The last pathologico-physiological (functional) deficit to emerge from the research requires us to invent a new term: ‘copelessness’. Inductively derived from the data from this study, copelessness is defined as a syndrome in which two regressive social psychological features are typically found fused together, co-morbidly reinforcing each other: poor organization of self and others; and low self-esteem with no faith in the future.
To repeat, copelessness is an inductively generated category, appropriate to a grounded theory study. Its utility is that it reduces the complexity of the data. One can make better sense of distributed parenting when one has it, because it ties distributed parenting as a cultural manifestation to the environmental conditions which generate it. It is a mediating variable between the causal factors impacting on the constitution of deprived areas (Section II) and the consequential societally ill-adapted family behaviour noted in Section III. However, it actually manifests itself as performance deficit in family life; people cannot measure up to their adopted family roles [90].
Professionals often tend to assume that their role partners, (their clients), share their objectives, while of course accepting that they may need help to reach them. Clients who are not sure where they’re going, or whether they’re going anywhere at all, professionals seem to find frustrating. The research recorded frustration of this kind. Strong and sharply focused criticism emerged, from a cross-section of commentators, of the capacity for organization of family leaders in these communities. Because family leaders were so poorly organized, family-linking professionals found it difficult to do their jobs. Few of them were able to take such a holistic view of people-in-their-circumstances as this minister.
41 Poverty seems to me to be the key to life, to being able to cope with life and see beyond the present. So many of them live just for now. It seems to be really difficult for them to have any sense of the future. They have no security, no ambitions.
JW: Financial security do you mean?
Any security – money, loves, relationships – the whole lot. Poverty and education – that seems to be at the root of it all. Rich/poor, educated/uneducated. That’s the difference between [the well-off areas and the schemes]. People don’t seem to be able to motivate themselves – it’s in every generation. People can’t “get out of the bit”, as they say here. People in [well-off area] had a purposefulness which came from stability. Money is a big part of that.
Money has moral value. Money provides stability. Money and stability foster purposefulness, especially in education. Money and stability underlie an educated purposefulness which allows people to see beyond the present (because the present is taken care of) and to start taking care of the future, to stop living just for now but to become ambitious, motivated, to enter into relationships, to love. An integrated process theory of social health in a nutshell. Fairly accurate, too, to judge from this social worker’s experience.
13 There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of young people with broken wings, who have been badly hurt when they’ve been encouraged to leave the nest. It was so different for me. I think my folks thought I would never leave home, I stayed until I was 20. I had a lot of security. I had time to get some sense of myself, to feel that I could believe in myself. They lack mature guidance so often.
The poor organization side of copelessness was frequently manifested by school-age mothers. So much so, one education worker gave it some causal value. In her view, ‘teenage pregnancy’ was an unhelpful category: the quality of mothering was not so much affected by the fact of their being teenage mothers so much as their being teenage mothers was a result of their general lack of capacity to organize their lives. As totally independent parents she found these teenagers were not a good bet for quality mothering: well supported they were in with a chance.
20 People talk about the problem of ‘teenage’ pregnancy. I think it isn’t so much their age that is the problem – although it isn’t ideal, by any means. But it wouldn’t make much difference what age these girls were, they wouldn’t be any more able to cope even if they were older. Their lives wouldn’t be any more organized, they wouldn’t be any better at coping, most of them won’t have these skills regardless of their age. They are only more or less fortunate depending on the type of support which they have. That support is what makes the difference.
Here is another example of a professional reasoning through from manifesting condition (inadequate contraception) via an exemplary case study to some hypothesized causal factors (excessive pressures causing lives to lose organized structure). While there is professional frustration in the account, there is also considerable ethnographic insight and evident familiarity with the background conditions. This community nurse’s conclusion is that in the final analysis (‘the secret’) being or not being able to organize themselves is an attribute of individuals. Living lives without structure left a number at odds with all forms of organization.
