According to Schews – ‘On Friday 1st October, an historic ban on squatting in all circumstances comes into force in the Netherlands. All Dutch squatters will be instantly criminalised – in a country where squatting used to be largely legal. The new law, voted for by the right-wing, Christian-dominated Dutch government, makes squatting a crime punishable by up to 2 years and 8 months in prison.’

This is a great example of how a government can criminalise a group of people overnight and clearly demonstrates the ‘social construction of crime’ and the ‘power of the authorities to label certain acts as criminal’.

Here a couple of clips of squatters taken from youtube – ‘squat – breaking in Amsterdam in 2006 – note the jovial atmosphere of the neighbours and police – at the time they were not criminals in setting up a squat – but now they are!

Here is a second video which provides the history of squatting and the rationale for doing it –

 

One thing the women in the above video mentions is that it is up to local councils to enforce the ban on squatting, which some will not do, but if some local councils do choose to evict certain squats this will probably be resisted by squatters – which in turn will be met with some degree of force by the police – this this might result in a classic ‘deviancy amplification spiral’.

 

 

 

 From Wikipedia – Squatting consists of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building, usually residential,^[1] that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use. According to author Robert Neuwirth, there are one billion squatters globally, that is, about one in every six people on the planet.^[2] NOTE – that most of these six billion are those living in slums in large cities in the developing world – we will look at this aspect of squatting as part of our Global Development module.