notions of violation as rape by way of a doing of damage or injuryby violence or to treat without proper respect or roughly. It is also present in the idea ofviolation as involving an infringement, flagrant disregard or non-observance of some principleor standard of conduct or procedure, as an oath, promise, law, etc', or as involving thedesecration of something sacred.

This discussion with its focus on what is said to be legitimate force and illegitimate violencebegins to indicate why it is not possible to accept or to believe that some activities areessentially or 'objectively' 'violent'. Such a suggestion is tantamount to saying that in allcircumstances the gesture or activity X will always be defined and be recognised invariantly as'violent'. This however is not the case.

7 In the French the root word viol carries the meaning of violation and is eg. the very word used for rape (leviol). Likewise the word force in French carries with it the notion of a freely accorded respect as in the phrase'He command or wins respect', which is rendered 'Il force le respect'. (Equally in the French the word forcealso caries with it connotations that again drag it close to violence as in the idee of 'force' as 'power').

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Violence is perspectival

Violence is perspectival and social, firstly because it involves both historical and relationaljudgements and shifts. Violence is perspectival and social secondly because it is social:violence as a form of social action necessarily involves social relations and any number ofprospective evaluations which seek to address both the external signs of violence and theexperiential or phenomenological dimensions of violence on the part of perpetrators andvictims and observers.

Tutt (1976: 15) draws attention to the fundamentally perspectival nature of violence:Today's violence may often, through the passage of time become tomorrow's heroism ormartyrdom.

Miller (1993: 65) makes the same point:... our views of violence depend on so many variables of sight, sound, pain, on categoriesof law and morality, on levels of technology, on rules of group formation, on legitimacyand status.

This reminds us that particular social and cultural settings seem to have the capacity to screenviolence in -or out.

That is what counts as violence depends on who is in a position to authoritatively definesomething either as violence -or not. For many women in to the 1970s the weekly drunken sexact, or the beating from their husband was just part of their lot, a practice which was simplynever spoken about or identified as a problem. This again simply reminds us that violence is aperspectival matter. Very often, it is the observer typically an expert who problematises, and sotransforms by means of re-classification, a once acceptable action into violence. As Hegel'sfamous case of the Slave-Master relationship suggests, one role that intellectuals and socialelites often play is to reveal to the oppressed victims of violence their 'true' status and so leadthem via a social movement through a process of social transformation. As with so many othersocial problems, violence points to the role played by discourses in either obscuring orrevealing the existence of something as a problem.

Violence involves relational positions

As Miller (1993) shows the basic social structure of violence ie., violence as a form of socialinteraction, typically involves the play of three positions, (not two) and hence threeperspectives. This is so because there are always and irreducibly three relational positions;'victim', 'violator' and 'observer'. (As Miller himself notes that having said this does notparticularly advance the analysis). While it is useful to insist that mostly these three roles areclearly distinguished, this is not deny that on occasion the same person can play all three rolesand take on serially the three perspectives: the would-be suicide can cut her wrists and so bethe person doing the injury, as well as the person injured and later live to tell the story as anobserver. Nor should we deny the possibility that between the roles of the three relationalpositions (ie. 'victim', 'violator' and 'observer') that there may well be complex, imaginedsympathies or understandings which will confuse the apparently sharp edged boundary betweenthe three roles.

Anyone who has watched the scenes of sexually charged violence in Lynch's Blue Velvet willrecall both the shifting of roles within the film as well as the viewer's own frequently shiftingreactions to what is taking place on the screen. Likewise as we hear the unfolding story of awoman whose husband has systematically abused, harassed and hit her and who has now

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turned the tables and killed her oppressor, the framework defining who is victim and who isperpetrator may alter. Or as Carrington (1998) shows in her superb study of a rape-murderthat took place within a 'blokey' culture, the defininitions about who is 'victim' and who is'perpetrator' can alter over time. How complicated will be our reactions to women, who in apatriarchal society are always the 'victim', rape or violate children in their care (FitzRoy 1997)?Here issues of the various roles of violator and victim intersect in strange ways with ourconceptions of justice, moral emotions like revenge and legitimacy intervene in ways that arevery complicating .

No less complicating is the question of how it is possible that within a situation that seems tomanifest positive evidence of violence involving a 'victim' and a 'perpetrator', the 'victim' mayeither not recognise the situation as violent or may even hold herself responsible for it or asdeserving the violence.

As those who have asked people to talk about their experience of doing violence, or having itdone to them know, there are additional complexities in engaging with the phenomenology ofviolence. It would be useful eg., if we could insist that between the roles of victim, violatorand observer there are always clear and present lines of demarcation between these 'roles'.Again Schlink (1997: 101) accurately recalls the memories of survivors of the Holocaust andthe numbness common to both victim and perpetrator of violence:

All survivor literature talks about this numbness, in which life's functions becomecompletely selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning are everydayoccurrences. In the rare accounts by perpetrators, too, the gas chambers and ovensbecome ordinary scenery, the perpetrators reduced to their few functions and exhibiting amental paralysis and indifference, a dullness that makes them seem drugged or drunk.

Yet ultimately however valid many of these sophisticated and relativising distinctions are, wealso need to accept that in many situations there are clear cut distinctions between victims andperpetrators, and that the experiences of victim and perpetrator are both different anddiscernible. As one of the great witnesses to the Holocaust, Primo Levi has argued forcefully,we should not be under any illusion that the roles of violator and victim are either sopermeable as to be totally unclear, or that the roles are inherently or easily transposable:

The oppressor remains what he is, and so does the victim. They are not interchangeable(Levi 1989: 25) ... I do not know and it does not much interest me to know, whether inmy depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim, and I wasnot a murderer. I know that the murderers existed, not only in Germany and still exist,retired or on active duty, and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease oran aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity (Levi 1989: 48-9).

(One possibility clearly suggested by the classic victimological literature eg., Wolfgang (1958)and Amir (1970) is that in the violence that takes place between private persons there may be adegree of complicity and even victim precipitation that is largely missing from state sponsoredviolence like genocide and systematic terror).8

8 That Jewish organisations were complicitous in facilitating the implementation of the 'Final Solution' asArendt (1965) controversially showed entails only that we avoid essentialising 'Jews' as victims.