3 A lot of what we are able to do is limited because the girls don’t co-operate. They will move house and not let us know, and then it will be our fault if they get pregnant. An increase in the domiciliary service would help a few, but there are still a hard core that we can’t reach. The secret is the individuals themselves. For most of them contraception is a low priority, the lowest, in fact. They think that they will put it off until all the other things are dealt with: money, housing, rent arrears, court cases. They don’t realize that they can’t afford to put it off, or they will be pregnant.
I’ve been seeing a girl in the homeless unit. She has two other children in care and she is fighting to get them back. She isn’t interested in contraception, but she seems unable to see that the last thing she needs now is a pregnancy. I’ve tried to talk to her about taking the pill or having Depo until she is more settled and has got a house and her other ones back, but she isn’t interested. She doesn’t seem to be able to see the importance of taking the pill; she’s had it before and gets all mixed up with it, so she won’t consider it again. She won’t think about using another method, there are plenty of good things which she could choose from. Mirena would suit her but she won’t even discuss it. They are poor compliers because they are not what we’d call organized.
I suppose they’ve got so many other pressures, they have no structure to their lives so it must be difficult to get organized. You just have to look at the number of times that I visit people who aren’t organized. They know you are coming, but they’ve either forgotten or they haven’t bothered to get ready. They aren’t dressed, washed or ready. Sometimes they don’t answer the door; or they will answer it, but not let you in because they’re not up. They seem to manage to get sorted for specific things, like getting their giro, or going for their script if they are on methadone. It’s almost as if they are only able to have one thing in their heads at once. They even do it with shopping, they’ll have been out, but forget something basic. They only shop day to day. I expect that’s because they don’t have money for a week’s shopping. They look in their purse every morning and shop with whatever is left after they’ve bought their fags. They just live day-to-day.
It is hard not to think that this account is also evidence for a widespread sub-clinical depression among lots of women who have neither the security behind them nor the motivating ambitions ahead to be able to do more than put one foot in front of the other. Here is a full-blown case.
37 Health? You must be joking. I dinae hae time to think aboot health. Ye ken I smoke and him ‘n all. I’m depressed, I’m back on the tablets and the valium again, I’ll kill him if not, some days I just feel that angry. I worry about how I feel, that I canny see things getting any better. (single mother, 19)
It has been known since Marie Jahoda’s research on Marienthal in the early 1930s (Fryer 1992) that unemployed people have particular problems in maintaining a sense of personal effectiveness. A voluntary sector worker painted a discouraging picture of the difficulties in this area faced by people he had worked with, even going so far as to use the term ‘survive’.
15 There is a great sense of powerlessness for people in [poor housing neighbourhoods]. Many of them have been long-term unemployed and that affects what you can buy, you can’t renew your clothes as often as you would like, the only thing you have is your house and where you live. You can see why people get into the “can’t be bothered” mind set. I see a difference between those who have worked but now don’t have jobs, to those who have never worked. Those who have had a job at some time seem to be better able to survive. I don’t know if it’s some sort of hope that they have that the others don’t. I’d describe it as labouring with long-term unemployment.
The day-to-dayness of people’s lives and the lack of planning had also been observed by a police officer and another community nurse. This community nurse also offered an explanation for people’s tendency to live in the moment, that it was a response to disappointment with life, even desperation.
18 So much of people’s lives are just lived on a day to day basis, they don’t think ahead to getting a job. You see them in the corner shops, buying only enough for today. The lower classes don’t seem able to plan their finances, they just blow it when they get it. (Police officer)
39 It’s like everything else about their lives — they live in the immediate, for the moment — no sense of future. I think this comes from their constant disappointment with life — a certain desperation which they seem to have. You see it with shopping, folk never have food in, they buy for the next meal, nobody shops for a week. There’s no planning. We’re into the second generation of this, because girls don’t see anything different. They’ve no way of changing. That’s why we are always getting phone calls from folk running out of money. They can’t budget. (Community nurse)
Others also made the link with the behaviour of the parents. Lacking parental support for a different future made them more likely to reproduce their parents’ past. It is a dark picture
20 You can understand that a lot of parents don’t see [education] as important in the large scheme of things. Many of them will have had no experience of nurturing themselves; you could trace it down through families. You hear the girls talk about abuse in families and you know that there has been a history which goes back in the family of physical and sexual abuse. There is also a lot of intrafamilial abuse. If you are living as a product of these kinds of relationships, as a lot of these girls are, then where are your goal posts? For most of them, I’d say that pregnancy isn’t a plan for the future, because they don’t have any plans for the future. They lack parental support to reach any potential which they have. They don’t have a preferred future; all they can see is more of the same. (education service)
When it came to explaining, the police officer was more drawn to a moral than an environmental account: it was the lack of self-discipline and acceptance that they were self-responsible that led to poor people’s failure to manage their own lives.
