Sunday, April 28, 2013

Public criminology, Raoul Moat and ‘the perfect crime story’


There is clearly some argument about what public criminology is and some of this might turn on the precise definition of democratic underlabouring.  Here Elizabeth Turner of Liverpool Univeristiy responds to recent guest post by David Wilson.

Professor David Wilson’s April 18th guest post on this blog made a number of criticisms of three recent peer-reviewed articles published in the British Journal of Criminology (Turner, 2013) and in Crime, Media and Culture (Ellis, Sloan and Wykes, 2013; Rowe, 2013). Wilson’s frustration with these three articles appears to stem from the fact that they each in their own way criticise, conflict with or neglect his own work as the most frequently quoted ‘public criminologist’ in the UK (Wilson, 2011: xvi). In this post I want to respond to Wilson’s assessment of the contribution made by these three pieces of peer-reviewed academic work, by examining the concerns he expresses against the backdrop of the wider debate about ‘public criminology’.

Wilson defines a ‘public criminologist’ as ‘an academic criminologist who, while teaching, writing and researching at a university, also engages in popular debates in the print and broadcast media about crime and punishment’ (Wilson, 2013a). For me this definition is what I have described elsewhere as theoretically ‘empty’: it provides no normative justification as to why criminologists engaging with the media should necessarily be considered to be a desirable thing. The idea that ‘public criminology’ merely means criminologists gaining media exposure in order to say things about crime rests upon a number of assumptions which I think need to be interrogated. Indeed, examining the assumptions underpinning recent discussions of criminology’s public role is what I set out to do in the journal article which Wilson criticises (see Turner, 2013).     

Wilson’s main criticism of my article seems to be that it merely reinforces what he sees as a dominant tendency amongst academic criminologists to shun the kind of active engagement with the media that he himself has adopted. In Wilson’s view the criminological field is overpopulated with individuals happy to accept a modest role as ‘democratic underlabourers’ (see Loader and Sparks, 2010) rather than engaging in ‘newsmaking’ (see Barak, 1988) or what Wilson (2013b) calls ‘viewsmaking’, criminology.  Wilson suggests that my article is aligned with Loader and Sparks’s (2010) notion of ‘democratic underlabouring’ and that I unfairly dismiss the ‘newsmaking’ perspective without providing adequate evidence or quoting from some key recent texts in this area (including Wilson’s own work).  

The first point I would make in response to this is that I don’t think Wilson accurately represents Loader and Sparks’s (2010) idea of the ‘democratic underlabourer’. The ‘democratic underlabourer’ Loader and Sparks describe is not, as Wilson suggests, simply a criminologist doing what criminologists already do [1]. As such I think for Wilson to say there are too many ‘democratic underlabourers’ is inaccurate. To be fair I think what he meant was that too many criminologists are wholly concerned with producing knowledge which they communicate in ways that are utterly incomprehensible to the proverbial ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ and that they devote too little time to finding ways to make their knowledge accessible such that it can make a constructive contribution to public discourse. This may be an accurate point. However it is not the same as saying there are too many of Loader and Sparks’s ‘democratic underlabourers’ amongst the ranks of academic criminologists.   

As regards Wilson’s suggestion that I myself am ‘aligned’ with the democratic underlabouring perspective there is some truth in this. As I make clear in my article I think that, to date, Loader and Sparks have made the most theoretically sophisticated and democratically committed attempt to grapple with what it means for criminology to go ‘public’. I also concur with their suggestion that if criminology is to have a more prominent public role, that that role must be subordinate to the primacy of democratic values in the political sphere. ‘Expert knowledge’ might help to improve political deliberation but it cannot and should not replace it (a position I imagine Wilson also supports). Furthermore Loader and Sparks rightly identify and attempt to accommodate within their ideas the plural and disputatious nature of criminology, something which I think it is important to acknowledge if a satisfactory account of criminology’s public role is to be provided. So broadly speaking, yes, I am aligned with the notion that criminology’s public role must be democratically defensible [2].

In order to consider whether, as Wilson alleges, I unfairly dismiss the ‘newsmaking’ approach (and thus his work) without acknowledging its achievements, it is important to revisit what my article sought to do. The purpose of the article was to consider the ways in which criminologists have reflected upon the appropriate public role for their field and to interrogate the justifications which they have provided (or failed to provide) for their right to play any public role [3]. The ins and outs of doing ‘public criminology’, and the impact made by those who do it, were never my primary focus. It is clearly a fact that some criminologists have rolled up their sleeves and embraced the difficult task of translating academic research for mass mediated dissemination and I never set out to claim otherwise.

