Asbos is one of those strange modern concepts, like "back to basics" and "zero tolerance", that arise from the triangular inter-relationships between politics, media and public.
Like all chicken-and-egg stories, it is difficult to establish its beginning, but let us speculate that it begins with the media which, in search of concepts from which to mould "stories", divine the public mood in a particular context as angry, fearful, disgruntled or whatever.
Politicians, wishing to be in touch with the public mood, take their cue from such stories and coin slogans to, by a happy turn of fate, advertise in the media, which, wishing this to long continue, further feed the public emotions that ensure the tills will continue to rattle.
The public, meanwhile, begins to feel something it had previously only wondered about. Hearing something all the time, we presume it must be true, and some of us come not merely to believe it, but to feel it in a most profound way. If citizens are constantly told they should be afraid to walk the streets, they begin to feel afraid walking the streets. Polls and focus groups commissioned by the politicians begin to reflect these fears. The public looks to politicians for signs of a confirmatory awareness and, bang on cue, the slogan hits the spot. That settles it. The media, anxious to keep up, record these responses faithfully. There must be something in it, mustn't there, if people feel so strongly about being afraid to walk the streets, and if politicians are responding so readily to these public feelings?
The distillation of complex social phenomena into short, simple slogans makes for pat, marketable headlines, which further feed both the emotion of the public and the determination of politicians to rise to the occasion. Each point of the triangle functions as though independent of the others, but all three are engaged in a dance of mutual affirmation, like someone adding the credibility of repetition to a rumour he may have started himself. Thus, the half-truth acquires the sanctuary of conventional wisdom.
The shedloads of money involved in lubricating this triangular process ensures that public emotion acquires a power that is both immensely greater and quite detached from any actual basis in reality. Hence, public concern about criminality increases even if the graph of criminality goes down. The Minister for Justice sees nothing odd in announcing, one day, a decrease in crime figures, and the next another "clampdown" on criminality.
What is now called "anti-social behaviour" was once known as "blackguardism". As long as I remember, reports from the district courts of the weekly carnival of public inebriation occupied about half of the Roscommon Herald, providing both entertainment and material for communal outrage (possibly the same thing).
What has changed is that public fear and outrage have become political commodities, which in turn provide coherent material for politicians pursuing the same dwindling number of highly mobilised, self-interested floating voters.
These phenomena have resulted also in a blurring of the respective integrities of what once were identifiable as "left" and "right". Oblivious of the ironies, right-leaning politicians announce measures that will extend virtually absolute powers to servants of the State, while "left-wingers" announce that they support such draconian instruments because they reflect the authentic desires of the working class. Each claims to be "in touch" with "the people", but these rationalisations mask a concrete shift in political culture from emphasising social context and conditions to pointing fingers at personal behaviour, less a shift from left to right as an abrogation of the true, perhaps the sole purpose of politics.
The "anti-social behaviour" buzz-phrase is, naturally, imported from Britain, where it was deployed with enormous effect by New Labour during the 1997 general election. The "outraged" niche, in England identified as the Daily Mail-reading Middle England, is comprised entirely of natural Tory voters. A significant element of Tony Blair's successful election pitch in 1997 was his persuading of this constituency that New Labour offered a safer pair of hands. The chief consequence of this Faustian pact was the 1998 introduction of Asbos. Although you might imagine the whole point is to bring relief to those who live in fear of crime and yobbery, the opposite is the case. If people cease to be afraid, the commodity is kaput, and a new idea must be found to feed the hungry triangle. New Labour today claims a reduction in anti-social behaviour, but in the same breath renews its pledge to "tackle" the problem of yobbery and street crime. Last week, Tony Blair blamed parents for failing to control their children and promised "tough legislation to tackle anti-social behaviour".
For politicians, it is actually more important to fuel the continuing fears about criminality and anti-social behaviour than to reap the one-off political rewards for having addressed them.
For the media, it's all the same as long as there's a story to sell. And the public just goes on being outraged and afraid.