18 For others in the lower classes, I don’t think health really matters that much. They don’t realize how much of it is their responsibility. It comes down to discipline, self discipline, management of your own life. People get into a rut and they just want an easy life.
Another police officer takes a similar view of causation, that people have lost the will, the motivation to work for the rewards they aspire to. The loss of ‘the work ethic’ bears considerable explanatory weight.
5 People have high expectations of rewards, but lack motivation to act on these expectations. People don’t seem to be willing to work for the things which are important to them. They have lost the work ethic.
39 Folk are too busy to fit us in. That’s the other thing, lack of organization is a problem. There’s no work ethic, therefore no job, no structure to their day. If you don’t get up till 2pm and are up till 5am or whatever, this leaves you little time to fit in to services which are 9 to 5. (Community nurse)
Concisely and precisely, the first community nurse lays out the basic terms of the problem of coping. 3 People don’t seem to cope, they just go from one set of circumstances to another. It almost seems as if they don’t have any control over what is happening in their lives, things just happen to them. They live beyond their means, they don’t seem to think about simple things that would help, even in a small way. The poor coping behaviour which was attributed by the community nurse to lack of motivation was couched by a medical practitioner in terms of values.
3 [Scheme] used to be full of patients on the dom., so we managed to get a clinic going up there so that people didn’t have difficulty travelling. The numbers were so low that we closed after 18 months. It was an afternoon clinic but they would say that they weren’t up in time. They knew that we would come looking for them. I have visited people six times before I’ve been able to get them in. After two visits now, I will write to let them know that I won’t be coming back. You know that you are failing people, but you have to draw the line somewhere. It will always be our fault anyway, even if it is down to their lack of motivation.
10 I see the other side of it when I’m on the dom.. Girls in a wee room with a bed, a cot, a hi-fi, and a TV and video. The bed will have no bottom sheet on it and the duvet won’t have a cover on it. The girl will be walking about in a dressing gown with a fag in her mouth. They never seem to be up when you go, even if they know you are coming. It sometimes seems as if they have no values at all.
If one’s constant experience is of not coping, an understandable reaction is to try and minimize the damage by leaving as much as possible to anybody else whom they can persuade to get involved. We have already seen how much young mothers look to other family members for support. We have also seen how those functions that families can’t cope with pass to the social agencies, who thus become metaphorically a form of socialization prosthesis, compensating for the perceived moral handicaps of absent values, lost work ethics and lack of self-discipline.
20 So often you see them avoiding situations rather than dealing with them. It all feeds into this culture of other people will sort out the problem. Social work are forever being expected to pick up the pieces. (Education service)
And if this handing on to the social agencies is not to be the cause of yet more disappointment and self-reproach, it makes sense not to have accepted that it was your responsibility in the first place.
