A nine-year-old girl has been shot dead in Liverpool — the third fatal shooting in the city in a week. Social media is awash with footage of gangs of youths terrorising communities across the country. Yesterday, a 28-year-old man was sentenced for raping a mother and her 14-year-old daughter in their own home. He was given a life sentence — to serve a minimum of 10 years.
My intention here is not to talk about the range of factors that lead to such crimes, nor about the leniency of sentencing guidelines, but rather the notion among certain commentators and academics that discussing such issues is indicative of a reactionary mindset or even some kind of psychological malady.
It is bad enough that these communities are subjected to such violence and lawlessness, and they do not need snide journalists and academics arguing that a preoccupation with crime is a conservative or cringey middle-class phenomenon.
Prominent Left-wing voices who have adopted such a position include Tom Gann of the New Socialist, who’s argued that nobody on the Left should give up on police abolition, and Novara Media columnist Moya Lothian-McLean believes that Keir Starmer’s focus on anti-social crime “sums up the carceral bureaucracy” the Labour leader “embodies”.
Amia Srinivasan, writes in The Right to Sex (2021) that “when feminists embrace carceral solutions, they give cover to the governing class in its refusal to tackle the deepest causes of most crime”, framing the imprisoning of rapists and domestic abusers as a means of class control, rather than protecting the most vulnerable women from violence.
In reality, of course, the opposite is true. Crime is highest in working-class areas, and working-class, BAME, and LGBT people are all more likely to be victims of crime than straight, white, middle-class men. This is reflected in the high priority given to crime by voters in these poorer and more diverse areas — as the MPs representing them know all too well.
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