[A-List] UK society: social inclusion in Bradford

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

When a fair cop show is copped
IAN BELL
The Herald, May 24 2004
The TV week

You didn't get to see Edge of the City (Channel 4, Thursday). Brilliant it
may have been, but, as we now know, West Yorkshire police stepped in on the
day of transmission to argue that its showing could "heighten community
tensions" in Bradford. Channel 4, having accepted this advice, said the
piece will now be broadcast, as the expedient phrase has it, "at a later
date".

The belated intervention is odd. Given that they participated in the film,
the police must surely have guessed sooner at the outrage it might cause.
Even as grim fiction, a tale of Asian men grooming white girls as young as
11 and 12 for sex, drugging them and raping them repeatedly, would have
inflamed opinion. The documentary's other horror - the 17-year-old white
youth with 97 criminal convictions - seems slight by comparison.
Nevertheless, both stories are true, and both say something important about
the condition of young British males, of whatever race.

TV drama, in contrast, has to make do with fantasies and star vehicles where
law and order are concerned. The crime shows rarely bother themselves with
the condition of society. Where once dear old Dixon of Dock Green would
produce a weekly parable and conclude with a nice little homily, these days
a show such as Murphy's Law (BBC1, Monday) seems to build its dramatic
structure around the body count.

The contrast makes TV drama seem like a parallel universe. Edge of the City
contains not a single scene of violence. James Nesbitt's thriller began with
a graphic depiction of a young policeman blowing his brains out and took it
from there. ONE life (BBC1, Tuesday) had PC Lance Thomas trying to deal with
the very real problems of the Openshaw estate in Manchester with the motto
"No drunks. No smackheads. No neighbours from hell". Nesbitt's DS Tommy
Murphy, meanwhile, cast plausibility to the winds by sleeping with one of
the crooked detectives he was supposed to be investigating.

Gritty realism is not compulsory in the cop shows, of course, for the
obvious reason that real police work is often dull and frequently a failure.
Real detectives can't catch every criminal or solve all of society's
problems. You wonder, nevertheless, about the effect an unrelieved diet of
shows such as Murphy's Law has on perceptions of crime. Is it as bad as
fiction likes to suggest? Do we grow discontented with the efforts of our
police forces because they cannot boast the amazing rates of success enjoyed
by Murphy and all the heroes like him? I suspect we might.

In TV drama, problems are solved, moral circles are squared and justice is
done. What is supremely depressing about Edge of the City, unflinchingly
directed and produced by Anna Hall, is the suspicion that some social issues
are simply intractable. Why has the abuse of dozens of adolescent girls,
well known to Bradford social services for the best part of a decade, been
tolerated? How on earth could one 13-year old have been abused by well in
excess of 100 men?

Because, fantastically, these girls simply do not regard their treatment as
abuse and will make a statement of rape themselves - a legal requirement if
they are 13 or older - only rarely. Somehow they imagine these men are their
"boyfriends" and go with them willingly to flats or to lay-bys on the moors.
Yet, if the girls won't admit they are victims, the police have nothing to
investigate. These children are meanwhile groomed to lie about their ages by
manipulative and violent individuals. Besides, child protection, despite all
the hysteria over paedophiles, is not a "police national target"; burglary
is.

Repeatedly, we are told in the film - and I sincerely hope you get to see it
soon - that the rapists see nothing wrong in their behaviour, though we were
not told why that is. A kind of cultural contempt, even a sort of revenge,
might be involved. Yet these same men, ranging in age from early twenties to
early forties, surely know that their own communities would see a lot that
is very wrong about drugging adolescents, plying them with drink and
assaulting them repeatedly, night after night. Somehow, a profound
inhibition has broken down. If police and social workers are to be believed,
after all, dozens of men are involved, not a handful of psychopaths.

But then, take our 17-year-old, Matthew Spaven. The irony, clearly not lost
on Anna Hall, is that this disaster of a youth is being helped, as much as
anyone can help, by Omar, a dedicated young British Muslim social worker, in
a town that sees such role reversals only too rarely. Omar has to cope with
a serial offender too stupid to stay out of trouble, the kind who gets
arrested for stealing a £1.99 deodorant. Matthew is tagged, tracked and
given a 10.00pm curfew, yet still he continues to offend. He, too, fails to
grasp what is wrong with his behaviour.

True, the boy is afflicted, so we are told, with "attention deficit
hyper-activity disorder" and has been taking Ritalin for seven years. But
when you see him out on the streets with his mates, looking for mischief and
worse, you realise that he is no different from his peer group. Petty
crime - shoplifting, theft, burglary and "vehicle crime" - have become a
habit, a way of life. Matthew doesn't fancy being locked up yet again, but
there is never once a flicker of regret or remorse for his actions. In
short, he is a full-time sociopath.

The film is intended as a portrait of a social-work department. As such, it
was never likely to come up with good news, given the sort of inequalities
Britain these days seems to take for granted. It leaves you wondering,
though, about all the political rhetoric, from Labour and Tories alike,
about being tough on crime and its causes. In the world of Edge of the City,
the sort of world inhabited by millions of Britons, the world never seen in
Murphy's Law and the other formulaic cop dramas, such language has yet to
penetrate. Yet if young British men are adrift, what becomes of a generation
of young girls in the poorer areas of Bradford and Keighley who "have no
concept that they are being abused", as one social worker puts it, the girls
who are "getting into cars indiscriminately"?

As the commentary also points out, "This story is not about girls who think
they are prostitutes". Their sexual favours are not sold. Again, a moral and
emotional gulf has opened up, a traditional restraint has disappeared. As
Matthew rampages through the streets and sinister cars slide through the
Bradford night, social breakdown seems to give way to anarchy. The concept
of law, as opposed to its letter, has become alien to young men and
incomprehensible to young girls.

Edge of the City does not deal only with crime, but it demonstrates why so
many of the routine cop shows fail. They forget that criminality is the road
to chaos, that crime is a kind of encroaching moral darkness. The
documentary, by that measure, is steeped in the shades of night. It is a
marvellous and awful film, leaving you to ask when it was that we began to
mistake fictionalised human depravity, the stock in trade of crime dramas,
for entertainment.