Ethics Newsline®

BIRMINGHAM, England
In a bid to bring back neighborly communities and a culture of respect, the United Kingdom has begun enforcing “antisocial behavior orders” that slap rude and threatening individuals with severe restrictions.

The New York Times snapshots these efforts in a report last week, focusing on one ordeal in the town of Birmingham, which recently forced an abusive man to move out of his housing project.

Since Prime Minister Tony Blair began stumping for a restoration of social order four years ago, the government has hit about 1,600 citizens with antisocial behavior orders, notes the Times.

While some of these citations are mild, others can impose strict limits on the future actions of offenders — barring them from their neighborhoods or from visiting with previous partners in crime, for example.

While proponents of the rules say they help make neighborhoods safe again, others say they are difficult to enforce and also may deepen the problem of antisocial behavior by further stigmatizing and isolating troubled individuals.

“If you take away someone’s home and drive them into a worse situation, it’s not going to give them the impetus to make their life better,” Ben Overlander, a spokesman for the advocacy group Shelter, cautioned the Times.

Prime Minister Blair championed the measures in a Guardian piece from 2002, noted the Times, writing that the “reciprocity of respect on which civil society depends” appears to be slipping away.

The Times observes that the government’s new efforts are an attempt to fill the void, picking up the slack by compelling “the state to police behavior that would once have been the purview of families or neighborhoods.”