Nice Thinking Allowed podcast that demonstrates Cameron is irresponsible to blame gangs for the looting, if nothing other than the fact that the term ‘gang’ is such a loose concept.

The podcast blurb starts – Are we right to blame the parents? Is there anything they could do? Laurie Taylor speaks to two researchers behind a massive investigation into the families of British gang members. Judith Aldridge and Jon Shute tell him what they discovered about the lives and experience of families with children in gangs and whether it is possible to intervene.

There research is just about as extensive as it gets on gangs – carried out between 2005 – 2008  a team of five researches cunducted formal and informal interviews with 130 gang members, ex gang members, mothers and fathers and members of agencies dealing with gang members.

The podcast starts off with the question ‘What is a gang’? – mentioning that there is a considerable debate around this basic question – as one person interviewed pointed out ‘sometimes’ what the authorities call a gang is just kids hanging around on the corner’, later on we are also reminded that being in a gang and committing crimes are two different things

The second question is ‘ Are the cerain characteristics which predispose someone to joining a gang…? The researcher here give an unfortunately wooly answer but confirms that the following predict future gang membership –

• Having gang members in the family already
• Coming from a permissive family
• Rather unexpectedly, coming from an authoritrian family (this later being precisely what the right is calling for in response to the riots)  

They next move onto the question of interventions in family life, and here it’s pointed out that the people intervening have not clue just how bad some of their kids are – the authorities do not recognise the day to day challenges facing the parents of ‘bad children’ – they hence mistrustful of social workers – being able to cite evidence of their competence –

The parents also seemed to think that the courts were from different worlds – some quoted the fact that judges were mostly privately schooled and had no idea what it was like to wake up hungry and cold – and they tended to see incidents such as ‘smoking weed’ as serious, while to the parents in the study this was just not the case.

Another point is that we don’t know if parenting classes work as a means of reducing gang membership specifically because the two have never been compared – there is an evidence gap.