However, what I do say in the article is that as some criminologists (Wilson included) are frequently and publicly enthusing about the advantages of ‘public criminology’ (confusingly sometimes also referred to as ‘newsmaking criminology’ and ‘viewsmaking criminology’) it is worth taking some time to think about why and how academic criminologists should contribute to public life and under what conditions. So, reflecting on that particular issue, rather than providing an inventory of public criminology’s achievements, was always the focus for the article. As such, when I describe ‘newsmaking criminology’ as ‘appear[ing] to empty criminology of any meaningful content so that all that matters is getting one’s own favoured discourse heard’ (Turner, 2013) I do not mean that self-identified ‘newsmaking’ criminologists have not contributed to public debates in influential, perhaps even desirable, ways. What I mean is merely that they have done so in the absence of a satisfactory normative account of why their particular ‘criminological’ discourses should receive media exposure in preference to any other ‘criminological’, or indeed non-‘criminological’, discourses on crime. As such, I would dispute Wilson’s claim that I ‘airily dismiss’ the ‘newsmaking’ criminologists and suggest that, rather, what I do is to suggest that we might put their achievements on a firmer footing within the academy by providing a robust, democratically-defensible and theoretically-engaged account of their public value. 

Still, in the absence of any explicit exposition on the value of criminologists’s contributions in the mass media, it is possible to consider what some recent examples of ‘public criminology’ in action might tell us about the potential that such activity has to enhance public life. Wilson himself has suggested that some key benefits which might be achieved through ‘public criminology’ are: (1) public education; (2) putting crime issues into a ‘broader context’, recognising complexity and grey areas; and (3) exerting a ‘cooling’ influence on what is often a heated topic of public debate. But, as Wilson and Groombridge (2010) and Rowe (2013) point out, public criminologists oriented to these objectives will inevitably experience significant ‘tension’ when attempting to pursue them through the media as core media agendas and priorities will often clash with those of the public academic. Indeed, Rowe suggests that whilst the possibilities for criminologists to contribute to media coverage are expanding so too are the risks of ‘misrepresentation, simplification or marginalization of perspectives that seek to challenge dominant narratives of crime and responses to it’. These risks create the danger that criminologists will retreat from engagement with the media, leaving a void which less-informed others will be only too happy to fill (Rowe, 2013: 13). 

In his blog post Wilson (2013b) objects to this aspect of Rowe’s analysis, asserting that Rowe ‘lags behind’ the small number of criminologists ‘who are already aware of that framing, written about it and are trying to use that awareness to promote a better public understanding of crimes and punishments’.  Wilson goes on to state that his own awareness of how media framing works, and of the need to reach out to wider, and potentially more challenging, audiences is behind his success as a contributor to the Daily Mail writing, amongst other things, about the Raoul Moat case. Wilson describes this case as providing a ‘perfect example of the various, tensions, opportunities and dangers that exist for the public, newsmaking Criminologist’. In contrast with Rowe (who suggests that the kind of ‘rolling-news’ coverage which is provided in relation to extreme events such as the Raoul Moat manhunt, provides limited opportunities for meaningful criminological contributions) Wilson looks back on his involvement in the media coverage of the Moat case as a positive example of what public criminologists can achieve. In his own assessment of his work Wilson claims that his contributions to the Daily Mail were ‘perfectly framed’ for the paper and yet also offered an argument to which Mail readers would not usually be exposed. 

However, and as Wilson notes, other writers have offered rather less flattering assessments of his Daily Mail contributions. Well-known blogger, author and columnist Owen Jones accuses him of ‘class hatred’, and of reducing the white working class to the status of ‘knuckle-dragging thugs lacking legitimate aspirations’ (Jones, 2011: 6 cited by Wilson, 2013b). Ellis et al (2013) suggest that he draws on ‘established discourses of individual psychopathology’ and fails to consider the powerful impact of media and other public discourses in constituting, making available and reinforcing a hegemonic version of masculine identity which is heavily invested in violence. Wilson’s response is to argue that neither Jones, nor Ellis et al, properly acknowledge his article’s foregrounding of a range of issues including domestic abuse, misogyny and the impact of deindustrialization on men in Northern England. He also suggests that the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ is unlikely ever to appear in the Daily Mail. He is probably right on the latter point, but does that mean that the concerns expressed by Jones (2011) and Ellis et al (2013) and the cautionary notes sounded by Rowe (2013) can be so easily discounted?    

Well, if we examine the content of Wilson’s articles then I think there is reason to suggest that Wilson has somewhat blithely dismissed the concerns of his critics, rather than engaging with them in a constructive fashion. Jones (2011) seems to have a point in his suggestion that Wilson invokes the image of the white, working class as relatively unevolved (‘knuckle-dragging’). Writing in the Daily Mail in July 2010 Wilson explicitly likened the women posting pro-Moat messages on Facebook as reflective of the historical tendency for women to be attracted to ‘large, tough, violent’ men, and suggested that they were displaying values compatible with an earlier stage in the ‘evolutionary development of mankind’. 

