Anti-social Behaviour and the Vulnerable Public

Abstract

Sociological discussions about ‘late-modern’ society are often confusing with regard to the nature of what is repeatedly described as our ‘neo-liberal’ times (Hay, 2007). Not only is it difficult to find any group of individuals who would describe themselves as neo-liberal, but in policy, in law and in the nature of policing today, there is little trace of a ‘liberal’ sentiment (Ramsay, 2012). We may live in a market society, but we also live in a therapeutic culture (Furedi, 2004; Nolan, 1998). At the level of culture and politics, this is not a society that treats its citizens as liberal subjects, but as diminished vulnerable individuals. This is in stark contrast to the Victorians, who were passionate about the need for personal responsibility and autonomy (Himmelfarb, 1989). The rhetoric of freedom and responsibility may continue today, but they often mean something very different from anything the classical liberal John Stuart Mill (1999) proposed in the nineteenth century. Freedom, for example, since the mid-1990s, has been discussed with reference to the ‘freedom from fear’, while responsibility is more often than not an instruction to people to ‘behave’, rather than something adopted by the self-willing action of independent minded individuals (Mill, 1999). Central to this change has been the transformation of the ontological understanding of the individual. The Victorian ideal of the robust, free individual has been replaced by the ‘ideal’ of the vulnerable public — made up of dependent potential victims who need to be protected, not only from crime (or harm) but from an increasing array of behaviours.