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It can usefully be suggested that there are two kinds of perspectives that matter deeply for anycoherent account of violence. Firstly from the perspective of the observer looking at violencethere is a semiosis of violence. That is, we use signs to name it, to judge the quality of it andso help form our responses to it. Secondly we may also try to enter the world of theperpetrator or the victim to understand the experience of being either a victim or a perpetratorof violence.

Semiosis of violence

There are many signs that we can use to declare that we are in the presence of violence.Among the primary signs of violence we typically include the flow of blood, and perhaps tears;the more of these fluids the more do we acknowledge that the violence is 'real'. A brutal head-snapping boxing match is more violent than a debate between two testosterone-charged bullacademics; the blood on the nose or across the forehead in the first more than making up forfine points of logic inflicted on the hapless loser in the second. In terms of the techniques ofcapital punishment decapitation is more violent than chemical injection, death by firing squadmore violent than the swift English-style of hanging that uses a sprung trap door and acarefully calculated drop. Technologies that create more bodily mess and damage are deemedto be more violent: axes are more violent than bullets, which are more violent than pills, gas orinjection.

Sometimes we know we are in the presence of profound violence because of the sounds ofviolence or the silence it produces. Screams and groans, blood and broken bodies replace thewords that pain cannot find, or else seeks to obliterate (Miller 1993: 66). Scarry (1985) saysof torture that it is a political process; the violence inflicted by the perpetrator replaces thevictim's capacity to speak and reason with inarticulate screaming or silence. As Scarry (1985:29, 33) says for the prisoner undergoing torture:

... the sheer simple, overwhelming fact of his agony will make neutral and invisible thesignificance of any question as well as the significance of the world to which the questionrefers. Intense pain is world destroying ... as in dying and death, so in serious pain theclaims of the body utterly nullify the claims of the world.

We can intuitively understand that violence and pain returns us to a primal state, that state ofinarticulate nature which the graces and rules of civilisation are supposed to render intelligibleby way of speech. If we are 'political animals' (zoon politikon ) as Aristotle insisted we are,then our political character as reasoning speakers is possible only inside the polis or city-state,the site of conversations reliant on polis-hed manners and civic restraint.

Violence, especially politically motivated violence removes us from that polis, rupturing thethin skin of civility such that pain and violence alike are defined as visceral, disordering,irrational, barbaric, even animalistic.

Certain emotional responses mark out the terrain of violence. With physical assault and bodilypain comes overwheleming fear and humiliation. These states are not always the product ofphysiocal violence. The threat of violence can achieve these states of mind. Shame, humiliationand fear can be used as terrifically as any overt physical violence.

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Dostoyevsky's famous account of the way he and 20 political prisoners were put through thepreliminaries of their own execution, remind us of the power of psychological violence (Kelly1981: 161-613). Many contemporary state-sponsored torture practices depend onpsychological violence, involving humiliation, or the threat of physical and sexual violence. DeZulueta (1996: 87) recalls one Tunisian victim of torture recalling the 'most terrible moment' inhis torture:

... after having fainted when he was beginning to gain consciousness, he found that hewas chained by his feet and hands on one side to the bars of a window and on the otherside to an iron bed: one of his torturers unzipped his trousers and pulled out his penis. Hethen urinated into his victim's mouth. At this point the Tunisian man who is giving thisterrible story stops, visibly distressed and says , 'I can't bear it ... I'm sorry'.

Amnesty International eg. reports Pakistani police operations against 'suspects' in 1991(Jempson 1996 : 48):

... men and women have been made to strip in front of family members of the oppositesex; women have been paraded naked in public and two Christian women were made tostrip and dance naked by police officers at Jaya Bagga police station in Lahore.

Amnesty International also reports (Jempson 1996: 52) on Afghanisti women who hadreturned from exile to the city of Kabul in 1993 being terrorised by mujahideen troops:

They told us that we were spies. They showed us a number of containers in the house.They opened one... and I saw that there were gouged out eyes stuck to the side ... Theytold us these were the eyes of those who fought against them ... there could have been 50or 60 eyes. They said our eyes would be gouged out if we did not tell them who had sentus.

Finally the amount of space between perpetrator and victim calibrates the index of violence.We tend to judge 'close-up' to be more violent than 'far away'. It may be that we imagine thatincreasing space between perpetrator and victim somehow confers increasing ethicallegitimacy on the perpetrator. The face-to face killer we tend to judge more violent, moreculpable and harder to understand than the artillery squad or the pilot of some high-altitudebomber. We have assumed, at least since Adam Smith spoke about the moral sympathybetween people in face-to-face relationships being like the strings of a violin vibrating insympathy, that the perpetrator who can look his or her victim in the face before killing them orhurting them must overcome more moral revulsion in order to act violently than the killer whois three thousand kilometres away with his hand on the missile button. More violence and lessmorality defines the face-to-face killer.9

9 Yet we also know, as do many military commanders, and others for some such knowledge matters, that killing at adistance precisely addresses the problem of overcoming moral scruple (Grossman 1997). Technological deterministscan take only partial heart from the fact that the modern technologies of rapid fire rifles did not convert intoincreased killing on modern battlefields. From the American Civil War to the 1939-45 war, scandalous research(Grossman 1997) has consistently showed that the fire rate (ie., the proportion of soldiers on a battlefield withweapons who were prepared to and actually did fire at the enemy) was consistently between 15% to 20%!

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The phenomenology of violence

If we accept that violence is a social (inter) action between persons, Mackenzie (1975:119)reminds us that we need to take into account the somewhat mysterious nature of human(inter)-action. Mackenzie begins to get close to something important when he remarks that:

... violence is more subjective in use than force; it is an emotion, as well as an action, anemotion evaluated morally according to rather puzzling criteria.

In search of a 'rational theory of social action' Max Weber (1947) in his account of the socialact sought to catch the flight of the arrow of linear rationality by insisting that from intentionflowed the action. Alfred Schutz (1973: 67-77) understood better how all social action has atemporal framework which can deflect the flight of that arrow. Schutz showed that action hasat least three moments, the intention to act, the duree of the action itself (or the lived quality ofthe action as itself), and the recollection, the memory or the rationalisation we offer after theevent. Each of these moments, as Schutz shows cannot define in any privileged way the truthor the 'essential' meaning of any social action. Between intention, duree and recollectionthere are too many slips and twists, too many emotions and too many moral compulsions toact, to change our minds or to construct post-facto accounts that let us off some hook.