Furthermore, whilst Wilson did indeed draw his readers’ attention to Moat’s misogynistic attitudes and history of domestic abuse, as well as to the wider issues associated with deindustrialization in the North of England, it is important to consider how he ‘framed’ these issues. For example, in referring to the expressions of support for Moat as ‘a howl of rage from some of the Northern, dispossessed, white working-class who feel, however unjustifiably, they have been neglected by the sweeping social forces changing modern Britain’, in my view, Wilson gave with one hand and stabbed in the back with the other. Moat’s supporters were made out to be emblematic of the whole white Northern working-class; the working-class were portrayed as ‘howling’ like toddlers, or animals; they were said to ‘dispossessed’ but their perception of neglect was ‘unjustifiable’; they were negatively affected by change, but that change was a ‘sweeping force’ seemingly disconnected from human agency. 

Throughout the two articles on Moat which Wilson wrote for the paper (Wilson 2010a; 2010b) familiar, and sociologically unenlightening, Daily Mail staples like ‘welfare dependency’ and ‘underclass’ were rolled out, alongside emotive phrases like ‘dark forces’, ‘twisted mindset’ and ‘grotesque narrative’ which are difficult to read out loud without one’s face being forced into a kind of sneer. At one point Wilson seemed to imply that only it was unemployed people whose lives lack ‘work or stimulus’who were sucked into watching the real-life soap opera of the Moat manhunt unfold, as if the eyes of a nation weren’t glued to the saga at the time. And always in the background of these articles there lurks a low but constant note of othering, occasionally made explicit (such as when he refers to ‘an amorality that exists in our midst’). The plain implication appears to be that misogyny, domestic abuse, violence and deindustrialization are their problems, not ours. One might ask, then, whether there is any point in Wilson drawing attention to these factors, if it is only to locate them squarely in the lives of the allegedly morally degenerate ‘others’ whose lives he purports to describe [4]? 

As Ellis et al (2013) observe the Raoul Moat drama may have been ‘the perfect crime story’. Wilson’s framing makes it just so, if one happens to subscribe to the worldview of the Daily Mail that is. And here lies the problem for Wilson’s self-proclaimed mastery of ‘perfect’ framing: so adept has he proven at adapting to the Daily Mail’s ‘house style’ that he appears to have forgotten that often it is not just what you say but the way that you say it that leaves an imprint on people’s minds. 

It would seem, then, that Rowe (2013) was quite right to emphasise that there are very real ‘risks’ when criminologists seek to engage with the media. However, Rowe does not mention what may be the greatest risk of all: not that the media will misrepresent what criminologists say, but that criminologists themselves will misrepresent what criminology is. The lure of media relevance and interest may lead us towards certain topics, as well as certain ways of ‘framing’ them. But a line needs to be drawn between making knowledge widely accessible and making it easily acceptable (if all sociological knowledge were readily acceptable into common-sense then there would be little point in us doing research). 

I certainly applaud Professor Wilson, and indeed other criminologists, who seek to find novel and effective ways to enlighten the British public about issues of crime and justice falling within their own areas of expertise and interest. However, I am concerned that in his blog post Wilson (2013b) has been a little too quick to dismiss those who sound more cautionary notes, who seek to explore the theoretical underpinnings of the practical enterprise he is engaged in, or who point out the potential unintended consequences of his media engagements. One such unintended consequence may be that most of the criminology which goes ‘public’ is representative of only a narrow segment of criminological work: that which feeds into and reinforces common-sense understandings of crime and how we should approach the matter of its control, whilst neglecting more critical perspectives which seek to situate ‘crime’ in relation to a much wider range of social harms [5]. For me, it seems likely that such a development will be to the detriment of high quality democratic dialogue. In the end, then, unless self-proclaimed ‘public criminologists’ can give a coherent account of how their approach to media engagement enhances the health of our democracy, then, for me at least, one question looms large: precisely which ‘public’ is ‘public criminology’ for?   

