Anti-Social Behaviour Orders -

http://www.viceland.com/int/v14n8/htdocs/anti.php?country=us

Last year I travelled up and down Britain for six months to meet and take photographs of people with Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. In case you didn’t know, an ASBO is something invented by the Labour government to give out to people who are seen as a menace to the community they live in. I decided to do this because at the time there was so much coverage on things like “chavs” and “ASBOs” in the tabloid press that I wanted to find out what life was really like for the people who’d been labelled “anti-social” by the government. Originally, only a limited number of ASBOs were meant to be handed out and then only under very special circumstances. Once they started making front page headlines, however, the government started chucking them out like they were lottery tickets. When I began the project, over 9,853 people had ASBOs. At one point the rate of increase was so dramatic that if it had continued most of the country would have their own personal ASBO by the end of the decade. I wonder what mine would have been for?

...by savvy psychologists so their clients can avoid consequences for their actions.

But rather to a mechanism of enforcement across the pond.

of tagging people with labels such as ABSO, felon, sex offender, etc. for long periods of time (sometimes the rest of the individual's life). I wonder if it sends the message to the individual that they are incapable of change, that they will always be essentially a public menace. If so, I think that can induce sort of a learned helpessness and, consequently, a self-fulfilling prophecy in that people begin to internalize the messages that they are given (and then becomes contrary to public safety).

But I often wonder if such things are really about public safety in the first place, or more about cheap political points.

sex offenders almost never change without taking hormones to dramatically reduce their sex drive. But others can change. I wrote a paper in a graduate education course about LD (Learning Disabled) kids and learned helplessness so I read a lot about it and I think it applies to a lot more than LD kids.

In public schools where I taught, there were always more black kids labeled as "Behavior Disordered" than there were white kids considered "BD," but only about a third of the student body was black, more like a fourth or less in one school. There were always a number of white kids who should have been in the BD program but their parents refused to allow it. Black parents are more likely to support whatever the school says. I helped liberate some black kids from BD one year by telling a special education teacher who asked my opinion about them that if they were BD, I'd like her to see some of the white kids who were not so labeled! These kids who were liberated were kids I'd taught the previous year. She'd just had them a couple of weeks and was wondering why they were in the BD program. They all did fine in regular classes, played varsity sports, and graduated.

Keeping kids in special ed programs when they could function in regular classes contributes to learned helplessness. The labeling is troubling, too, a real sore point for the LD and BD kids. Many LD kids are likely to need help throughout school but many BD kids can learn how to control their behavior and should be returned to regular classes.