In any human interaction there are always feelings, moral insights, and intentions jostling in thestream of consciousness of each of the actors. This is the stuff which we can use to constructa phenomenology of violence in which the agential capacity of the actors is emphasised.Paradoxically as criminologist Jack Katz (1988: 5) reminds us that:

Only rarely do we actually experience ourselves as subjects directing our conduct. Howoften, when you speak do you actually sense that you are choosing the words you utter?As the words come out they reveal the thought behind them even to the speakers whoselips gave them shape. Similarly we talk, walk, write in a sense of natural competencegoverned by moods of determinism.

The novelist Bernard Schlink (1997: 18) makes the same point in his account of a lifelongpattern in his narrator Michael Berger's life:

Quite often in my life I have done things I have not decided to do. ... thinking and doinghave either come together or not come together -I think I reach a conclusion, I turn theconclusion into a decision and then I discover I am doing something else entirely ... Idon't mean to say that thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behaviour.But behaviour does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through anddecided. It has its own sources, and is my behaviour, quite independently, just as mythoughts are my thoughts and my decisions my decisions.

Here we confront another basic conundrum. If we do not see value in locating violence withinsome kind of theory of rational action, does this mean we automatically condemn violence tothe irrational, and in some sense put it beyond our capacity to know it?

There is a dominant view that violence is precisely characterised both by its arbitrariness, andthat it bears all the stigma of irrationality because 'emotion', possibly even 'violent' emotion,plays the crucial determining role. Curia's (1986: 61) phenomenology of violence stresses that'violence is blind', where one is 'blinded by violence' or one experiences 'an explosion ofviolence'. From, this Curia (1986: 61) concludes that 'violence' is different from 'force'.Violence variously possesses immediacy (because it is boisterous and unpremeditated), isdiscontinuous (because it is separated from normal continuous activity), is disproportionate tothe ends to which it is put, is non-durable because it cannot sustain itself, and like any violentstorm must blow itself into exhaustion. Violence is alwaysunexpected.

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Arendt (1970: 12) at first glance seems to accept these connotations in her account of 'violenceand its arbitrariness'. She notes (1970: 63) eg., that 'violence often springs from rage, andrage can be irrational and pathological ...' Yet Arendt (1970: 64) does not accept that violenceis 'merely' an emotional and so an 'irrational' form of conduct. She argues that 'the absence ofemotion neither causes nor promotes rationality' because:

In order to respond reasonably one must first of all be moved, and the opposite ofemotional is not rational, whatever that may mean, but either the inability to be moved,usually a pathological phenomenon, or sentimentality which is a perversion of feeling.

And Arendt also allows (1970: 64) that:

... under certain circumstances violence - acting without argument or speech and withoutcounting the consequences -is the only way to set the scales of justice right again. (BillyBudd striking dead the man who bore false witness against him is the classical example).

In short and against Curia, Arendt allows a role for what Katz (1988) will call 'moralemotions', with major implications for how we understand violence. Equally while Katz'(1988) account of 'ordinary' (ie., not done by the state) violence accepts something of Curia'sphenomenology of violence as explosive and 'passionate'), this plainly does not encompass thephenomenon of state violence where deliberate, slow and painful processes of death, terror andtorture are played out on the bodies of its victims over time.

The Hydra-headed nature of violence rises up before us in Jack Katz (1988) remarkable effortto 'explain criminal action from the inside' ie., phenomenologically in ways which do notdepend on a simplistic division between the 'rational', 'emotional' and 'moral' dimensions. (Wehave already argued that his framework brings us close to some of the intricate, becausesymbolically expressive, even creative ways in which violence is enacted and understood(Bessant & Watts 1995).

Always hovering in the conceptual foreground are issues here of how much significance weshould give to intention in our understanding of violence. In the criminal law intent iseverything. Indeed much of the Anglo-American legal tradition presupposes a kind of utility-maximising rational action model of human action. How important to a satisfactory conceptionof violence is the question of whether there was an intention to cause the harm that was done?

Though it is not uncontested, there is a widely shared view which treats violence as a means toother ends. (This may be just one of the many consequences of the popular credibility ofrational action theory allied to a thinned-out behaviourist account of human conduct whichscientistic psychology and neo-classical economics alike have perpetrated). Within such aframework violence assumes a purely instrumental quality. Arendt (1974: 46) is not alone inemphasising that, 'violence is distinguished by its instrumental character.' With ganglandslayings like Capone's 'St Valentines Day massacre' of 1928 we might want to say Caponeintended to kill the eight members of a rival gang. With the Nazi state, gangsters of a differentorder, we might say that the Holocaust is explicable in terms of an intention to kill Jews alongwith other groups defined as 'sub-human' (untermenschen) like the Roma, Slavs, gays and soon. In some commonsense meaning of the word genocidal violence was intentional because itwas a means of achieving policy objectives.

Yet the search for intention to distinguish between violence and other kinds of action whichwe might say eg., is 'cruel' or 'unkind', while it is initially plausible only goes so far. We canuse an actor's intentions to assist us to understand the difference between somewhat similarconduct. For example we may wish to differentiate between the actions of a surgeon in a New

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York hospital who is experimenting with new techniques and opens up a chest cavity to inserta new heart using new technologies, and the patient dies, and the actions of Nazi 'scientists'located in the Third Reich's death camps whose actions in some macabre way appear to mimicthose of the surgeon (see Lifton 1992).

We may want to use the matter of intentions to make this distinction. Yet the fact that therewere good intentions on the surgeon's part is not by itself sufficient. Some of the Nazi doctorseg., claimed to have been motivated by scientific and altruistic motives such as advancingscientific knowledge. What matters more than the issue of intent is that there are somereasonable grounds for making a distinction. While the surgical intervention is justifiable, theactions of many of the Nazi doctors was not as suggested by their cavalier disregard forminimal hygienic and experimental procedures which increased the risk factors to theexperimental subjects so significantly as to kill many of their 'subjects'. What should weighmost heavily with us, however is that the patients of the surgeon will eagerly, if anxiously,consent to the surgery. The 'patients' of the Nazi doctors were no different from the rest of theinmates in the camps where the Nazi doctors practised. They were powerless and terrifiedvictims of an overwhelming power and they had not consented to be there.

