Maggy Lee

Chinese migrant women and families in britain

Abstract This article examines the mode of understanding and experiences of family relationships of Chinese migrant women in Britain. In contrast to much existing research work on the patterns and experiences of postwar settlement of unskilled Chinese male labourers in Britain, the focus here is on the life stories of 41 Chinese women with different migration trajectories and varying economic and cultural capital. Their oral testimonies reveal Chinese womens diverse expectations and experiences of migrant family relationships and their different strategies to achieve self-fulfillment both within and outside the confines of the migrant family. For some women, migration brings opportunities for a fulfilling and independent lifestyle. They are successful in negotiating their way around and sometimes out of their initial familial and social position. For others, they bear the disproportionate cost and labour of familial strategies of advancement and remain vulnerable to the most constraining aspects of diasporic existence.

Globalization, ethnicity and racism: An introduction

There is a troubling relationship between human difference—visualized through the tropes of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’—and the study of crime and punishment. This relationship is manifest in myriad ways from studies of ‘ethnic differences’ in the demographic characteristics of arrestees and penal populations to persistent allegations that racism is institutionalized in the courts, policing and prisons. It is also evident in public fears about ‘visible’ ethnic minorities and those regarded as non-citizens who are often assumed to be more crime prone than the natives. Most recently, the importance of ‘difference’ has been invoked to explain criminal acts perpetrated against the State as well as in the State’s reaction to these events in the prosecution of a ‘war on terror’ or the pursuit of ‘national security’. Indeed, the ‘globalization of fear’ after 11 September 2001 heightened anxieties about the new ‘globally mobile’ dangerous classes (terrorists, traffickers, immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees, ‘illegal aliens’ and so on) and this has been coterminous with increased securitization of societies both within and without the borders of the State. The ‘new’ security agenda—focusing on ethnic conflict, terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, drug trafficking and human smuggling—which supplanted Cold War ideology, has become seen as the ‘dark side’ of globalization linking migration to crime, smuggling, terrorism and the policy issues of ‘law and order’ across the globe. Despite the importance of racism and ethnicity in shaping patterns of crime and victimization, in media representations and in criminal justice policy, academic criminology has had little to contribute to our understanding of this complex field. While there have been a few attempts to provide a synthesis of theory and research in this field these are exceptions to a general indifference to the study of difference (Tonry, 1995, 1997; Bowling and Phillips, 2002; Theoretical Criminology

Receiving Police Cautioning

To date there has been no systematic research on the experience of police cautioning from the viewpoint of the young people and their families. In a welfarist rhetoric, young people are given a police caution — a second chance — rather than being sucked into the formal court system. The notion of progress in pre-court diversion is often underlined by its claim to remove children from the criminalizing ethos of the court and the potentially damaging effects of stigmatization and labelling. Furthermore, there is an implicit assumption that the informal handling of delinquents (as in the Scottish Children Hearings System) may promote parental involvement and a sense of partnership between the state and the parents of offending children (National Youth Agency, 1991; NACRO, 1994). In practice, does police cautioning really represent an alternative to court? Or has it simply altered the place and meaning of punishment in the criminal justice system? Do young people and their parents regard police cautioning as a ‘soft option’, as critics in favour of giving cautioning ‘some teeth’ often claim? Do they accept the service role of the police in preventing young people from getting into trouble? This chapter seeks to address these questions by drawing on observations of police cautioning sessions and a series of interviews with the police, and those juveniles and their parents who received a caution at the station.

Controlling Cautioning Practice and Police Discretion

The police caution is now the predominant means of dealing with young offenders outside the formal court system in England and Wales. In 1994, 95 500 young people under the age of eighteen were cautioned by the police for indictable offences compared to 40 300 found guilty in court. A formal caution can have serious implications: it is recorded by the police, and may be taken into account in subsequent police decision-making. It is citable in court and can be subject to judicial review (Evans, 1996). Despite this, the historical legacy of the police’s claim of common law discretion in deciding when not to invoke the full processes of law means that the system of police cautioning has always operated on a non-statutory basis. Police cautioning has remained largely unaffected by the creation of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), as the CPS has no formal power to review or alter cautioning (i.e. non-prosecution) policy or practice. Instead, oversight of the cautioning system is the responsibility of the Home Office. The Home Office’s initiatives have evolved around the setting of policy objectives, promoting national standards for cautioning practice and closer monitoring of caution decisions. In theory, this should lead to police decisions which are impartial, more consistent and open both to police managers and other agencies.

Managing Youth Crime through Multi-Agency Partnerships

In the past decade, the multi-agency approach has increasingly come to dominate policy debates on crime control and criminal justice. In the diverse fields of crime prevention (Home Office, 1990d, 1991b), drugs control (HM Government, 1994; ACMD, 1994; London Drug Policy Forum, 1994), local policing (Home Office, 1993), prison disturbances (Woolf, 1991) and punishment in the community (Home Office, 1990e; Smith et al., 1993), ‘partnerships’ between statutory agencies, voluntary bodies, local businesses and communities are formed, linking organizations and groups with different goals, cultures and traditions. The emphasis on multi-agency intervention in the prevention and control of juvenile delinquency is, quite clearly, not a revolutionary breakthrough in the ways in which those problems had previously been discussed. This chapter looks at the reworking of the multi-agency approach as a feature of the discourse of criminal justice, and contrasts this with the local organization of juvenile delinquency as a contested site of intervention for different agencies.

Constructing the Case for Caution

In principle, the shift to the multi-agency approach to criminal justice in recent years should have benefited the autonomy and professional standing of the expert cadre. Under what Pratt (1989, p.229) has termed ‘a corporatist model’ of youth justice, bureau-professionals and child care specialists enjoying increased discretion are the key players in a pre-court administrative apparatus as they ‘confer the label of delinquency without recourse to the formalities and intricacies of the legal process’. However, as critics have argued (Pearson et al., 1992; Blagg and Smith, 1989; McConville et al., 1991), the outcome has been much more contradictory because the agendas of those agencies with a core law and order mandate have been prioritized at the expense of others. This chapter looks at multi-agency consultation in action through an examination of the organization of police caution decision-making. On what basis are caution decisions being made? What is the impact of prior police decision-making on multi-agency work? And ultimately, is there scope for the social agencies to challenge the conceptions and categorizations underlying policework with juvenile delinquents?

The Policing of Juvenile Delinquency

Contemporary studies of policing have emphasized the importance in police work of duties unrelated to crime detection and the arrest of offenders (Audit Commission, 1993; Cain, 1973; McLaughlin, 1996). The policing of young people exemplifies this aspect of police work. This can be illustrated by tracing the historical and ideological context within which police remedies for juvenile delinquency were developed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So under what conditions did police come into contact with young people and what did they do in those contacts?