17 If they have been in trouble with the housing, it is never their fault, even if it clearly is. And then they can’t get rehoused. But they will never accept that it is their responsibility. (voluntary association worker)
24 It’s so difficult to work out what’s going on. People just don’t take responsibility for themselves, it’s always the council’s responsibility. (Voluntary community worker)
19 They are all very quick to hand a problem over to someone else. Responsibility is never theirs. A lot of folk have such a selfish view. Things will always be someone else’s responsibility, you can’t get them out of that way of thinking. (Company manager)
An education service worker echoed the widespread observation that people were ready to pass the blame on to the social agencies, but added an important qualification: only if they had self-esteem would they be prepared to accept the blame themselves. The lack of self-esteem was a root cause of the irresponsibility. No self-esteem, no personal responsibility
22 Young people and parents are very quick to pass the blame to others for the way things are, it’ll be the fault of the social worker or the school or someone else. You need to have self-esteem to be able to accept blame, so it’s not surprising that they can’t. I don’t think we look at that side of it enough. I would say that it is very low self-esteem which is at the root of a lot of the problems which we have.
One employment service worker, whom we have seen earlier to be fully aware of the hopelessness and depressed state of many young jobseekers, sketched a complex picture of failure to cope with the requirements for getting employed which included both objective disadvantages (no qualifications or skills) but also a combination of irresponsibility and imperious demandingness which was replicating, once again, the behaviour of earlier generations. If mums encouraged it, there seemed no end to this self-defeating attitude.
7 A lot of them I can’t see coping at all. They think they’ll do fine, but they have a real lack of realism, and no qualifications or skills. The other thing they don’t have is any concept of time. They don’t turn up for their appointments because they have something more important to do. What is more important than coming to get a job sorted out? They get that off their parents. I see this generation being exactly the same as the last. They want everything now, demand to be seen as soon as they come in. It doesn’t matter that they were supposed to be here yesterday and didn’t turn up. They must be seen now. You get all the usual excuses: “I didn’t wake up”, “It was my mum’s fault, she didn’t wake me”. Mums often encourage that. No one takes responsibility for themselves, it’ll always be someone else’s fault.
Both the community nurses also felt that the lack of ‘discipline’, the do-as-you-please attitude to life, was learned behaviour, passed down in families. In contrasting it with her own family practice of devolving graded self-management opportunities to her children, one implicitly detailed what she thought was absent from the parenting of families without discipline: their families were not learning organizations.
3 I don’t think the way they live is only about [lack of] money. They are quite happy getting their giro. It’s money for nothing. They don’t have to get up early, they can do what they want, when they want. I think they’ve had a lack of discipline in their lives. It’s passed down, or not, from one generation to another. They learn from their own parents, either directly or by example. My lot, for instance, learn about care and responsibility by having a pet, learned about money by having a wee job, saving up for things that they wanted, that’s the kind of thing that they seem to be missing out on. They need to be taught these things from an early age; if not the chance has gone.
The second also saw learning as the bottom line, and agreed about the importance of fitting the challenge to the developmental stage. Each window opened only once; miss it and the appropriate skill was lost for ever. This was what made their remedial education work so hard.
39 It’s about how you learn — that’s the bottom line. We learned through a combination of things — by talking about things; direct discussion, by learning from mistakes, by getting support from our families to learn to budget, for instance, and through what we learned at school and what we saw others doing. It was a combination of all these things; people are losing out on all fronts today.
It’s the same for parenting, cooking, all these things. I think that for everything we learn, there is an optimum time – if that is missed then it is gone for good, you can’t get it back. That’s what we are up against, trying to make people learn outwith that optimum time bracket. We are losing skills forever.
So both these nurses see a socialization deficit from the parental generation turning into a learning deficit in the younger generation; unlike their own children, their clients’ young were not being pushed into graded sequences of life experiences from which the learning was consciously extracted by parents, the skill acquired being thus made transferable. Those who can’t learn can’t socialize others; those who have not been socialized can’t learn. If this is a correct interpretation of their view, they see some of their poor families as trapped in a learningless loop, from which the only means of exit is what they cannot provide. Here again there is an ironical parallel: just as the parents were unable to teach their children how to learn, so the professionals working with these families are unable to teach them how to teach. Their job is to look after children, not families. Even though they can see that successive generations of children are suffering from what they are not getting from their families, community health professionals cannot remedy this at the family cause level, but are restricted to the child consequence level. Like social work, they have to pick up the pieces, though they may be watching the falling apart process over years of domiciliary visits.