As Katz shows, a phenomenology of violence necessarily adds more depth to the idea ofintention. Katz redefines the role of intention in violent conduct like murder. He shows theunfolding of the action beginning with the perpetrator defining a particular problem or situationevoking certain moral emotions (eg., humiliation, betrayal, or infidelity) which then seguesrapidly into mounting rage. This is a rage which, because it is transcendental, however briefly,is indifferent to the legal or indeed any of the usual social constraints. This means that theconduct lacks some or many of the prescriptively normal features of a self-aware, morallyconscious act. Yet it is this rage which temporarily works both to blind the perpetrator to hisactions and enacts his sense of achieving a unity with the eternal Good (1988: 18-19). Indeedboth humiliation and rage are:

... holistic feelings experienced as transcending bodily limitations ... Humiliation forceshim to feel himself as soul, to become intensely aware that his being is spiritual, notprotected by physical barriers between the internal and the external ... Humiliation takesover the soul by invading the whole body. Like humiliation, rage draws the whole bodyinto its service ... When we speak of getting one;'s adrenalin up to counter physicalchallenges aggressively, the reference is not only to an unusual level of effort but to anew aesthetic that unites all parts of the body (1988: 25-6).

Likewise the feelings go in opposite directions: if humiliation 'drives you down', makes you'small', rage 'lifts' you up 'enlarges' you.

More importantly all of this involves a major reworking of our understanding of intention inviolent conduct. If we accept that righteous rage -and the physical forms it takes likestomping, stabbing, shooting or whatever- is designed to 'create something for himself', thenwe are forced towards a radical re-evaluation of the idea of intention in violence (Katz 1988:32). Rather than treating violence as an action driven by the intent to kill or wound, we mayneed to take into account the symbolic, expressive and figurative dimensions of the action.For example in a 'stomping':

... the attacker may announce to his victim the objective of 'kicking your eyes out of yourhead'. The specific practical objective -to remove precisely the condition of the attacker'shumiliation, the victim's offending gaze- is more imaginatively related to the project oftranscending humiliation than would be the victim's death Sacrificial violence does notparticularly seek the neat end of death ... (Katz 1988: 32).

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For example we have Katz' reworking of what was being intended in the violence done in thecase of 'Ruth', a woman who killed her unfaithful husband who had brought back to their homeanother woman, and had done this many times before. According to witnesses Ruth's lastremark before she stabbed her husband to death were, 'If I can't have you, no-one else can'.'Rationally' the murder appears to be the resolution to a difficult relationship involving endlesshumiliation for 'Ruth'. Yet as Katz notes, from Ruth's perspective, the killing becomes a waynot of ending the relationship but of preserving it:

If he leaves her or is she leaves him, the relationship they had may well become arelatively unremarkable chapter in a series of failed relationships. By killing her mateRuth made their relationship last forever; in the most existentially unarguable sense, shehad made it the most profound relationship either had ever had.

We do not wish here to pre-empt the presentation at some later date of the results of ourresearch project. We have argued that violence is perspectival and social, firstly because itinvolves both historical and relational judgements and shifts. Violence is perspectival andsocial secondly because it is social: violence as a form of social action necessarily involvessocial relations and any number of prospective evaluations which seek to address both theexternal signs of violence (understood as requiring a semiosis) as well as addressing theexperiential or phenomenological dimensions of violence on the part of perpetrators, victimsand observers. What we have argued for here will have implications for long standing ways ofthinking about violence and crime prevention.

In the second part of this paper we turn to the pre-occupation found in criminology withidentifying dispositional factors located within some structural features of the families ofviolent and offending young people.

The role of the family

The idea that there are some families which are either 'broken' or else engage in poor parentingpractices with terrible consequences for 'later on', has achieved a conventional evencommonsensical status both in the social sciences and in the wider public culture. In modernistcriminology there is a long-standing reliance on researching family life to 'explain'/'predict'juvenile crime. In the late 1990s the internal workings of the family continue to provideresearchers with a host of factors which they seek to use to explain juvenile crime.

In this regard though they did not initiate the idea, British writers like Winnicott (1971) andBowlby (1940; 1953) did much to give credibility to the idea that children who displayed‘maladjusted’ and/or ‘anti-social’ behaviours came from dysfunctional families.

Bowlby and Winnicott famously claimed that the 'deprivation of maternal love and warmth' inthe early years of childhood was likely to produce all manner of problematic attitudes andbehaviours in the child later on. Bowlby (1953: 41) eg., argued that the prolonged separationof the child from his/her mother (or mother substitute) during the first five years, ' ... standsforemost among the causes of delinquent character development.' In America, one of the firstmajor studies to focus on family relationships and delinquency was undertaken by two Harvardcriminologists Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck (1950; 1959) through the 1940s and 1950s. TheGluecks carried out a longitudinal study of more than 500 ‘officially defined’ delinquent boys -matched with non-delinquent boys from Boston. The Gluecks assembled a vast range ofsocial, psychological and biological data aimed at identifying the particular characteristics of‘the delinquent’. The results of their research, demonstrated the apparent link between family

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life and juvenile delinquency. The Gluecks argued that delinquent behaviour could bepredicted by a number of key factors, including:

• the extent to which the boy was disciplined by the father;

• the nature of mother’s supervision of the boy;

• the extent of affection of the father and mother for the boy;

• and the general ‘cohesiveness of the family’ (Glueck & Glueck 1950: 261).

The claim that the internal workings of families was primarily responsible for the onset ofdelinquent behaviours was central to their ‘explanation’ of crime. The actions of offenderswere therefore directly attributable to the dynamics of ‘dysfunctional’ family life.10

In the past quarter century there has been a proliferation of studies making causal and 'predictive'links between ‘family functioning’ and the onset of delinquency. While factors like unemployment,urban decay, poor education and housing are also used to explain the onset of offending, it is theinternal dynamics of family life that has arguably received most empirical attention.

Blumenstein et al (1985) using a seven point scale of variables (including inter alia 'child anti-social behaviour', poor parental child-rearing behaviour, deprivation, convicted parents and'low intelligence') claimed that they could have predicted the chronic offenders in advance onthe basis of the information available at age 10. Wilson and Herrnstein likewise attributejuvenile offending directly to the 'deep-seated temperamental problems' exhibited bypathological parents who 'lack much desire to change their children's behaviour' (Wilson andHerrnstein 1985: 366). These conclusions reflect a vast number of 'empirical' studiesdeveloping this consensus view across more than half a century.11 In proposing that crimecan be linked explicitly to particular types of family relationships this kind of criminologyclearly believes it is possible and desirable to go a step further and identify certain families interms of their ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘criminogenic’ features.

If nothing else the efforts to identify the role of family factors in the creation of delinquencyhave been exhaustive. Wells and Rankin (1991: 87) note that during the 1980s in the UnitedStates at least 65 major studies were conducted on the relationship between 'broken families'and crime. Other inquiries (eg., Barnett 1987; Kolvin et al 1988: Tremblay et al 1992;O'Connell et al 1995) have, attempted to correlate a wide range of family factors with theonset of delinquency, including

• parental neglect and abuse,• divorce, separation and bereavement (the 'broken home');• the presence of 'latch-key children';• the emergence of 'working mothers';• lack of love, attachment, closeness;• and family size 10 In an analysis of the Glueck's research, Laub and Sampson (1988: 360) identified a number of shortcomingsin the Boston study. The most serious of these was the general lack of systematic attention to the influence ofsocio-economic factors on delinquency and the failure to acknowledge the processes by which ‘offenders’ were‘officially’ defined as such. Laub and Simpson said the Gluecks’ work was rather superficial insofar as itignored the complex ways in which ‘external’ factors impacted upon young people and their families. Despitesuch reservations, however, Laub and Sampson (1988: 375) supported the Gluecks’ the central contention that'family process variables' (that is, supervision, attachment and discipline) were the most important factors inexplaining delinquency.11 The bibliography in Rutter et al (1998: 389-464) lists over 1200 articles and monographs on the aetiologyof anti-social juvenile behaviour and very few written before 1975.

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The sheer volume of studies in this area is testament to the extraordinary preoccupation with‘the family’. Yet the atheoretical nature of most of these studies means that their ability todemonstrate the connections between families and crime is actually severely limited.

'Broken families' and anti-social behaviour

If the 'broken home' or 'broken family' has attracted the most persistent attention amongempirical researchers concerned with families, anti-social behaviour and crime what is meantby this idea of a broken family' or by 'anti-social behaviour'? We make two observations.

Firstly the ‘anti-social’ concept itself is surely one of the most thoughtless and abused of ideasin contemporary social science. It is entirely consistent with many of the other failures of themodernist disposition that when Rutter et al (1998: 1) ask what 'do we mean by anti-socialbehaviour?' that he and his authors simply brush their own question aside by allowing that itinvolves 'breaking the law' while simultaneously acknowledging that there are all sorts ofdisorders ('oppositional/defiant disorder, conduct disorder, and anti-social personality disorder'that are not criminal activities). In short there is a quiet extraordinary refusal to try to addressthe conceptual mess they have deposited on the first page.

We would like those who use this category to say (i) what kinds of human conduct it issupposed to refer as well as to (ii) say what kinds of conduct are believed to provide thebenchmark for ‘pro-social’ conduct and (iii) finally to explicate their reasons for thiscategorisation.

We say to those who insist on using this category that assuming that by 'anti-social conduct' ismeant some conduct that breaches a societal norm implying the existence of a dominant moralconsensus, it is a bit of an embarrassment for this proposition that this consensus has neverbeen shown to actually exist (in the sense that a coherent and unifying set of values andpractices forming a seamless and consensual normative web) let alone that the likelihood ofits existence was ever established. Indeed in any kind of large-scale society it most likely doesnot and could not exist. So what is the 'social' that 'anti-social' contravenes? If the labellingtheorists were right and deviance was whatever some people said 'it' was, then the suspicioncannot be made to go away easily that by anti-social is simply meant either whatever iscurrently legally proscribed or else it is what some people do not like. Either way it is acategory that lacks any kind of stability that makes it either amenable to study or toconceptualising within the canons established as properly 'scientific'. Finally the very existenceof concepts like 'sub-culture' in criminology or the fact that ethical controversies have beendocumented since the origins of an ethics based on elenctic argument (Vlastos 1997), gives thelie to the story of moral consensus.

By the 'broken family' is presumably meant the absence of a parent through divorce, separationor bereavement, a connotation partly attributable to the general persuasiveness of the 'maternaldeprivation' thesis and to the popular belief that the 'broken home' per se leads to ‘anti-social’behaviours among the young (Wilson 1980; Utting et al 1993).

Yet the empirical evidence when it is collected and analysed carefully does not support arobust connection being drawn between ‘[broken families’ and delinquency. In one 'meta-analysis' of 65 American studies of ‘broken homes’ and delinquency Wells and Rankin (1991)found that the correlation between ‘broken homes’ and delinquency was 'stronger for minorforms of juvenile misconduct (status offences) and weakest for serious forms of criminalbehaviour' (Wells and Rankin 1991: 87). In an earlier and much larger American study of

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‘juvenile misconduct’ and the ‘broken home’, in which two national samples totalling 2,242children were analysed, Rankin found that broken homes correlated significantly only withthree types of self-reported juvenile misconduct: running away from home, truanting andfighting. Even in these cases, however, it was difficult to state with any certainty whether suchoutcomes were directly related to family structure. Indeed, Rankin concludes that 'therelationship between broken homes and running away and truancy do not seem particularlystrong' (Rankin 1983: 478). This conclusion has been supported in other general reviews ofthe literature in this area. Thus, the relationship between broken families and delinquency hasbeen described as 'weak' (Rigoli & Hewitt 1991: 206), 'less than convincing' (Jeffs & Smith1990: 35) or as 'not at all strong' (Lovry 1994: 6).

More importantly, however, is the absence of any theoretical reflexivity. As Wells and Rankin(1991: 88) point out:

Despite the sizeable body of empirical research extending back to the turn of thecentury the ‘broken home; question remains unsettled and ambiguous. A majorshortcoming in the literature is the virtual absence of any systematic conceptualspecification and corresponding empirical measurement of the broken home as asociological variable. Although it seems straightforward on its face, more carefulanalysis reveals it to be a summary gloss for a multiplex combination of familystructural and interactional conditions.

The 'failing family'?

If the 'broken families' thesis is problematic, the idea that some families are failing to provideappropriate care and support offers an escape route. There is now a large body of research onthe ‘quality’ of parent-child relations and its effects on crime. (Much of this research relies onthe persistent 'maternal/parental deprivation' thesis in which the relationship between parentsand their children is believed to have a direct bearing upon the development of the child). Amajor implication stemming from such approaches is that the onset of crime can be attributedto the evident failings in parent-child relations. Parental failure is thus exhibited in pooremotional relationships between parents and their children and in the inability of parents toexercise effective child-rearing skills.

