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Anmeldungsdatum: 14.04.2008
Beiträge: 1
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 Verfasst am: 14. Apr 2008 16:01 Titel: "Taking Liberties" & "Bradford's culture |
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Brauche dringende hilfe , muss bis dienstag 2 Texte für eine Klausur auf deutsch zusammengefasst haben, schon eher ausführlich also kein summ up in 5 sätzen...bin leider kein Ass in Englisch, deshalb würde ich mich freuen wenn mir jemand ein bisschen helfen könnte in was es denn in den Texten so geht !!!
wäre wirklich super !!!
Also das hier sind die Texte:
1) Bradford's culture clash
Although the political significance of the weekend events in Bradford ought not to be exaggerated, it should not be underestimated either. Over the past few years Asians, especially Muslims, have felt deeply uneasy about the ease with which the wider culture of drugs, petty crime, prostitution, and commercial exploitation of women, especially young girls, has invaded their residential areas and penetrated their own ranks. Drug-taking has increased within the Asian community, and so has drug-related crime. Asian Babe, a sex magazine involving Asian girls, has been in circulation for more than a year now and has overcome the initial problem of recruiting Asian girls. A gay magazine involving Asians has appeared recently and is apparently doing well.
All this has naturally worried the Muslim community. It undermines their traditional values, subverts their family life and heightens the inescapable inter-generational tensions within the Muslim community. The older generation fears losing its youth, and the dreams that drove it to Britain lie in ruins. Predictably, this has generated a climate of moral panic. Since the family is vital to the success and survival of the Asian petit-bourgeoisie, the moral threat to the family is also an economic threat. Asians living in inner-city areas also find that the value of their property declines once these areas become notorious for drugs and prostitution.
It is hardly surprising that Muslims living in inner-city areas have been campaigning against the invasion of their social space by the unsavoury features of the wider culture. The campaign began in Birmingham last year. Muslims in central and east Birmingham repeatedly complained to the police, local authority officials and the councillors. When these complaints proved of no avail they decided to set up vigilante groups to clean up the area by taking down car registration numbers, harassing pimps and driving away prostitutes.
Although the desire to assert the spiritual superiority of the Islamic civilisation and set an example to the decadent West was not entirely absent, the campaign was basically an act of moral self-defence. Muslims wanted to control their social and moral space and guard it against what they considered undesirable values and practices. They also thought that cleaning up their environment in this way was a matter of civic responsibility and deserved wider support. Birmingham Muslims were able to attract considerable support from several sections of the local community.
What happened in Birmingham last year has now spread to Bradford. And since the Muslims' struggle has deeper cultural, moral and economic roots, it is unlikely to stop in Bradford. As inner-city areas become cultural deserts and fall prey to commercial exploitation of drugs and sex, those condemned to live there feel beleaguered. Their struggle inevit-ably brings them into conflict with the dominant liberal orthodoxy. Liberals insist on freedom of trade, of movement and of self-expression, but they do not have to live with the consequences of these practices. Inner-city Muslims feel victims of liberal toleration, and their campaign against it exposes them to the charge of illiberal fundamentalism. The two sides get locked in an apparently irresolvable conflict of values and ways of life.
By itself, the Muslims' campaign to clean up and acquire control over their moral and geographical space need not lead to violence. However, it tends to do so when it occurs against the background of accumulated frustrations of various kinds. Once the campaign begun by the older generation is taken over by the new, it becomes subject to the new agenda set by the latter. Unemployment among Asian youth is quite high; many of them leave school without adequate qualifications, their job prospects are poor, and they continue to face considerable discrimination in all areas of life. Asian youth also feel picked on by the police, who often treat them in an insensitive and heavy-handed manner, as happened in Bradford. Indeed, relations between the two bear considerable resemblance to those between the police and Afro-Caribbean youth until recently.
Not surprisingly, young Asians take over the moral and religious campaign of their elders and give it a more muscular, economic and political orientation. The older generation is content to drive away prostitutes, pimps and drug pedlars. The youth redefine it to include both racism and preservation of cultural integrity. However, they define their cultural identity differently from their parents and stress such Western values as the equality of the sexes, greater freedom of choice in matters relating to marriage and occupation, and freedom of social dissent.
The political struggle in the hands of young Asians therefore acquires a complex form, primarily against the wider society, but secondarily against their own elders. Since it has a larger political agenda and is born out of accumulated frustrations and a deep sense of injustice it tends to become militant. And since it occurs against the background of inter-generational tension, it lacks the disciplining influence of the older generation, and its militancy turns into violence. As we saw in Bradford, the older generation started the campaign, but panicked when it took on an unexpected character at the hands of the youth. Their appeal for calm had little effect.