References

Barak, G (1988) 'Newsmaking Criminology: Reflections on the Media, Intellectuals and Crime' in Justice Quarterly 5 (4) pp. 565-585

Ellis, A; Sloan, J and Wykes, M (2013) ‘ “Moatifs” of masculinity: The stories told about “men” in British newspaper coverage of the Raoul Moat case’ in Crime, Media, Culture 9(1): 3-21

Jones, O (2011) Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, (London: Verso Books)

Loader, I and Sparks, R (2010) Public Criminology? (London: Routledge)

Rowe, M (2013) ‘Just like a TV show: Public criminology and the media coverage of “hunt for Britain’s most wanted man”’ Crime, Media, Culture 9(1): 23-38

Turner, E (2013) ‘Beyond “facts” and “values”: Rethinking some recent debates about the public role of criminology’ in British Journal of Criminology 53 (1): 149-166

Wilson, D (2010a) ‘A howl of rage from a bitter and deluded underclass’ in Daily Mail 16 July 2010 View at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1295161/Raoul-Moat-Facebook-tributes-A-howl-rage-bitter-deluded-underclass.html (Last accessed: 27/04/13) 

Wilson, D (2010b) ‘Violent narcissist who thought he was Rambo’ in Daily Mail 12 July 2010 View at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1293954/Raoul-Moat-Violent-narcissist-thought-Rambo.html (Last accessed 27/04/13)

Wilson, D (2011) Looking for Laura: Public Criminology and Hot News (Hook: Waterside Press)

Wilson, D (2013a) ‘The TV academic: balancing the demands of a double career’ Guardian Professional. View at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2013/mar/28/tv-academic-celebrity-media-career (Last accessed 27/04/13)

Wilson, D (2013b) ‘Raoul Moat and Public Criminology’ Blog post. View at: http://criminologyinpublic.blogspot.co.uk/ (Last accessed 27/04/13)

Wilson, D and Groombridge, N (2010), “’I’m Making a TV Programme Here!: Reality TV’s Banged Up and Public Criminology,” The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 49 (1): 1-17

Notes

[1] Perhaps, Loader and Sparks have not helped matters here because they somewhat confusingly refer to both a broad sensibility of ‘democratic underlabouring’ and the specific figure of the ‘democratic underlabourer’. However, a careful reading of their text reveals that the ‘democratic underlabourer’ is a criminologist with a particular orientation towards what we might think of as intellectual diplomacy. She attempts to support the productive coexistence of different modes of criminological knowledge production and their collective interaction with the wider public sphere in such a way as to support a ‘better politics’ of crime, crime control and criminal justice. This is not the daily bread and butter work of most criminologists who are, I think it is fair to say, primarily concerned with producing knowledge, rather than with undertaking intellectual diplomacy

[2] Where I part company with Loader and Sparks is over their rather optimistic assessment of the prospects for their conception of democratic underlabouring to facilitate (i) peaceful coexistence between starkly different approaches to thinking about and researching crime and (ii) a ‘better politics’ of crime, crime control and criminal justice. I suggest that democratic values occupy a precarious position in the contemporary public sphere, and that our politics are all too vulnerable to domination by particular interest groups and certain narrow ways of knowing about the world. In this public sphere inconvenient conclusions can be buried, alternative perspectives crowded out and research agendas skewed.  Under these conditions, my article asks, what hope is there for the ‘better politics’ which Loader and Sparks rightly desire?  

[3] The article approaches this task by describing and examining three perspectives on criminology’s public role which I believe can be discerned in the existing literature: (1)  ‘Fighting for truth’ – (see Currie, 2007) criminologists should use impartial scientific methods to identify objective, value-free ‘truths’ about crime and then disseminate these perspectives widely and assertively; (2) ‘Newsmaking criminology’ (see Barak, 1988)  – criminologists should develop a strategic approach to working with the media in order to ensure alternative ‘discourses’ on crime and justice are heard (3) ‘Democratic underlabouring’ (see Loader and Sparks, 2010) – criminologists produce knowledge in three modes – Primary, Institutional-Critical and Normative – some criminologists should work as ‘democratic underlabourers’ or ‘diplomats’ helping to interpret and negotiate between different modes of criminological knowledge and the wider public sphere in order to bring knowledge to bear on ‘matters of public concern and dispute’ and thus help to bring about a ‘better politics’ of crime and justice. Ultimately I argue that none of these perspectives is entirely satisfactory, because none of them offers a plausible and democratically-defensible response to either the manifest pluralism of the criminological field, or the wider political context within which a variety of ‘facts’ about crime jostle for position in a public sphere prone to dominating influences.

[4] It is worth adding here that I think it is fair to suggest that Wilson’s implication that the by-lines assigned to both of his Moat articles in the Mail were misleading is somewhat disingenuous. Both by-lines use phrases which are completely reflective of the language used in Wilson’s articles. No ‘sub-editor’ can be blamed for this; the by-lines are not false advertising for the content which follows.

