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1993-12-15
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jr008c@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Sgt. Pepper) writes:
>dianem@boi.hp.com (Diane Mathews) writes:
>> Stupendous Man (bkottman@afit.af.mil) writes:
>> > Maybe. Part of the reason wages have been decreasing is the
>> > entry of women into the workplace.
>>
>> I just can't get over the fact that this is becoming a wider
>> spread belief. But, i will give the man the benefit of the
>> doubt, here, because he did say "part" of the reason. A very
>> small part, perhaps, but a part. Your bias is showing here,
>> Stupe, better keep that thing covered up.
[ Nimble nonsense by nameless non-entity nixed. -- dks ]
> Maybe all the men in the workforce have artificially created
> a larger supply of labor; both men and women have an equal
> right to any job.
Ah, yes, *you* might think so and *I* might think so, but
read the following article and you'll see who might disagree.
Cheers,
Dhanesh
---------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Copyright 1993 Newspaper Publishing PLC
|
| The Independent
| November 14, 1993, Sunday
|
| Section: Comment Page; p. 23
|
| Headline: Boys who can't grow up; Men use crime to
| prove their masculinity because they have lost
| their role as breadwinners, says Anna Coote
|
| Byline: Anna Coote
|
|
| CRACKING down on criminals and lone mothers - twin themes of the
| Cabinet's "back to basics" campaign - reveals a Government
| struggling to understand the links between family and crime.
| Ministers propose to cut benefit for single mothers. They want to
| take more suspects to court, lock up more offenders, build more
| prisons and more secure units for delinquent teenagers.
|
| They may be reaching in the right direction: there is evidence of
| links between family and crime. But ministers seem not to see
| what is staring them in the face.
|
| Crime is, overwhelmingly, a male occupation. Men account for
| eight out of every ten people cautioned by police and nearly nine
| out of every ten found guilty of indictable offences. Men are
| responsible for 81 per cent of convicted cases of theft and
| handling stolen goods, 92 per cent of violence against the person
| and 97 per cent of burglary.
|
| Why do they do it? Why don't the women? Most research in this
| area has been strangely uncurious about the links between men and
| crime. Many people have taken it for granted. Albert Cohen, the
| criminologist, in a study published in 1955, observed that "the
| delinquent subculture" was created largely by young men who had
| problems adjusting to the male role. Men and women, he said, had
| different problems and preoccupations because they were judged by
| themselves and others according to different standards. But he
| did not go further than that.
|
| Since then, a host of (mainly male) criminologists have argued
| over the causes of crime. Should we blame it all on "bad
| apples"? Or moral degeneracy? Or cultural alienation? Or
| poverty? Or dysfunctional families? Several weighty surveys,
| undertaken at considerable cost in Britain and the United States,
| have been analysed and re-analysed in search of an answer. Yet
| none has paused to question traditional assumptions about
| masculine identity or male roles.
|
| Some have observed differences between male and female behaviour,
| but have not troubled to investigate them. Others have reported
| their findings about "youths" without specifying whether they
| were male or female. Most have investigated the parenting
| practices of women, but not of men; they have been interested in
| fathers only as breadwinners or as bearers of a criminal record.
| In short, these studies have conformed to the well-worn academic
| practice of treating the male as the real human being whose
| maleness does not require investigation. The female, by contrast,
| is treated as an aberrant sub-species and worthy of passing
| curiosity.
|
| Feminists first drew attention to women as victims of male
| violence and to patterns of female deviance - both neglected
| areas. They argued that relations between men and women, and the
| way in which masculine and feminine identities developed, were
| vital to an understanding of deviant and criminal behaviour. But
| it took some time before their insights made a wider impact on
| the study of crime and family.
|
| There is now a small but growing interest in studying precisely
| what masculinity means and how men learn to be masculine. With it
| comes a new, critical interest in the role of fathers in
| families, the experience of boys growing up to be men and the
| reasons why men, rather than women, get into trouble with the
| law.
|
| In September, more than 150 people took part in a conference on
| masculinity and crime at Brunel University, the first of its
| kind in Britain. This was not a convention of feminists out to
| blame men. It was a group of academics, probation officers and
| community workers, with a handful representing the police and
| prison service, who shared a sense that here was a rich source of
| intelligence on the nature and causes of crime.
|
| They note that the old routes by which boys learnt to be men have
| been severed and new trails have yet to be blazed. Not only are
| more women going out to work, but eight out of ten jobs created
| between now and the turn of the century are expected to be
| "women's jobs". Roles and expectations of daughters, wives and
| mothers have changed profoundly. So have the prospects for sons,
| husbands and fathers. But while women have added the role of
| wage-earner to their traditional one of homemaker and carer, men
| have simply lost their breadwinning role. Young men grow up
| fearing there will be no jobs for them, and lacking (in Albert
| Cohen's words) the means of "realising their aspirations" to
| become men.