Here we see another failure of modernist social science research, its failure to be properlyreflexive and to take into account quite basic, but seemingly invisible class and ethnic biases. Inmuch of this research, quite fundamental class and ethnic biases are simply allowed to swirlaround in all manner of assumptions and prejudices about the obvious deficiencies of 'the poor','the working class' and the 'coloured folk' shaping the kinds of research done and the conclusionsdrawn.

Farrington (1996) argues in his longitudinal study of over 400 working-class British boys, thatinconsistent and poor parenting has a direct bearing on the emergence of delinquency. Parentalattitudes and the quality of supervision and discipline are considered vital in preventing theonset of 'anti-social behaviour'. (As with Rutter et al (1998) this category is never explicated or

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defended).12 Farrington reaches a number of stark -and simplistic- conclusions about therelationship between parenting and delinquency. For example:

... cool, rejecting parents tend to have delinquent children ... [as do] parents who lettheir children roam the streets unsupervised from an early age [while] ... warm, lovingparents tend not to have delinquent children.

'Erratic and inconsistent discipline' is also considered a major cause of delinquency (Farrington1996: 10). Farrington (1996) considered a wide range of other ‘predictive indicators’ in his‘prospective longitudinal survey’ of over 400 ‘traditional’ working-class British boys that hebegan in 1961. His research team found that one in five of the boys committed an offence(mainly theft, burglary, taking and driving away of a motor vehicle). Farrington interviewedthe boys over regular periods between the age of 8 and 32 years. He also studied therespondent’s parents with respect to factors such as income, family size, employment, childrearing practices and ‘degree of supervision’. He also interviewed the boy’s teachers toestablish general patterns of school behaviour among the children while the boys’ peers wereinvited to ‘rate’ such 'anti-social' factors as ‘daring’ (sic), ‘dishonesty’ and ‘troublesomeness’(sic).

Farrington’s research spared no effort in trying to identify every conceivable relational factorthat might be correlated with delinquency. The boys were ‘tested’ at various points forintelligence, development and attainment, as well as 'assessing' the impact of living conditions,employment, relationships with parents, leisure activities and other pursuits such as 'drinking,fighting and offending behaviour' (Farrington 1996: 79). Yet, even with such an abundance ofdata, Farrington (1996) was able to draw only the most cautious and tentative conclusions.Indeed, as Farrington (1996: 59) himself observed:

... it is difficult to establish which (factor) causes what, or how all these different factorsinteract to produce delinquency.

Despite these reservations, Farrington still felt able to outline a number of factors that‘contributed’ in one way or another to the onset of delinquency. Of these Farrington (1996)claimed that ‘family factors’ were particularly important in accounting for delinquentbehaviour. For Farrington while large family size, low income, poor housing, ‘lowintelligence’ and ‘poor school attainment’ have a direct bearing on delinquent behaviour, it iscertain kinds of intra-family relationships that are most closely associated with ‘anti-socialbehaviours’ of young people. According to Farrington (1996: 14):

... the presence of adverse family background (poor parental supervision, cruel, passiveor neglecting attitude of the mother, parental conflict) doubled the risk of a later juvenileconviction ... We can show that family factors predict delinquency independently of otherfactors...

Other studies in America, New Zealand and Australia have replicated Farrington’s style ofmultivariate research (See Utting et al 1993 for overview of these studies). Such studies areinvariably characterised by the use of large sample sizes and longitudinal methodologies.

12 The authority with which Farrington outlines what he means by 'anti-social behaviour' is matched only bythe near complete absence of any kind of social or ethical reflexivity. Farrington (1997: 363-4) 'defines' 'anti-social' behaviour to include heavy drinking, heavy smoking, using prohibited drugs, gambling, lying, bullying,daring, impulsivity, being sexually active or promiscuous, poor concentration, spending time hanging aboutthe street, and anti-establishment attitudes (sic) behaviours which with the exception of the last two wouldprobably define at leats half of the regular high income patrons of Crown Casino, many leading sportsmen andsignificant numbers of male politicians.

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Inevitably, this has resulted in the accumulation of a large body of ‘data’ that (subject to theusual qualifications) may be used to ‘predict’ the onset of delinquent behaviours. However,the sheer magnitude of the studies, as well as the array of factors under scrutiny, always seemto make it difficult for the researchers to state with anything like precision which factors arelikely to predict delinquency. As D.J. West (1982: 38), a leading figure at the CambridgeInstitute of Criminology points out:

No survey ... can hope to provide a complete map of cause and effect. The most one canexpect to do is to identify within an infinitely complex system of interacting influencessome items that make a significant contribution to delinquency ...

Perhaps not surprisingly then, research based on surveys tend to err on the side of caution andthe talk is of ‘general tendencies’ rather than specific ‘causes’ of delinquency. Having saidthis, such studies tend to focus on particular ‘clusters’ of factors that are considered togenerate delinquency - hence Farrington’s highlighting of ‘family factors’. Yet even in themost sophisticated of multivariate studies, nothing is certain. Utting, Bright and Henricson(1994: 11) point out:

It is important to recognise that statistically significant ‘predictors’ ... rarely, if ever,approach the realms of certainty.

Utting, Bright and Henricson (1994: 18) add that:

... any attempt to target and stigmatise young children as ‘potential offenders’ usingstatistical predictors are likely to mis-identify a proportion of children who will not turnto crime, while missing many others who are equally at risk

Thus, the exact degree of ‘influence’ that particular factors engender remains unclear. In short,the ‘causes’ of offending can be neither specified nor generalised to any specific or readilyidentifiable population of offenders.