[5] Take Wilson’s most recent foray into TV documentary: ‘Killers Behind Bars’. From the title, to the description of the academic front man as a ‘real life “Cracker”’ to the bizarre CSI-style trailer which sees Professor Wilson walk through a mock-up murder scene and spray an unidentified substance onto a brick wall, this programme has clearly been designed to, as Wilson himself says, harness ‘the public’s fascination with murder’. But, apart from the fact that the presenter is a criminologist, what has this kind of CSI-framed, cold-case research got to do with what most criminologists do? The answer, as I am sure Wilson is well-aware, is very little.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Public Criminology and Raoul Moat a guest post by David Wilson


Public Criminology and Raoul Moat
Professor David Wilson

Centre for Applied Criminology, Birmingham City University

In his best-selling book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, Owen Jones quotes a criminologist called “Professor David Wilkinson” arguing that Raoul Moat had:

tap[ped] into that dispossessed, white-working-class, masculine identity, whereby they can’t make their way in the world legitimately so behaving the way that Moat has behaved, as this kind of anti-hero, has, I think, touched a nerve, (Jones, 2011: 6).

Jones was unimpressed by such analyses, suggesting that it revealed “class hatred” and argued that, the “white working-class had, at a stroke, been reduced to knuckle-dragging thugs lacking legitimate aspirations,” (Jones, 2011: 6).  Jones went on to illustrate his point by quoting readers’ comments that had been posted on the Daily Mail’s website. You might gain the impression that Wilkinson – in reality me - had been writing about Moat in the Daily Mail.  That quote was thereafter directly and correctly linked by Mike Wayne (2012)
 to an article which I had actually written in the Daily Mail.  That article was headlined “A Howl of Rage from a Bitter and Deluded Underclass” (Daily Mail, 16 July 2010).   It is not one I would have chosen but even high profile columnists find their work given ‘unexpected’ headlines or pull quotes.  I am sure Jones must have his own experience of this and I’m sure his editor is to blame for confusing my name with Richard Wilkinson
 who he later quotes approvingly.

Wayne is more forgiving than Jones and noted that I had, at the very least, correctly identified that mass de-industrialisation in the northeast of England had created a “crisis in masculine identity,” (Wayne, 2012: 128).  On the other hand, Aida Edemariam, writing in the Guardian, wanted it both ways, and therefore suggested that my analysis was both “glib and patronising” but that it had, nonetheless, “a kernel of truth in it,” (Guardian, 12 July 2010).

Thankfully Edemariam had correctly identified that the quote, used in different ways by Jones and Wayne, did not in fact come from the Daily Mail
  but instead had been used by me in a live, studio interview on Sky News on 11th July 2010.  Selected extracts from that interview thereafter appeared in print on the Sky News website and, as a consequence, some of the context for the quote got lost unless the reader clicked onto the actual footage.  Indeed, the immediate context for the comment, and now a quote in several books, was an attempt to explain why 3,000 people had wanted to sign up to a Facebook page in Moat’s memory on which he was described as “a legend”.  So, comments made by me live on air about people – especially working-class men - in communities which had been de-industrialised, feeling harassed unfairly by the police, and essentially powerless and trapped, with few legitimate outlets for their talents, were  lost.  

The point here is not so much to dwell on how fair, or otherwise, these various uses of a quote made by me on live TV might have been, or to chart that quote’s subsequent misidentification with a newspaper article where it never appeared, and attributed to a non-existent criminologist.  Some might see an irony in a media savvy criminologist so hoist by such petards.  But despite such reverses my aim is to  consider whether or not public Criminology in the print or broadcast media did help to explain the actions of someone like Moat, by placing his behaviour in a broader context which recognised both his personal responsibility for his actions, and how that responsibility might also be shaped and determined by broader, social, cultural and economic forces.  

This seems like a timely moment to consider all of this with the publication of Anthony Ellis, Jennifer Sloan and Maggie Wykes’s (2013) “’Moatifs’ of Masculinity: The Stories Told about ‘Men’ in British Newspaper Coverage of the Raoul Moat Case,” and Michael Rowe’s (2013) “Just Like a TV Show: Public Criminology and the Media Coverage of the ‘Hunt for Britain’s Most Wanted Man”, both published in the current edition of Crime, Media, Culture.  I feel in a particularly good position to comment, not only because I did indeed write several articles and make various comments in the print media about Moat,(see, for example, BBC online 10 July 2010 and Guardian 7 July 2010) , but also because – like Rowe – I was used by Sky News, as a “presenter’s friend” in Rothbury on 7th and 8th July 2010, and also made other comments on such outlets as BBC Radio 4’s The World and One and PM.   I subsequently described these experiences in Looking for Laura: Public Criminology and Hot News (2011: 136-148).