One of the voluntary association workers perceived that an unwillingness to accept responsibility was prejudicing people’s rights to enjoy another of the services that they were eligible for by virtue of their citizenship. Here, too, a complex interaction was traced between people’s irresponsible behaviour and being brought up in families in which they did not get valued, did not believe in themselves, or care for themselves. The rule we are offered is that only people who care for themselves can care for things which are not theirs. We are back to self-esteem.
15 I don’t know how you change things at a ground level, there is an underlying attitude which needs to be overcome. It used to be that people appreciated having a council house, they treated it with care, looked after it. Now people see it as a right, but they are not prepared to accept their responsibility for looking after it. You come across the “It’s not mine, I don’t care what happens to it” attitude quite a lot. We’ve even had to introduce legislation to deal with anti-social tenants now. People need to recognize that things will only change if they change that kind of attitude. A lot of it seems to come from people’s upbringing, they don’t have any family values. I think you have to start by making people believe in themselves, if they felt that they cared about themselves, they would care about other things, their houses included, and their environment.
The link between low self-esteem, being fed up with their life, and people’s inability to care for their home had also been made by a medical practitioner.
10 I visit a lot of houses with sticky carpets. The standard of living is very poor sometimes, lack of cleanliness and often very untidy. If you can’t even be bothered to keep your place clean, that makes me think of poor organization, poor self-esteem. I suspect that a lot of it has to do with poor self-esteem, but for some it is a lack of life skills. They have never learned how to look after a house. Others just seem to be that fed up with their life, they can’t be bothered, even if the house is unsafe.
A local authority manager, having observed immaculately clean homes kept by poor people, was also of the mind that these standards were more affected by psychology than by having money. They had pride, a belief in themselves.
14 There are others who are poor, but their houses are immaculate. They have standards for themselves, and even though they can’t afford to redecorate, the house will be kept clean. I think they have a sense of pride that others don’t, a sense of themselves. Others don’t seem to think that there is anything wrong with the way that they live.
Is it reasonable to extend this line of reasoning and say that, as it is with care for house and home, so it is with respect for their bodies, for their personal reproductive destinies? Were young women ‘unsafe’ about contraception because they were ‘that fed up with their life’? If a contraceptive method is only as good as the person taking it, and there are some people whose selves don’t feel at all good, is it surprising that risk-taking among this population is so pervasive and contraception is so ineffective? Those closest to the problem were thinking such thoughts.
12 Girls that come requesting termination of pregnancy always give a reason which seems plausible, but that isn’t necessarily the underlying reason and we don’t probe. More and more are having recurrent terminations. They are often unrealistic about contraception, they don’t appreciate that most methods are only as good as the person who is taking them. It is easy for them to find excuses for not using contraception. (medical practitioner)
39 I don’t understand why girls don’t prevent pregnancy – I really don’t believe that they can’t access contraception. Gender plays a huge role. Some girls seem to think that this is just what they do. Some families are still ruled by powerful men and women have no confidence to resist. Younger girls don’t know how to say ‘no’. They have no confidence, no self-respect. (community nurse)
10 It needs to be an education which runs through everything which we do, the services we provide, the way we talk to people, the way we are with our families, everything. It’s more a societal approach to treating people with value and respect. I think [that the lack of being so treated] has to be the reason why so many young people are putting themselves in the way of this kind of sexual behaviour. They don’t feel any sense of their own worth. (medical practitioner)
Can anything be done about this damaging psychological condition affecting so many people living in poverty? How does one bring people to respect themselves when they don’t experience respect from others? An obvious beginning was felt to be to stop treating children with contempt, making them feel worthless.
10 If all you ever hear is that you are stupid, you must grow up believing that you are stupid. If you believe that you are stupid, then you will behave in stupid ways, that’s what people expect of you and that is the only way you can think of yourself. That’s why you see so many young people who feel that they are pathetic and useless – and that’s the way that they present.
