Not my hoodie, but my character?

Article by Dr David Muir, Director of Public Policy.

20 July 2006

When the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, turned up at Bradford Diocese conference on youth work in his designer hoodie in May, he was not only giving his fellow clergy an object lesson in ecclesiastical dress with a pertinent social commentary on youth culture, but he was also unwittingly paving the way for David Cameron’s latest discourse on the so-called modern ‘hoodie’ phenomenon.

At the recent (10 July) Centre for Social Justice symposium entitled Thugs: Beyond Redemption? a select group of voluntary sector workers and youth agencies professionals heard the Conservative leader articulate his new approach to neighbourhoods wrecked by vandalism, graffiti and the menace of youth crime and the need to ‘understand’ and ‘love’ juvenile delinquents. Unlike the ‘short, sharp shock’ approach of the Conservatives of previous years, the speech was trailed in the media with the dominant message being an exhortation to ‘hug a hoodie’ and ‘love a hoodie’.

But what is David Cameron really trying to tell us about the so called ‘hoodies’, education and the menace of youth crime? Although Cameron’s long-awaited afternoon speech was the highlight of the symposium, there were a number of high quality presentations from health professional in the morning.

Of particular note were the presentations by Professor Hilton Davies (Professor of Child Health Psychology at King’s College London and a Clinicial Psychologist with the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust), and Dr Felicity De Zulueta (consultant psychiatrist and head of the Traumatic Stress Service in the Maudsley Hospital).

Although David Cameron was very keen to stress the importance of trusting the ‘real experts’ in dealing with youth crime and disorder, the presentation by Hilton Davies seemed to treat this with a degree of caution. Indeed, Davis was arguing for a joined-up approach of radical partnership where the expertise and wisdom of parents also play a significant role in the collective arsenal of solutions and strategies to tackle youth crime and social exclusion.

Having seen the short video she used to illustrate the importance of attachment and emotional intimacy in the early development of monkeys, you were left with the distinct impression (especially if you were a parent) that maybe there was more to David Cameron’s notion of ‘hug a hoodie’ than the morning’s media sound-bite. Dr De Zulueta, a disciple of the psychologist J. Bowlby, gave a fascinating insight into how emotionally vulnerable young people are and the need for parents, teachers and society to respond to them in an emotionally intelligent way if we are to avoid some of the worst effects of youth crime and anti-social behaviour.

Reflecting upon scenes in the video portraying the destructive and anti-social behaviour of monkeys devoid of maternal touch, intimacy and other group attachment, one participant said: ‘Of course, children are not monkeys.’

Maybe this aspect of experimental psychology with monkeys was too reductionist for him in its implications for human social relations. But surely we are not so smart that we can’t condescend to learn something instructive from the pedagogy of monkeys. In fairness to David Cameron, he wasn’t saying, as the media quoted, All You Need is Love, but what he did say enunciated an old truism slender on policy, programmes or resources that appears to depart from the traditional Conservative philosophy of the ‘short, sharp shock’ approach to youth crime. And whilst it is true that in some quarters Cameron’s ‘hoodies speech’ was reported as ‘his worst error to date’ (The Spectator, 15 July), it is axiomatic that a precondition for tackling youth crime and disorder is an understanding of ‘the background, the reasons, the causes’ why so many young people are going off the rails. Additionally, David Cameron is absolutely right when he says we’ve ‘got to be optimistic about young people’. Youth workers, teachers, church leaders and voluntary organisations often do what they do for young people because they believe, and often see, something redemptive in these encounters.

However, to say that ‘hoodies are more defensive than offensive’, or that they are ‘a way to stay invisible in the street…to keep your head down, blend in, don’t stand out’ is probably overstating the case. As a former secondary school teacher in a challenging boys school in South London in the 1990s (the pupils often wore their hoodies then) I well recall a couple of pupils removing a laptop from a classroom during school hours, but their hoodies helped them evade CCTV detection.

Of course, not all kids we see ‘walking down the road, hoodie up, head down, moody swaggering, dominating the pavement’ are troublemakers and potential criminals. This was the point the Archbishop of York was making at the youth work conference when he said, "Ninety-nine per cent of those who wear hoodies are lawabiding citizens." But the truth of the matter is that a small minority of them are; and the smart ones have cottoned on to the fact that some professionals have a panopoly of theories (some of them specious) and social discourse to lessen (some might say excuse, but I’m not going that far) the weight of responsibility they might otherwise feel for their wrong-doing and anti-social behaviour.

As a former principal of a community school in South London, I often admitted youngsters who other institutions had given up on. Very few of them were feral, but the teachers administered what can only be called ‘tough love’; anti-social behaviour was challenged, along with low expectations. The moral ‘3Rs’ (right, ’rong and responsibilities) informed classroom conversations and school ethos. Recently, a report from the Social Exclusion Unit entitled Preventing Social Exclusion reminded us of some of the causes and consequences of social exclusion. Among the causes were more youngsters being brought up in lone-parent household, fragmented communities and lack of ‘concerted preventive’ action by Government. Needles to say that the costs to taxpayers were staggeringly high. It was estimated then that the annual cost of school exclusions was £406 million; and the overall cost of crime to the UK economy was estimated at £60 billion per year.

Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of the Kids Company in Camberwell, candidly said at the symposium that she felt ‘like a prostitute’ in the work she has to do to secure funding for her project to assist vulnerable young children. Interestingly enough, David Cameron’s speech says little, or nothing meaningful, about resources and funding for the voluntary sector—the social entrepreneurs, ‘the people doing the patient, painstaking work on the ground with young people’. Of course, you can’t just throw money at youth crime. We also need better moral framework of respect and greater social responsibility. However, more resources aimed at the voluntary sector and a shift in spending from custody to prevention will certainly go a long way in tackling some of the underlying causes of youth crime and anti-social behaviour even though it probably won’t stop youngsters wearing hoodies and our suspicion of what lies beneath this symbolic attire.

Dr David Muir, Public Policy Director at the Evangelical Alliance