Rowe does not reference this work in his article, nor a previous co-written article about the competing demands and tensions placed on public criminologists whilst working with the broadcast media (Wilson and Groombridge, 2009).  However, Ellis et al do quote from one article that I wrote for the Daily Mail – again by-lined by a sub-editor “Violent Narcissist Who Thought he was Rambo” (Daily Mail 12 July 2010) - noting that there was a “façade of novelty” in my explanations but, echoing the Guardian’s Edemariam, that these explanations still drew on “established discourses of individual psychopathology,” (Ellis, et al 2013: 4).  They do not therefore acknowledge that I also claim in this same article that Moat’s actions were those of a “domestic violence abuser”, which in turn were underpinned by “misogyny” and that, more generally, some “working-class males no longer have a role in our society”.  These are neither, I would suggest, tropes from “individual psychopathology”, nor the usual suspects and demons favoured by the Daily Mail – an issue I discuss below.  However, at least they didn’t accuse me of class hatred.

Clearly there is an inevitable desire to expand, modify, disagree and praise what Rowe, Ellis, Sloan and Wykes have written but rather, I want to use these two articles, and another by Elizabeth Turner, as a lens through which to discuss not just Raoul Moat specifically, but public Criminology more generally in relation to “news-making Criminology”.

The Current State of Public Criminology
Elizabeth Turner’s (2013) article in The British Journal of Criminology “Beyond Facts and Values: Rethinking Some Recent Debates about the Public Role of Criminology” – neatly summarises the three, and often competing perspectives, on Criminology’s public role.  Turner identifies these three perspectives as: “fighting for truth”; “news-making criminology”; and “democratic under labouring”.  The second perspective can be readily associated with Barak (1988; 2007) and Groombridge (2007), and the third with Loader and Sparks (2010).  

Turner – while offering a new take on the idea of ‘democratic under labouring’ – is clearly aligned with the third perspective.
  However, she rather airily dismisses “news-making criminology” as “appearing[ing] to empty criminology of any meaningful content so that all that matters is getting one’s favoured discourse heard”, (page 157).  No evidence is presented to support this and, crucially, Turner fails to cite Rowe’s work, that of Jon Silverman, the former BBC Home Affairs correspondent, or my own, all of which predate her article.  And, lest we forget, the biggest news story of last year, about the paedophile Jimmy Savile, and which is continuing to make headlines this year, was exposed by Mark Williams-Thomas, who  publicly identifies himself as a Criminologist and is currently studying for his PhD .  Had Turner been able to take this growing corpus of work into consideration she might have been able to modify her conclusion or, at the very least, acknowledge that good “news-making criminology” is indeed filled with Criminological insight and can even, REF-like, have “impact”.  

It is here that I want to use Rowe’s work to argue that “news-making” Criminology has now actually moved beyond these essentially preliminary theoretical positions that Turner employs, and which Rowe implicitly endorses, and has reached a very different stage of development.  Far from the latter’s fear that criminologists might “retreat from engagement” with the media (Rowe, 2013: 35), a small number of us have increasingly welcomed that engagement – albeit this in itself has now created different tensions (see Wilson, 2013) - and, in doing so, have, I would argue, developed the “robust public criminology” that Rowe is advocating for in his article.  However, sadly, his downplaying of such engagement that has already taken place means that his desire for the academy to better understand how the media frames crime events, lags behind those of us who are already aware of that framing, written about it and are trying to use that awareness to promote a better public understanding of crimes and punishments.  Indeed, that awareness is the primary reason why much of my public writing now appears in the Daily Mail.  

Hated by the Daily Mail
I have previously written about how I have made a conscious decision to stop writing so often for the Guardian and to start writing for the Daily Mail and Tribune.  As I pointed out at the time:

The two papers are not natural bed-fellows, but the move to the Daily Mail was made because I felt that my views and opinions were naturally accepted by most readers of the Guardian and if I wanted to see real change then getting the readers of the Daily Mail onside seemed to me to be more important.  I’m still debating with myself if that part of the strategy has worked, although I have thoroughly enjoyed learning to write about issues that are important to me in a different style and aimed at a different audience.  The move to Tribune was meant to reinforce the fact that in deciding to write for the Daily Mail I hadn’t lost my left-leaning principles, (Wilson, 2011: xvii).

I am still debating as to whether this move has been successful.  However, I did see it as part of a broader strategy to use Criminology to cool the ‘red hot debate’ about crime and punishment and, in doing so, reposition some tabloid staples into a broader context that recognises the complexity of issues related to serial killers, sex offenders, naming and shaming, child killers, “holiday camp prisons”, ASBOs, yobs and slobs and the underclass.  Has that move been successful?  How would I measure success? 