Moving into the proactively positive, a youth worker’s view was that the best way to avoid copeless teenagers was for them to have received personal recognition through meaningful relationships as children.
13 These are young people who are vulnerable because they don’t have the self respect that they are entitled to since it has been denied them through their experience of families, school, agencies etc. The thing that would probably make the biggest difference in their lives, would be someone listening to them, from an early age, having relationships with people who mattered to them. It goes back to that slogan, respect yourself. I think we should be saying respect young people and they will respect themselves.
Spot on, so far as this twenty-year old is concerned.
JW What would have made a difference to you, or to other young people, do you think?
1 Someone taking an interest. Otherwise all these feelings come out in anger, or depression. I didn’t want all their presents, I wanted a cuddle when I was upset, that would have done me the world of good. Or things like someone sitting down with you at tea time and asking you about what you’ve done today, even if it was boring things, it would show that they were interested in other things than themselves.
Some good news for the next generation was that the small numbers of school-age mothers were being given the skills to control behaviour through positive interactions with their baby. Good news in that such a positivity-driven relationship is more of the kind that the post-industrial family is rewarded for by post-industrial society. The children should be better adapted to handling the higher levels of inter-personal dealings characteristic of the service economy. And less copeless.
20 We’ve been using a thing called Video Interaction Guidance, which focuses on the positive interaction between the girls and their babies. We use it as an illustration of how they should behave with the baby. One of them said to me, ‘This isn’t so difficult when you see how it’s done’. You can see the pleasure in their faces when they see the baby responding, it’s a real thrill of the moment for them. It’s a way of showing them that they have the ability to control behaviour in a positive way.
As well as the mother-child relationship, attention was also being paid to teaching the girls to cope with others in a more general way.
20 Many of the mums are trying very hard to change, but they don’t know how. Their way of dealing with people is always very confrontational. We try to have assertive management of things. We encourage the girls and staff to sit down and work through things, looking at the consequences of actions. They don’t know how to do that.
Someone had been appointed to give other teenagers the chance to develop through a positive relationship with an adult for whom responding to their needs for talk was part of the job description. Giving them time was giving them respect.
40 My remit is to do development work with young people; they know they can drop in for support, and they do. That can be the down side of the job, some young folk will come in every day, looking for you to talk to, for help or support. I think it’s meeting a need for them, for respect, being treated kindly, well. Someone giving them time. So many of them are in a kind of limbo, they have left school, they have no work, or only part-time jobs, maybe they’re trying to move out of home or whatever, they just have no one to talk to. So many of them are in families where there is no time to talk, or no one to talk to, no one is interested in them, there’s no space to talk. It’s particularly bad for older ones; the younger kids are the priority because they’re more demanding, so the older ones’ needs are ignored. The older ones have to look after the younger ones so often. (Social worker)
Unfortunately for some young people, especially boys, there is a risk that their access to such a resource can come too late. Severe damage may already have been done to the very part of their functional capacity through which this youth development work was intended to bring results, namely their ability to communicate. Their own behaviour, and the view of human nature which determines that behaviour, threatens to cut them off from healing opportunities held out to them by society. Paraphrasing Seligman, they have learned to be unhelpable. For as one communicates, so one is.
