The Government's Together campaign aims to combat antisocial behaviour in England and Wales. Graham Readfearn finds out whether youth work has been given a serious role in the programme

The Government's Together campaign aims to combat antisocial behaviour in England and Wales. Graham Readfearn finds out whether youth work has been given a serious role in the programme.

Southmead Youth Centre in Bristol has experienced both sides of the Government's campaign to tackle antisocial behaviour. While it has been working to steer the bulk of its membership away from antisocial behaviour, three young people have been banned under an antisocial behaviour order (ASBO).

Centre youth worker Lesley Lenton says: "It was just a bit of silliness really and a couple of young people being cheeky enough to go the distance.

Some people think ASBOs are a panacea, whereas others see them as a step towards a criminal career." Alongside senior youth worker Jeremy Bent, Lenton has been running an array of diversionary events, with golf and other sports on the agenda, along with outreach work.

But the team has also developed a strategy for coping with aggressive and sometimes violent behaviour, which in the past had led to staff being attacked.

Community beat manager PC Lee Patterson is a regular face at the club one night a week. Playing pool, chess, watching EastEnders and taking some serious stick, PC Paterson says his time there has helped him to build a platform that allows him to talk to young people. "Youth workers should not be acting as security guards," he says. "Since one of the young people was given an ASBO, the attendance at the club has gone up by 70 per cent."

The entire Southmead area is currently an "exclusion zone" - a new tool available to police that lets them disperse groups of young people under 16 after 9pm. Kylie Beasmore, 16, thinks the exclusion zone is a good idea. "Most of the younger ones do seem more troublesome," she admits.

"I understand that some people might be intimidated if we are in big groups. I actually think there should be curfews for some of the older ones too."

Harsh reality

Southmead Youth Centre regular Jamie Chappell, 15, has had a letter through the post warning him not to hang about on a certain street or he could face an ASBO. "If they ask you to move on and you don't go, they can fine you 80," he says. "They told us old people are scared to walk past. One time they told me I can't even sit outside my own house. My parents don't really care because they know that the police will do whatever they want anyway."

Bristol is one of the Home Office's 10 "trailblazer" areas announced in October 2003 at the launch of the department's Together campaign to tackle antisocial behaviour. Within months of the campaign's launch, a flurry of new powers came into force. Police were allowed to disperse groups of young people and on-the-spot fines were extended to include those aged 16 and 17.

Magistrates were allowed to name young people convicted of antisocial behaviour offences in youth courts and youth offending teams were given the power to negotiate parenting contracts for young people "engaged in, or likely to be engaged in, antisocial behaviour". Leaflets and posters can be used to inform communities about specific young people with ASBOs.

Together "academies" were launched, which travelled to key cities to spread best practice. Further events will take place around the UK this month.

The launch of a Together action line for professionals was followed up this January with a number for people living in 25 areas to report antisocial behaviour.

In a one-year review of the strategy, published last October, the then Home Secretary David Blunkett said communities were now "taking back control from the loutish minority". The Home Office estimates that more than 2,600 ASBOs were issued and almost 5,400 acceptable behaviour contracts agreed between October 2003 and September 2004. The report said: "When young people hanging around involves intimidation, abusing and swearing at passers-by ... then this is not acceptable and it should not be tolerated."

Latest figures show that almost 4,000 ASBOs have been issued since 1999, with 20 per cent of those issued between July and September 2004. Some 45 per cent of ASBOs went to juveniles, and 42 per cent of all ASBOs were breached up to December 2003.

Dual approach

The report also highlighted work done in the Failsworth area of Oldham, Greater Manchester, where residents had been "subject to antisocial behaviour from youths". Alongside an array of ASBOs that targeted group ringleaders, youth workers were asked to help re-engage the area's young people.

Pam Griffin, head of Oldham Youth Service, says youth work has been fully engaged to combat antisocial behaviour in the town.