Perhaps we could use the Moat case which, as both these articles seem to reveal to me, provides a perfect example of the various tensions, opportunities and dangers that exist for the public, news-making Criminologist who is in danger of being damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t.  After all, does the Daily Mail taking an article by me about Moat – albeit framed within language that suits the readers of that paper – describing the dispossession of white, working-class men not at least encourage a broader acceptance of the negative consequences of global, neo-liberal economics?  I’m uncertain, but I did describe how these men have been “neglected by social forces sweeping modern Britain [and] the manual occupations that gave their forefathers pride, like shipbuilding and coalmining, have gone”.  In their wake, welfare dependency had merely rendered these men – like Moat - “useless”.  This conclusion seems to me to be perfectly framed for the Daily Mail, while at the same time making an argument which would not normally be heard in that paper.

This importance of this issue of framing that Rowe is keen to describe, is not something that would seem to have even been acknowledged by Ellis et al.  Indeed, I did sometimes get the impression that within their general review of the papers that they analyse I was being criticised for my “façade of novelty” for not overtly acknowledging hegemonic masculinity.  Frankly, I can’t imagine any article using this term ever appearing in the Daily Mail.  In other words, the “retreat” from engagement with the media that Rowe fears, or at least, in the examples provided by Ellis et al from this particular outlet – is predicated on an inability, or an unwillingness, to re-frame an academic argument into one which can be accommodated by the audience which would consume that argument, and also in terms that they would understand.  

This would seem to fit into a broader pattern of how British academics deal with the media more generally.  For some, although I am not suggesting that this is necessarily the position of Ellis et al, the media is a scary monster to be avoided at all costs, or a machine that will simply grind their beautiful and complex arguments into simplistic sound-bites and, in doing so, render them meaningless.  And, as my opening paragraphs show, academics and more serious commentators are quite capable of some grinding and sound-biting.  In other words, as far as public Criminology is concerned, some of the tension that Turner well describes between her three perspectives is not simply about the plural, contested nature of Criminology  but also about a clear preference for most criminologists to remain rooted in the academy.  Tucked away behind the university’s walls, I continue to sense a reluctance, never mind a retreat, on the part of many criminologists, for different reasons, to engage with any public, let alone a “news-making” debate.  

But let’s leave all of this to one side, for my greatest concern about what Turner presents is that she sees her three perspectives as if they each have equal weight and support.  Nothing can be further from the truth.  Sadly, democratic under labourers and diplomats proliferate in academic Criminology, either because of temperament, inclination or downright academic snobbery.  The tragedy for me is that either through omission, in the case of Rowe, or commission with Ellis et al, they fail to acknowledge that engaging with the media, and framing a reasoned argument that will be heard in outlets outside of the academy, is not easy to do, has to be tailored to the relevant audience and therefore also needs to be done with care.  I appreciate that I am probably fighting a losing battle on this, and I should also acknowledge that I have had perhaps had unfair advantages over my peers in that I was trained to present TV programmes by the BBC.  I now have considerable experience of doing so, and many will perhaps simply see me as a “media tart” and this short article as special pleading.  However, it nonetheless still seems short-sighted to me that so few of my academic peers want to engage with the print and broadcast media.  Rather, they are far more comfortable – dare I say “proud” – of being democratic under labourers or diplomats, than public criminologists – or, if I may – “public intellectuals”.  What’s more, the small number of us who do engage with the media will gradually become even smaller, if their work continues to be ignored, taken out of context, or simply misrepresented.  In so doing they may cede the field to the rag-tag of police, politicians and moral entrepreneurs that Groombridge (2007) found sheltering under the rubric, ‘Criminologists Say’.


References
Barak, G (1988), “Newsmaking Criminology: Reflections on the Media, Intellectuals and Crime,” Justice Quarterly 5: 565-587
Barak, G (2007), “Doing Newsmaking Criminology from within the Academy,” Theoretical Criminology 11: 191-207
Ellis, A, Sloan, J and Wykes, M (2012) “’Moatifs’ of Masculinity: The Stories Told about ‘Men’ in British Newspaper Coverage of the Raoul Moat Case,” Crime, Media, Culture, 9 (1): 3-21
Groombridge, Nic (2007) ‘Criminologists Say … : An Analysis of UK National Press Coverage of Criminology and Criminologists and a Contribution to the Debate on ‘Public Criminology’ The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice Volume 46, Issue 5, pages 459–475, December 2007
Jones, O (2011), Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, (London: Verso Books)
Loader, I and Sparks, R (2010), Public Criminology? Criminological Politics in the Twenty-First Century, (London: Routledge)
Rowe, M (2012), “Just Like a TV Show: Public Criminology and the Media Coverage of the ‘Hunt for Britain’s Most Wanted Man”, Crime, Media, Culture, 9 (1): 23-38
Elizabeth Turner (2013), “Beyond Facts and Values: Rethinking Some Recent Debates about the Public Role of Criminology”, The British Journal of Criminology
Wayne, M (2012), “Hans Magnus Enzenberger and the Politics of the New Media Technology,” in D Berry (ed) Revisiting the Frankfurt School: Essays on Culture, Media and Theory, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing).
Wilkinson Richard G. and Pickett Kate (2009) The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better Allen Lane
Wilson, D (2011), Looking for Laura: Public Criminology and Hot News, (Winchester: Waterside Press).
Wilson, D (2013), “The TV Academic: Balancing the Demands of a Double Career,” Guardian, 29 March 2013
Wilson, D and Groombridge, N (2009), “’I’m Making a TV Programme Here!: Reality TV’s Banged Up and Public Criminology,” The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 49 (1): 1-17

