Anti-Social Behaviour and Social Housing

Abstract

The use of anti-social behaviour orders and moreover, strategies of anti-social behaviour management in social housing areas has become one of the most contentious aspects of anti-social behaviour policy and practice. The use of anti-social behaviour interventions in social housing is often characterised as an oppressive and discriminatory process of social exclusion and control. As Atkinson (2006: 101) contends: ‘Social housing has … become both a site … and process … through which an urban poor are first concentrated, then managed and subsequently disciplined in line with the normative expectations of wider society given voice by a hostile, hysterical and sensationalist media’. Critical commentators contend that the deployment of anti-social behaviour strategies in social housing areas should be understood within the context of punitive networks of regulation, power and bureaucratisation. In this way, anti-social behaviour management is identified as a mechanism to more efficiently regulate the poor. Law, policy and other forms of bureaucratic control are thus utilised to control and to manage newly-defined anti-social behaviour(s) within these ‘problem populations’. These critical analyses seek to represent the use of anti-social behaviour strategies in social housing as borne out of popular discriminatory proclivities coupled with an explicit/implicit desire to ‘sidestep’ fundamental problems of social structure emanating from economic deprivation and exclusion.