|
| In communities where there are no jobs for men or women, the
| girls still have their rites of passage: they can claim adult
| status by becoming mothers. This may well be undesirable because
| poorly educated teenagers, themselves trapped in dependency, are
| not best placed to give their children a start in life. But these
| young mothers have to grow up fast - in a way they would not if
| they spent their time stealing cars and videos or selling drugs.
| Most make a good job of parenting, considering the odds stacked
| against them - odds which the Government seems determined to
| lengthen. When such girls fail to marry the fathers of their
| children, they are not being feckless, but making a realistic
| assessment of the available options. The boys who get them
| pregnant appear to have little else to offer.
|
| So the young men are left adrift. Often they hang out in groups,
| where they can gain some security from being with their peers. To
| prove themselves as "real" men, they resort to the traditional
| masculine virtues. They try to be tough, brave and strong, they
| try not to show their feelings or to form strong personal
| attachments. They can demonstrate their potency by siring
| children and "earning" by foul means or fair. Many will regard
| their unemployed fathers (if they see them at all) as impotent
| failures. Not a few will observe their fathers using violence to
| defend their fragile authority at home. Where can they look for
| alternative role models? There seems to be nothing between the
| "hard man" and the "wimp", where they might forge a new
| identity.
|
| It is the unequal struggle to be masculine in modern times that
| gets so many boys into trouble. Delinquent and criminal behaviour
| offers the best opportunity to prove their manhood. Doing time in
| jail confirms their virility. One in four men is convicted of an
| offence by the age of 25. And two-thirds of all male offenders
| are under 30.
|
| This is the missing piece of the jigsaw that might help
| government ministers understand and tackle the rising crime
| rate. But they are fixated on single mothers. Michael Howard has
| rightly declared that absentee fathers are a part of the problem.
| Yet his response has been to demonise and punish the women who
| bear and raise their children - and to build more institutions in
| which young male offenders can learn to be more macho than ever.
|
| Government policy only makes worse a destructive cycle in which
| boys become the main perpetrators and the main victims. Boys
| between 11 and 15 are twice as likely as girls to fall prey to
| violence. Far less consideration is given to men who are victims
| of crime than to women. Men are supposed to be tougher and cope
| more easily with the experience. There is some evidence that
| males are more likely to be picked up by police than females
| behaving in the same way. Girls are much more likely than boys to
| be cautioned rather than charged. Ostensibly, girls and women are
| locked up for their own protection, while boys and men are locked
| up to protect society from them. Jewelle Gibbs, professor of
| social welfare at Berkeley, California, who has studied young
| black men in America, observes that they "have been the primary
| victims of mob violence, police brutality, legal executions, and
| ghetto homicide".
|
| Young men stop getting into trouble with the law when they
| "settle down". Getting a job and enjoying a successful marriage
| make them less likely to offend. Right-wing American analysts
| such as Charles Murray have argued that young men are
| essentially barbarians who are best civilised by the
| responsibility of providing for a wife and family. But how can
| women be persuaded to play ball? If breadwinning is all that can
| save men from perdition, they will have to be given priority in
| the job market. Women will have to go home and abandon their
| claims to financial independence.
|
| As Ulrich Beck points out in his book Risk Society, modernisation
| "is not a carriage one can step out of at the next corner if one
| does not like it". To turn the clock back, women would have to
| be displaced not just from the labour market, but from education
| as well. Wage rates for women would have to be cut to render them
| incapable of supporting themselves or their children. Equality
| laws would have to be repealed.
|
| "It would have to be checked," writes Beck, "whether the evil
| did not begin with universal suffrage; mobility, the market, new
| media and information technologies would have to be limited or
| forbidden." Impossibly, the great cultural and economic changes
| which have gathered momentum through the 20th century would have
| to be swung into reverse.
|
| The point is not that we just give up and leave things as they
| are, but that successful policies must cut with the grain of
| change. Women who become single parents may be making the best of
| a bad job, but few would deny that children are better off in
| two-parent families as long as these provide a happy, secure and
| stable environment. Soaring divorce rates are a sign that
| traditional family arrangements are failing.
|
| Michael Howard would be well advised to look for ways of helping
| parents, particularly men, adjust to change. He and his
| colleagues might consider how public policies can assist the
| quest for new masculine identities. Through education, benefit
| and employment policies, they could encourage men as well as
| women to be caring and attentive parents. It would take some of
| the strain off modern marriage, give men new ways of "proving
| themselves" and make life a bit easier for women. More
| important, it could give children a better start in life - and
| boys a better chance of growing up without a criminal record.
|
| -----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| The author is Hamlyn Fellow in Social Policy at the Institute for
| Public Policy Research. A conference on Families, Children and Crime,
| sponsored by the Institute and the 'Independent on Sunday,' will be
| held in London this week.
|