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Theocratic Criminology


If I were a Saudi-based criminologist how would I deal with a request from the authorities to investigate why women wanted to commit the crime of driving or anyone the crime of alcohol production, distribution and sale?  As a UK-based criminologist I can select from, or mix up, the whole smorgasbord of criminological history in attempting to explain crime or, in this Saudi example, criminalisation.  But what of a Saudi criminologist?

Women driving or pretty much anything to do with alcohol are crimes in Saudi Arabia but not in many other places; and I use such facts in my criminology teaching.  That is I attempt to show my students that law and morals have changed over time and between places and therefore that crime and deviance is relative.

I have often tossed such ‘facts’ into lectures without too much thought.  Whilst areligious I teach at a Roman Catholic University College.  I often spend time early in my introductory criminology module on the pre-history of criminology when crime and sin were undivided and indivisible and you only needed religious authority to know what was right and wrong and why.

The theological knowledge of my students (not all of whom may be Catholic) never stretched to answer my question to them about whether religious ideas of the devil and evil were more similar to classicist or positivist approaches to crime.  Did we freely chose evil - calculating in the classicist way that the fun now might be worth any pain later - or were we - in a positivist medical model way - ‘infected’ by the devil.  The punishment/treatment might be the same though.

Changes in the demographics of the college’s entrants and the obviousness of Islamic dress mean that I’m now having pause for thought.  How are my religio-criminological musings and discussions of lap-dancing or rape, let-alone the significance of the Enlightenment project to sociology going down?  My commitment to that and the need for an education that challenges, nay offends, comfortable and comforting complaisance ensures I will continue to teach such material.  However, I also now drop in plenty of examples of the theocratic absurdities derived from Judaism and Christianity too and autocracies that wield similar ‘I-am-the-Law’ powers.

But this has got me thinking about my notional Saudi scholar and his problems (or her worse ones). Critical scholars in the West don’t necessarily get preferment and Government and Commerce insist on practical solutions.  So it is no surprise to see Talal Al-Eidan, described as ‘a criminology and criminal justice expert’ advising, ‘the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency and banks should strengthen precautionary measures when it comes to stocking ATMs’.

Ali Wardak pointed out in 2005 how little research into crime and criminal justice there had been in Saudi Arabia.  But Dr. Robert Winslow’s A Comparative Criminology Tour of the World offers some and notes that:

In November 1990, a group of forty-seven women staged a demonstration to press their claim for the right to drive. The mutawwiin demanded that the women be punished. The government confiscated the women's passports, and those employed as teachers were fired. The previously unofficial ban on women's driving quickly became official.

And Hamid R. Kusha specifically discusses the possibility that Sharia Law deters criminality by comparing that in Iran and Sudan (but in 1998, so the changes in both those countries render comparison difficult).  Others suggest the influence of internalised specifically Islamic self-control.  Crime statistics show low but existent levels of crime.  These figures can, like all Government figures, be criticised and the low levels of crime against women subjected to particular scrutiny.  Women in post-Enlightenment countries find it hard to report partner violence so Saudi women even more so.  And violence at the hand of strangers is reduced by a segregation of the sexes that many women here would not welcome.

So we might conclude that crime is low in Saudi Arabia for a variety of reasons - religious, social, cultural, political and economy.  None of which one would want to replicate nor could we.  They have money and, until recently, isolation (Saudi Arabia builds giant Yemen border fence to keep out illegal immigrants and drug smugglers).

I’d not want to be a criminal in Saudi Arabia, nor a criminologist.  If you are one or the other let me know.  How’s it going?  What does a theocratic criminologist do all day when all the answers are in one book or in the head of one ruler?  And this was the case when Beccaria published his ‘On Crimes and Punishments’ and why initially published anonymously.