Opinion: Look at the signs behind antisocial acts

Home Secretary John Reid's call for people to "take on" antisocial behaviour, though rapidly retracted and re-presented as calling on people to make enforcement agencies aware of their concerns, raises a recurrent problem. If ordinary people remain passive and do nothing, it is alleged that the streets become occupied with invincible lawlessness, because formal authority simply cannot cover everything. But if ordinary people do something - and that something might range from a considered and effective intervention to an inconsiderate, possibly provocative, and useless one - there are often warnings from the police and others not to take on the role of have-a-go heroes.

So what to do? Home Secretaries are, of course, completely protected from the direct realities of antisocial behaviour, even if they are responsible for dealing with it. A namesake of John Reid's, a few years back, was not. He was walking back from the pub and saw four teenage boys vandalising a bollard in the road. All accounts say he intervened, though no-one knows exactly how. Local people feel it is a stain on his memory to suggest that he spoke over-aggressively to them. What is not disputed is that the boys attacked him viciously and killed him.

I knew the victim vaguely and I knew the boys as well. I think the former despaired at what he saw as the fragmentation of his community and the steady decline in respect. The latter were "bored teenagers", messing about, and - as they would describe it - having a laugh. They are now paying the price, in the form of lengthy custodial sentences, for a laugh that got out of hand.

Their victim paid the ultimate price. But he saw it as his responsibility to say something. He knew these boys. He had known them all their lives and probably thought of them as kids who needed bringing back into line, not young men who were likely to get defensive - and aggressive - about the one domain where they believed they had autonomy in their lives: the street.

We really must start to unravel the signs that lie behind the expression of antisocial behaviour. Why are young people where they are and doing what they do? Only then will we develop a more sophisticated repertoire of interventions.

- Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan, and a member of the Youth Justice Board. Email howard.williamson@haynet.com.