40 You see the need in all sorts of ways: the lack of social skills, they don’t know how to communicate. So many of them, the boys in particular, shout all the time, instead of just talking. It’s how they have to behave at home to be heard, either over the telly or the other kids. If they’re not shouting, then they’re aggressive or very defensive, as if you were giving them a row. I think that they only get spoken to if they’re in trouble, so that’s how they speak to us. Sometimes you’re just asking a simple question and straightaway they’re right on their high horse about it. They’ve no social chat, they don’t just ‘talk’. They’re often suspicious if you talk to them – people just don’t do that. They can’t talk to one another. It’s sad, very depressing. (Social worker)
25 There’s a lot of patter between them, they don’t have much proper communication. They don’t really walk out together, like you or I would have done. Most of the way they talk to each other, or talk about girls, is fairly crude, sexualized talk. They don’t seem to know how to relate to each other. They are very suspicious of any one trying to get close to them. You can see that they are not used to touch. (Education service)
21 The other thing that I notice, is how poor most of them are at having a conversation. They don’t know how to talk to one another, never mind adults. It’s not just that they are shy with us, you hear them with their pals, it’s all a slagging match, quite aggressive language, lots of sexualized talk. But they can’t maintain a conversation with other people. In schools, what I see is probably fairly typical, the boys talk with boys and the girls with girls. The way they talk to teachers and to adults in general, is appalling. I was walking to work one day and a girl who couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4 was sitting in the street. She shouted at me “Gie’us some money ye junkie bastard”. I ignored it of course! But she must be hearing that at home, where else is she going to pick it up from? They are so rude, I know not all teachers speak well to the kids, but they are so disrespectful. They seem to have no fear, they don’t think or care about the consequences of their behaviour. (Youth worker)
Another close observer had noticed the same pattern, and wondered whether the cause for the lack of social skills in boys was their sense of inadequacy, a general sense of not being ‘good enough’. Self-esteem again.
41 They seem to lack social skills, boys and men. Not just the adolescent “can’t speak to anyone when you’re 14 or 15” kind of thing. That’s more to do with being shy, embarrassed about growing up. This is different. It’s a lack of communication skills, they can’t seem to talk to people on an equal level. They’re really poor communicators as men are – can’t talk about feelings or whatever. But it’s more than that, they just can’t talk about things. I have an idea that somehow they don’t feel “good enough”. (Minister of religion)
An agency worker who had worked with young men had noticed how much their inner lack of confidence expressed itself in harmful behaviours, towards self and towards others. Clearly, any family system producing this sort of behaviour could not be regarded as meeting the functional needs of modern society; hence some of them end up in society’s most explicit exclusion system, prison.
13 We started working more closely with young men, The Lost Boys group. The only ownership they have is with other lost boys. Together they busy themselves with self abuse, whether it’s alcohol, slagging each other, drugs, violence. There are so many young men who have no confidence at all, things haven’t moved on at all. Even big groups of young men don’t have the confidence to change things. They don’t have the history of strength that the women have, to build on.
I suppose a lot will express themselves through crime, it’s a way of making a name for yourself, having an identity. You see it in the courts, young men up for serious crimes and there will be girls looking on as cheer leaders almost. The whole thing becomes a kind of human soap.
‘Lost Boys’ have just as much need as ever to demonstrate strength, but no means with which to do so. Like an engine racing when drive contact with the road has been lost, they redouble their efforts to show they’re men in a social arena which no longer has any respect for mere manliness [91]. The outcome is an almost farcical ganging together in a ‘lads lifestyle’ to imprint their spoor on the neighbourhood [92]. Their effect on their audience is almost certainly the reverse of what they intend.
40 Young women are a bit more able to communicate and contribute in groups. We see it here. Even those who come from fairly horrendous circumstances can join in to some extent. The boys – well, they just play pool. It’s just what young men do. They have nothing else.
Last weekend 20 or 30 of them turned up at our under 18s disco. Some are looking for girls, most just have nowhere else to go. A lot of them are barred from pubs, mostly from fighting – that sort of thing. We didn’t let them in, so they sat outside with their bags of carry-outs, just sitting drinking and shouting abuse at the folk going past.
JW: What do other young folk think about that?
Some think nothing of it – it’s a laugh, it’s what boys do. Others – mostly the girls – are adamant – you see them looking and they’ll say “I dinna want to be like them”. A definite decision to avoid that kind of lifestyle.
Once again, in reviewing the functional impairments reported by our respondents, we end up with disoriented young males, making themselves unattractive in a hopelessly ill-informed effort to attract. It is a concluding statement of how the constitutional disease of the reproduction system in the ox-bow scheme is cruel in its distortion of sound instincts, but also cues a transition to a more general conclusion as to distributed parenting’s impact on society at large.