Such conclusions have been replicated in a recent Australian study of young offenders in threeQueensland centres: Cairns, Mackay and Brisbane (See also Thomas and Heim 1993a,1993b). Following extensive interviews with over 1000 young people aged between 13 and 18years, Thomas, Heim and O'Connor (1993: 10) argue their work supports earlier studieswhich show that offending is strongly influenced by the distant emotional relationship betweenparents and their children and poor or low levels of parental supervision. They (1993: 10)conclude that:

The results show that the quality of the relationship between youth and their parents wasconsistently much poorer for offending youth compared to the sample as a whole. Thiswas also reflected in the degree of support that young people felt they could draw on athome. Those who had offended felt much less support than youth generally. Theresponses to questions about family conflicts, violence, fear of getting hurt, alcohol, anddrugs being associated with fights supported the reporting of poorer parentalrelationships

Graham and Bowling (1995) in a recent British study of 2,528 young people aged between 14and 25 found a close connection between offending and ‘poor quality’ family relationships.Graham and Bowling (1995: xii) concluded that ‘low levels of parental supervision’ wereclosely dependent upon the quality of parent-child relationships, particularly between childrenand fathers. In seeming disregard for the actual sexual division of labour unleashed in theIndustrial revolution as confirmed by numerous modern family work-time studies which showfathers as ‘absent presences’ in most modern families, Graham and Bowling would need toshow that the actually existing ‘pro-social’ family rests on rich, expressive and close

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relationships between fathers and their children. If they do not mean this and mean instead that‘good fathers’ discipline their children like they did in the ‘good old days’ then again we needto ask what kind of historical fantasy they are relying on.

The above studies all point to a close connection between various ‘emotional deprivations’ inparenting practices and a lack of ‘appropriate parenting skills’. It follows from this line ofargument, a line of argument wonderfully captured by William Ryan (1976) in his account ofthe close relationship between the ‘deficiency’ model of poverty and welfare programs and thearmies of human service professionals waiting to plug the deficiencies among the poor and theworking class that if crime is to be prevented, it is necessary for parents to receive 'training' inthe skills of care and supervision.

Post-1945 empirical studies of families and crime have been largely informed by a rhetoric (ie.modes of persuasion and argumentation; see eg., Billig 1996) which discursively emphasisesthe role of ‘objective’, ‘scientific investigation’, the ‘operationalisation’ of research categories,the collection of ‘data’, and the use of sophisticated statistical processes to establish the‘causes’ of crime and delinquency. Such an approach rests on a set of assumptions about boththe role of the investigator in the research process and the subject(s) under study. Specifically,the researcher is assumed to occupy a position of ‘scientific detachment’ involving ‘valueneutrality’ allowing him/her to faithfully administer technical methods to the specified area ofstudy. Yet, as Cohen (1988: 46-51) points out in relation to British criminological research,the very selection of ‘factors’ for study mitigates against any simple notion of ‘objectivity’.The rendering of the 'failing family’ model is based on some narrow prejudices. They are forexample extremely biased in terms of the preoccupation with researching poor, working classand coloured families whose children overwhelmingly make up the bulk of the population ofdelinquent and offending children.

As we have shown there is an appalling degree of insensitivity to basic issues of class andethnicity in the selection of populations for research, evident in the refusal of mainstreamcriminologists to systematically research the families and the lives of elite or middle-class whitepeople, a framework which all too accurately mirrors the policing and regulatory activitiesdirected against subaltern populations. In closely related fashion there is the ethical nihilisminvolved in obliterating any specification of the researcher’s own ethical and political valueswhich are then however promptly and surreptitiously reinserted into both the categories beingmeasured and are central to the research discourse. Categories like ‘adequate parentalsupervision’, ‘impulsivity’, ‘sluggishness’, or the current favourite, the ‘at risk’ category,reveal more about the strange bestiary of ethno-centric and class-centric prejudices of theresearchers than anything meaningful about the world to which they are applied. Thisobservation is derived from the stunning critique of the ‘nihilism of modernism’ which AlfredSchutz (1986) launched in 1940 and which continues to ruffle the feathers of social theoristsand empiricist sociologists everywhere. By asking where social researchers got theircategories from, Schutz posed a central question about the politics of discourse which mostempiricists remain singularly unable either to answer or to see the point of.

In a similar vein, the label of ‘offender’ or ‘delinquent’ is applied unquestioningly to thousandsof young people in an attempt to identify the particular range of factors that differentiate themfrom the ‘law abiding majority’. This attempt to ‘separate out’ ‘offenders’ from the ‘rest of us’and to record their social attributes, is itself symptomatic of a modernist way of thinking aboutthe origins of criminal deviance. The process of researching young people and their families forpredictive and classificatory purposes, is similar to processes outlined by Foucault in relation tothe period of morphological research in the nineteenth century (Foucault 1977). Then, as now,

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criminologists were intent on identifying the features that distinguished ‘deviants’ from ‘non-deviants’ (Garland 1997: 21-25). This distinction in turn underpinned various correctiveideologies that attempted to ‘treat’ offenders so that they could take their rightful place insociety. From Winnicott and Bowlby onwards we see prescriptions relating to the ways inwhich offending behaviour can be ‘corrected’ and the role that families should play in thisregard. Given the nature of the research informing policy making and practice in various criminaljustice systems over recent years, it is apparent that such prescriptions are aimed at ‘correcting’individual behaviour rather than addressing the need for conceptual or social change.

What is especially striking about the empirical research on families and delinquency is the wayit eclipses the voices of the subjects. Hil & MacMahon (1995: 4) have noted that the literatureis:

... remarkable for its lack of attention to the views and experiences of those actuallycaught up in the criminal justice system. We continue to know little about the livedexperience of those involved in processes of criminal justice or about the ways in whichthese experiences relate to everyday life in communities and neighbourhoods .

(This is a result of two methodological processes: (i) the construction of 'objective' scales andinstruments to measure concepts like 'impulsivity' or 'anti-establishment attitudes' usingmeanings and definitions imposed by researchers on other people's life experiences andactivities, and (ii) the use of large scale surveys and questionaires which again force therespondent's responses to fit pre-determined meanings required for the scaling exercise).

As if to compound this silence much of the existing research takes the meaning of 'the family'for granted. In most cases, no effort is made to offer even the most rudimentary definition ofthis institution. The possibility of alternative family forms and the influence of gender, classand ethnicity on family relationships are rarely explored in detail. The sole parent household isregarded as deviant to the culturally-loaded norm of the 'complete' or ‘intact’ nuclear family.This narrow view of 'the family' is made worse by the tendency to ignore the diverse andcompeting interests in family households. Rarely does one get the sense that families arecomplex, interactive institutions in which power and interest play a significant role indetermining relationships therein.