But she stresses that to get to this position, the service has proactively promoted the benefits of youth work.

"We are very clear to our partners about what our role is and they accept that fully," she says. "We are very clear about what we can do, and about what we won't do. We will not move young people on; we won't identify or name young people; and we won't hand over details about young people. We are also clear that we will not work on short-term, one-night projects."

This position was initially hard to maintain, explains Griffin, but now it is accepted to such a degree that if a youth worker feels they might accidentally reveal a young person's identity during a meeting, they are allowed to leave.

Oldham Youth Service has representatives on more than 60 multi-agency groups in the borough, including neighbourhood problem-solving teams.

The service's detached youth work manager also sits on a high-level council group with senior police officers to address specific localised issues.

"Everything that we do is underpinned by needs-analysis research," says Griffin. "We will go and find out what the needs of the young people are, and we are increasingly being asked to put in place targeted work over a six- to 10-week period with young people. A lot of that work is funded by the police."

Griffin says that in the past three months, the service has picked up contracts worth more than 30,000 to do this kind of work. But she is concerned that local and national headlines about ASBOs, and the shock stories that go with them, are making the job of engaging young people more difficult.

"It makes it harder to get a balanced perspective into the public arena," she says. "Unfortunately, the problem of antisocial behaviour is blown out of all proportion in the media."

Scaremongering

Will McMahon, senior associate at the Crime and Society Foundation, feels this perception and the Government's approach is driving a wedge between adults and young people. "The Government is leading a charge of intolerance towards young people. Adults think young people are involved in more trouble than they actually are," says McMahon, who backs up his argument with an example of one parent who received an ASBO for allowing their autistic son to trampoline in the back garden. According to The National Autistic Society, the young person was targeted for "making strange noises that caused distress to neighbours".

"Young people say they hang about in groups to feel safer," he says. "If the Government wants cohesive communities, it should want young people hanging out on the streets. These laws are draconian."

McMahon, who has given evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee on the issue, claims antisocial behaviour as a legal category is "a nonsense".

He adds: "The category covers everything from crack houses to young people cycling on pavements or just hanging around. How can these come under the same heading?"

Tom Wylie, chief executive of The National Youth Agency, is also critical of the Government's approach on a number of counts. "We don't like the overuse of ASBOs, which can - when breached - become a criminal offence based on slender evidence," he says. "They don't pay enough attention to peer group behaviour and the notion of how an individual can be made more dysfunctional - creating hard young men will give communities a hard life."

Wylie says not enough is done to support provision for preventative work and reminds the Government of its claim to be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime."

"The Government is giving people who live with anxiety and fear the feeling that something is being done. But the downside is that it demonises all kinds of behaviour as antisocial and in doing so builds a climate of fear."

SHEFFIELD FOCUSES ON EARLY INTERVENTION

Sheffield was named as one of 10 Home Office Together campaign trailblazer areas in February 2004. The city council was given an antisocial behaviour team leader and three dedicated support staff as well as 200,000 a year until 2006.

Sheffield's approach focused on early intervention and the use of acceptable behaviour contracts to tackle the issue at an early stage.

No targets were set by the Government, but the city's Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership, called Sheffield First for Safety, set itself a target to take "effective action" with 100 households.

In the year 2003-04, some 291 acceptable behaviour contracts were negotiated across the South Yorkshire city, but only 15 ASBOs. More than 4,500 cases were resolved without the need for any legal intervention.

Schemes introduced to draw young people away from antisocial behaviour include a project to improve green spaces in the city, a street art scheme, a new junior football club, cricket sessions and a junior neighbourhood warden project.

Liz Bashforth, Sheffield City Council's lead on tackling antisocial behaviour, says: "The risk is that all young people are labelled as the problem, whereas actually it's only a small number. We want to give young people a positive profile and try to take every opportunity to promote the good things that young people are getting involved in." She adds: "It is not our aim to end up with a lot of young people with criminal records."