2) Taking liberties
What the war on terror and the war on anti-social behaviour have in common
WHAT'S a government to do when faced with a bunch of undesirables whose guilt is difficult to prove in a court of justice? Lock them up without a proper trial, of course.
That's how the British government is dealing with people it suspects of terrorism. Its actions, including its shocking announcement last week of a new power of house arrest, have rightly been condemned as an attack on civil liberties. But cases of suspected terrorism are not the only ones in which the principles of the criminal justice system have been abandoned. The state has given itself new powers to deal with minor offences and other crimes which are scarcely less draconian than those to deal with suspected terrorism.
Over the past decade, anti-social behaviour—hellish neighbours, beggars, teenage gangs—has become a big worry in Britain (see article). Rightly or wrongly, people think that drunkards and beggars are more aggressive these days, that teenagers are more threatening and that bad children have got worse. Explanations vary, with some blaming 1960s liberalism and others 1980s individualism. But all agree that the normal remedies for dealing with neighbourhood tyrants are not up to the task. The police lack the time to collect evidence; witnesses are too scared to testify; wrongdoing is difficult to prove; and sentences are too mild.
In response to such difficulties, the government has created a new set of legal tools. Chief among them is the anti-social behaviour order, or ASBO. This is a list of restrictions tailored to an individual offender that can now be obtained either in a civil hearing or following a criminal conviction.
Troublemakers as young as ten years old can be barred from entering neighbourhoods, ringing doorbells, using public transport and mobile phones or even uttering certain words for a minimum of two years. Securing an ASBO is easy. Hearsay evidence, for instance, is admissible in court. The consequences of stepping out of line are weighty: a maximum of five years in prison for doing something that is not necessarily an offence in law. Not surprisingly, such a powerful weapon is popular: more than a thousand ASBOs were handed out in the first half of 2004.
That delights MPs, who were sick of hearing stories from their constituents about local teenagers who have terrorised the neighbourhood by blasting music, breaking windows and spitting at passers-by. Prosecutors and the police are also pleased. Their powers to deal with low-level offences used to be weak. Now they are so draconian that they undermine the principles on which the criminal justice system is built.
Trust us
The power to obtain anti-social behaviour orders was granted to the police and local authorities on the assumption that they were to be used with restraint. Just as the government promises to subject only genuinely scary terrorists to house arrest, so the forces of law and order are supposed to aim their most potent weapon only at the most dedicated and egregious troublemakers. Don't worry, goes the typically British assurance: our powers may be draconian, but decency and common sense will ensure we don't overuse them.
That's not what has happened. Obtaining an ASBO is so easy (fewer than one in 70 applications are turned down) that they have been used to tackle a wide range of undesirable behaviour. ASBOs allow the police to nail people for offences too minor to be criminal. Orders have been secured against crotchety old neighbours, prostitutes, beggars and mothers who argue with their children. Some of these people have subsequently been jailed for breaching their ASBOs: most absurdly, one man was sentenced to four months in prison for howling like a werewolf.
More worryingly, ASBOs allow the police to bypass the normal procedures of criminal justice when they suspect somebody of serious criminal activity but can't prove it. A suspected drug dealer, for instance, can be banned from using a mobile phone—a crucial tool, in his supposed profession. When he is caught doing so, he can be jailed.
If it's broke, fix it
It is not surprising that ASBOs are being used so frequently and so unwisely. After all, the English legal system is founded not on the assumption that everybody will behave with decency and restraint but on the rather more reliable conviction that most people, including the police, are capable of lying and may do so if it is to their advantage. Faced with two competing accounts of what one person has done to another, the courts normally give both of them a hard time. Accusations are minutely examined; witnesses are accused of fabricating their stories. Fail to make your case and you lose.
As the police point out in defence of their enthusiasm for ASBOs, the criminal justice system does not always work well. If the police catch villains, prosecutors sometimes don't charge them; if they charge them, witnesses don't turn up to give evidence; if witnesses do turn up, the case is all too often adjourned because the courts' administration is chaotic. These are, indeed, serious problems; but the government needs to deal with them, not create new, lazy ways around them. The safeguards built into the criminal justice system are there for a good reason. If the police think a man is a drug dealer but can't prove it, he shouldn't go to jail, however often he uses his mobile phone.
The defence of civil liberties is rarely a vote-winner. People are, understandably, moved more easily by violence against people than by attacks on systems. Politicians are keener to be seen to be protecting victims than defending the rights of suspects. In a country without a written constitution, the rules that underlie a properly-run society are particularly vulnerable to the whims of populist politicians, and vigilance is therefore especially important.
Britons are lucky people, and complacent ones. The liberties they take for granted have evolved over a thousand years or so. The idea that any one government should seriously undermine them seems implausible. It isn't. |
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