Yet such matters are crucial in enabling us to understand the ways in which family relationshipsare constructed and acted out in daily life (Funder 1995: 4). The 'terrible intimacy' of familylife is reflected in the complex relationships that exist in this ever-changing and culturallydiverse social institution (Donaldson 1991: 2). Thus:

It is necessary to see families not as unified entities, that can only be represented by theconcept of a 'household head', usually male, but as flexible and interactive groupingscomprised of men and women, children, young people and older people, whose collectiveand separate interests need to be protected and supported (National Council for theInternational Year of the Family 1994: 9)

Just as we need to recognise the complex nature of family relationships, so it is important toavoid labelling families as simply 'good' or 'bad' - a simplifying polarity implicit in manyempirical studies on families and crime. Rather as Frost and Stein (1989: 5) insist, 'we need ananalysis which helps us understand the positive and negative aspects of the family experiencefor children and young people'. By presenting a one-dimensional view of 'the family', theresearch tends to buttress oppositional categories that pit one representation of 'the family'against another. Accordingly, families are thought of as 'normal/abnormal','functional/dysfunctional', 'broken/complete' and so forth. This rendering of oppositional

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categories is underpinned by the assumption that it is possible to demonstrate a 'quantifiable' or'observable' difference between law-abiding and ‘criminogenic’ families. This reflects a widerdisciplinary discourse that views certain families, communities and neighbourhoods as threatsto existing social order. Particular households are thus homogenised as 'problem families' andregarded as in need of intervention and regulation (Cook 1997). The process of identifying theparticular characteristics of such families through research studies provides the necessaryepistemological justification for incursions by the state into the lives of working-class families(Parton 1991: 10). The families routinely subject to the most heavy and sustained research andpolicing are those from the poorest and most disadvantaged sections of the working class(Carrington 1993; Hudson 1993: 3).

Without wishing to suggest a perfect symmetry between academic discourse and institutionalpractices in respect of ‘offending families’, it is nonetheless evident that ‘research findings’ havereflected many of the concerns of the state and contributed towards bodies of knowledge thatserve to legitimate official interventions directed at certain kinds of families. What empiricalstudies gloss over in their head-long attempt to identify predictive factors are the complexhistorical and socio-political influences bearing down on families (Donzelot 1979; Devine 1989).To locate crime and delinquency simply in the context of the problematised 'dysfunctional family'is to ignore both the means by which the State seeks to maintain social order and the complexof conditions that give rise to offending which the criminal justice system notices and theoffending it ignores. The failure of criminological studies to articulate a cogent understanding ofrelations between families and the wider social world has produced a view of 'the family' that isboth abstract and ahistorical. This is compounded by a number of sweeping pronouncements onthe moral character of certain kinds of families. Thus, ‘criminogenic' families are said to bemore 'discordant', 'conflictual' or 'argumentative' than other more 'law-abiding' households. Theuse of these glib terms has served to obscure the lived realities of family life and to regard crimeas the simple by-product of the 'failing' family (Hil and MacMahon 1995, Cook 1997).

Donaldson (1991: 2) argues that a more adequate understanding of working-class families (andmost criminological research fails to think about them in this way) must represent 'the wholelives of its members, changing and changed by each other as they stand in structural oppositionto capital, its forces and agencies.' We would add that it would also be useful to know moreabout the diverse ways in which all kinds of families, up and down the hierarchy of opportunityand power construct their daily lives and interactions. Donaldson (1991: 73) is right to insistthat the daily life of the family-household is acted out in a multiplicity of ways. Thus the'struggle to create order and meaning out of precariousness and scarcity, to provide a measureof security in a very uncertain world... ' involves managing various household 'clocks'(Donaldson 1991: 73). The organisation of 'family time' and relationships between members is,however, severely disrupted by problems associated with unemployment and poverty, such aswaiting for long periods of time in welfare and government offices. At such times, familiesstrive to manage increasingly fraught and fragile relationships (Altatt and Yeandle 1992: 144).For those on the margins of economic life - the long-term unemployed, and the chronicallypoor - the family household becomes less a source of respite and support and more a place inwhich the pressures of the outside world are experienced acutely.

The move by governments since the early 1980s to devolve greater social and economicresponsibility back to 'communities' and families has simply exacerbated many of the pressuresalready faced by working class families (Hartley and Woolcott 1994). To simply ignore suchmatters, or to relegate them to the status of 'background' factors - as do so many of the studieson families and crime - is to deny the impact of social, bureaucratic and political demandsfrom agencies outside of the family in shaping intimate relationships (Holman 1995).

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Conclusion

In this paper we have raised many large issues. We have pointed to several seeminglyineluctable deficiencies in modernist criminology. These begin with a refusal to reflexivelyexplore basic categories, like 'violence'.

They also include an inability or unwillingness to reflexively identify the social values andprejudices of the researchers as they set about 'objectively' enumerating 'anti-social' conditions(like 'impulsivity', 'daring', 'sexual promiscuity' or ...) or patterns of pre-disposing conduct like'bad parenting'. In this regard there is a long tradition in criminology of identifying allegeddeficits on the part of certain kinds of parents and families who invariably are 'poor' or'working class' or 'coloured'. Criminologists continue to make the quite unwarrantedassumption that only poor, working class and coloured families get to be ‘broken’, display sub-standard care of their children or exhibit deficiencies either of morality or 'pro-social' conduct.It assumes without a shred of empirical evidence that elite and middle-class, white familiespossess all of these ‘pro-social’ competencies and abilities which are only ever found amongthe poor, coloured and working class families. 'Described' as deficiencies we have asked inwhat ways if at all these deficiencies are to be understood as a moral or social problem andwhat is to be understood simply as a difference in child-rearing practice or as difference inmanaging or enacting relationships? Given that the families of elite, high income, powerful,wealthy and white families strangely enough never get to be researched for evidence of anti-social behaviours, or the quality of their emotional life, or moral attitudes are any of theobservable differences between the poor, coloured and working-class families and elite familiesto be properly understood as 'deficits' or as differences and on whose part? (Why isn’t upper-class alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, emotional abuse or drug-taking researched to the sameextent as equivalent activities on the part of the subaltern classes?).

Without an appreciation of such matters, so-called ‘empirical studies’ actually practise a kindof moral nihilism which objectively obliterates moral frameworks (because of the rule of‘scientific value neutrality’) while surreptitiously reinserting highly selective moral frameworksinto the research findings. While they may pander to the prejudices of the media and topoliticians quick to see in 'law and order' issues an electoral marketing advantage, ultimatelythese socially vacuous and unreflective empirical research processes masquerading as objectiveresearch are actually blind to the diversity of the social contexts in which they are socially andhistorically located, and quite unable to inform realistic policy processes.

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