Depraved or deprived: What lies behind these riots, and why aren't they happening in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

[Solopower]

I've been reading the threads on the riots and I wondered if we needed one on the causes.

People's ideas seem to range from thinking the rioters are just opportunistic criminals to socially and culturally disadvantaged youngsters.

But why isn't there any rioting in Scotland, for example, where there are pockets of extreme social deprivation?

Zoe Williams' article on the psychology of looting is worth reading, imo:
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/09/uk-riots-psychology-of-looting?CMP=twt_gu

Abra1d You are right about the overcrowding - we have just been on a city break (London) and the feeling of being shut-in made us very tense after a while.We don't envy those people crammed on the Tube day after day.
Here up north we live in a semi-rural area and have the chance to breathe and relax far more. Saying that, we walked miles and miles in London, probably more than we do at home.
On a sombre note, Wales and Scotland are subsidised by the English taxpayers so they should feel privileged.

I was having a conversation at work today when someone said "the guy in charge is one of your countrymen and he's a twat". I felt embarrassed that a fellow Scot was perceived that was, felt it reflected badly on 'us'. It then occurred to me that I would never have said this to an English person, as there are so many of them so the actions of one doesn't really reflect on the whole, plus due to the number people tend to be more differentiated by the city/area they live in rather than the country. I bet most people couldn't distinguish between Glasgow/Edinburgh, Swansea/Cardiff, Belfast/Dublin unless they are Scottish, Welsh or Irish. Am I rambling?

Interesting discussion about the overcrowding, it's definitely very stressful and affects the way you think and feel towards other people. Definitely easier to feel community-minded and well-disposed towards your fellow humans when you're not crammed in a small hot noisy space having to smell them and be elbowed in the face on a regular basis!

It is almost certainly easier for these incidents to start and gain momentum when you have a large number of people in a relatively small geographical area as well. In more sparsely populated areas it would just take too much travel and organisation!

CrosswordAddict, Let's put that old chestnut to rest.

Um, rioting is strongly related to austerity and cuts. That was the point of the research I mentioned in an earlier post, talking about the Radio 4 statistics programme. Whatever your beliefs about the causes of these most recent riots and the morality of them, when number crunchers (proper academic researchers, I mean!) looked at riots across Europe since WW2, there was a very clear relationship between austerity, cuts and rioting. It'll still be on iplayer, it's worth a listen (More or Less, Radio 4).

As for the idea that in the good old days people didn't behave like this, you just need to look in a history book - recent history included - to see that isn't true. During WW2 bombed houses were looted - often by children or teenagers.

(And the same research also said riots tend to occur before the worst of the cuts - the academic (whose name I forget, apologies) said it was almost as if they were a negotiating tactic.

I agree with Smallwhitekitten, the law needs to be changed to allow the police to have greater powers of arrest and the courts need to be able to hand out maximum sentences not just a slap on the wrist, unruley people will go on the ramage because they already know the law is a joke before they even start and already know they will get a simple slap on the wrist by the "Social worker mummy did not love me " types who live in their Westminster ivory towers.If they do the crime they must do the time, simple as that,all the full time criminals and anti-social types already know their mickey mouse sentences before they commit the crimes so the soft legal system makes it worth the risk to commit crime in the first place, this needs to be reversed.

I live in London and generally rub along just fine in this overpopulated place. But since the riots I have felt tense, looking at people and wondering whether or not they were involved. I feel this tension around me too - people's confidence in each other has been sorely shaken.

edam still blaming the cuts do you really think these people even know who dave cam is or even what cuts are being made past benefits

Their throwing their toys out of their pram because their benefits will
be removed and the right to sit at home with 6 kids is going to be removed and quite rightly so

Here is an article in a Canadian paper where there were recently riots following an ice hockey game. I have to admit that I agree with the idea that this generation are selfish, bored and feel entitled to everything at no personal cost. I am not so sure that I agree that it is down to parenting as many of the people involved in the rioting are NOT parented.

www.vancouversun.com/opinion/Parents+bear+responsibility+recreational+rioter/5255553/story.htmlMeanwhile I am also impressed with the speedy justice system in the UK.

Oops! I meant to hit preview...

www.vancouversun.com/opinion/Parents+bear+responsibility+recreational+rioter/5255553/story.html

It's always interesting to know how others see us ...

They all seem to think it's got a lot to do with social deprivation and our unequal society.

Letter in the Evening Standard tonight from someone who saw Boris Johnson smashing restaurant windows in when he was in the Bullingdon Club at Oxford. (A family friend of ours was up at the same time and also reports Boris and his mates causing a lot of damage.)

There's a lot of rank hypocrisy in the response to the riots by the ruling elite. Many of them were just as bad when they were young - only they had rich and powerful Mummies and Daddies who could keep them out of trouble.

Funnily enough while the riots raged I was writing a psychology essay on group conflict, Henri Tajfel, intergroup conflict theory.

Basically we have a cognitive bias towards rejoice and therefore protect our in- group and discriminate against out group. Tajfel also anti Nazi

Prejudice not rejoice

(realises has failed miserably at being intellectual)

Well

You have put your finger on a central criticism of Tajfel - how you account for irrationality - emotion. Extreme behaviour such as the Holocaust - but Tajfel felt to explain this was to excuse it. I take from this that some people are just bastards and you have to look at intragroup dynamics and behaviour on an individual rather than group level.

I don't know much about Tajfel. But is it just a round about way of saying what the Daily Mail says, that some people are scrotes and cuts to EMA don't come into it.

But I do like Jungian analysis.

I do think you're right about hypocrisy, Edam. I was at Oxford just before Boris et al and there was a lot of that kind of behaviour. I found it totally baffling and awful, still do. WHY?? What's the enjoyment in smashing things up? I just don't get it.

That's why I don't totally buy the deprivation thesis for last week. Too many kids from non-deprived areas seemed to be involved. They were looting for smart trainers and flat-screens, not bread. Nobody on the streets those nights was hungry. None of them seemed to be homeless people (who generally seem to try and stay away from trouble).

Well Tajfel's Social Identity Theory is a seminal piece of psychology. Before Tajfel, people thought that conflict arose because we have a basic irrational, aggressive urge to protect our group: the 'blood and guts' model.

Tajfel however showed that group prejudice - to prejudge - was an entirely rational response to social context.
That society is relational so your perceived social group will inevitably be compared to another and from that conflict will arise as we are programmed to process and categorise objects in our brain in a way that protects our self esteem and therefore the status of our group. He showed this through experimentation which has been replicated many times.

Therefore we can't help bias, it is programmed into us and therefore conflict is, to some extent inevitable, and perhaps not necessarily a bad thing (apart from all the death and destruction)

So in the context of these riots - it seems there were many groups in conflict but broadly there seemed to be the impoverished young who identified themselves as a 'group' against everyone else. They want to maintain or raise the status of their group as it feeds directly into their individual self esteem.
Therefore they asserted themselves to show power against the police and against us. Again the looting of the shops was about simultaneously acquiring goods that provide status (flat screen TVs/trainers/phones) and destroying them (fuck you, you can';t have them, I don't care about your society anyway.)

WAKE UP AT THE BACK

But Tajfel's assumption that an individual's motivation will be to protect 'self esteem' and his discounting of our innate irrationality has been criticised More work has to be done on the role of 'emotion' and the unconscious in provoking extreme behaviour. (Although Tajfel was not a fan of this approach to psychology.)

Frankly I like my 'some people are just bastards' analysis but I doubt it would get me many marks in my essay. I am sure there some psychologists on Mumsnet who can explain this far better than me - I am just an OU undergraduate