Roger Grimshaw

Media Image, Community Impact

Assessing the impact of media and political images of refugees and asylum seekers on community relations in London ICAR is an independent information centre that exists to promote understanding of asylum and refugees in the UK context and to encourage information-based debate and policy-making. The copyright of this publication is owned by Kings College London. The views expressed in this report are those of the authors alone and do not in any way represent the views of the Greater London Authority or Kings College London. Advice was provided and/or additional work undertaken by a number of project advisers and by volunteers. Other agencies were also consulted for their expert opinions. The Greater London Authority (GLA) provided advice and support and set up a project advisory group which met twice to discuss plans and findings. Senior Development Officer, Refugee Action, freelance refugee journalist and project consultant (produced focus group materials) John Retallack Playwright and Director, Company of Angels ICAR is grateful for the invaluable help received from the following volunteers: Rachel Puttick who analysed media samples, and Charlotte Hardie and Alex Perkins for compiling newspaper cuttings. London has for centuries been a city of immigration. The most striking feature of this in recent years has been the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees from all parts of the world. Like those who came before them they are a tremendous asset for London and have much to contribute to Londons economic, social and cultural life. We must do all we can to help them to settle successfully and I am pleased that what they bring to our city is valued by many Londoners. But this is not always the case. Instead of feeling welcome many feel threatened and face daily harassment and persecution. Refugee community groups and other agencies working in this field have consistently linked this to intensive and largely hostile reporting of asylum issues by the media. I have shared their concerns and in summer 2003 I commissioned the Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees in the UK to explore the impact of negative reporting on refugee and asylum issues on community relations in London. Media coverage of refugee and asylum seekers issues has been researched elsewhere but the Media Images, Community Impact study is unique in that it explores the community impact of this media reporting. Assessing the precise impact of the media on peoples understanding of the world …

A Place To Call Your Own: does housing need make a difference to crime?

In public discussions, offending has long been associated with conditions of poverty. While novelists could readily portray characters whose origins in the slum somehow made sense of their moral turpitude, criminology has been preoccupied with analyzing how social conditions make a difference to patterns of offending. But the impact of housing need in particular has been less clearly understood. In his classic review, William Bonger (1916) referred to several disadvantageous consequences of overcrowding, such as early sexual experience, resort to alcohol, and indiscriminate association with others through interaction on the street. From a present day perspective it appears that the ways in which housing needs affect patterns of offending depends on several conditions and circumstances. We can all think of several ways of defining ‘housing need’, for example

Prisoner Resettlement and Accommodation: challenges for the new corrections

Following the example of the USA, the rise in custodial sanctions for men and women in all age groups in the UK inevitably poses questions about the ex-offenders re-entry to society and access to ...

Breaking the chainlinks of poverty: strategies for social justice

Thanks to support from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies produced an evidence review on the links between poverty and institutional care, summarised in a collection of reviews published by the Foundation (Grimshaw et al., 2014; Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2014).

Editorial: Roger Grimshaw introduces this issue of cjm

Classically, we think of criminal justice as open justice and therefore open to enquiry, scrutiny and argument. This issue brings all three together, with the different aspects intertwined. We do not normally think of prisons as ‘open’; indeed they often seem to present a ‘closed’ sign on the door. Yet if the prison puts up barriers to enquiry and scrutiny it loses the legitimacy we associate with the claim to openness elsewhere in the system. The fruits of prison research which tests the openness of the prison system are centrally featured in this issue.

Thinking of suicide: understanding the risks associated with child institutional care

Suicide is a catastrophe for communities and families as well as for individuals. Policy makers who plan to reduce its likelihood deserve public support. They need to identify people at higher risk and to be aware of factors that can be positively changed. Effective policies should be informed by an understanding of lifetime risks, which includes taking fully into account childhood experiences. But who is at risk of contemplating suicide, and what are the factors that play a part? Here we analyse evidence about one such group – adults who as children have been in forms of care and, in particular, a childrens home, borstal or young offenders unit.

My Story – witnessing narratives of childhood trauma and violence

Children found responsible for serious violence make for high profile news stories. The news media give their cases plenty of space and attention and the stories dwell on the information made available through a criminal justice process that typically focuses on a key incident. Issues of individual responsibility are central to the courts decision making and the sentencing is regarded as the major output. In this way criminal justice is seen to provide the dominant legitimate response to the crisis that an incident of interpersonal violence has caused. Prominent media coverage of a case has the effect of giving massive social endorsement to the significance of the criminal justice process as the legitimate place of account for the event, and by default for the public understanding of such individuals. Typically the individuals then disappear from public view and enter the criminal justice system, stories about them remaining embalmed in the media record. As the criminal justice system continues to record...

‘The outsider’: communication, diversity, and communities

Abstract No one has to go very far to see headlines about ‘communities’ or to read that governments and politicians across Europe profess concern about relationships among groups distinguished by faith or country of origin. The number of votes cast for right-wing groups with policies clearly antagonistic to migrant groups suggests that at the very least something is going wrong in relationships between established residents and specific groups, with a number of controversial manifestations. For several years we saw how ‘asylum’ became the subject of highly critical scrutiny in press and media reporting: instead of having genuine fears of persecution, asylum claimants were being accused of having dubious motives, such as coveting access to welfare or jobs, for seeking entry to European countries. In various countries ‘Islam’ is now being cast as a challenge not simply to other faiths but to the dominance of ‘Western’ values. An association of Islam with forms of terrorism also pinpoints risks that are perc...

My story: young people talk about the trauma in their lives

Abstract 2008 was a year in which public attention to individual violence and its causes rarely wavered. The newspapers and broadcast media narrated a rising toll of individual killings, especially among young people.