Still getting the blame

This book is a captivating exploration of the relationship between policy-driven discourses on bad parenting and their use as a justification for punitive state policies that disproportionately affect the lives of women and those from disadvantaged social backgrounds. It opens with a reference to the shooting of Mark Duggan by specialist firearms officers in Tottenham, London on 4 August 2011. Mark Duggan’s death and the subsequent failure by the Metropolitan Police to communicate with his family sparked a public reaction which led to outbreaks of street violence and riots across London and other British cities over a period of three days. Jensen acknowledges the work of criminologists and cultural theorists who have explored the English riots of 2011 in terms of their broader historical and social contexts, including the increasing penal activities led by the state that had contributed to a public sense of grievance and resentment against the invasive surveillance and harassment that were being experienced within certain areas of urban populations in the UK. But her focus on this topic is to look at how the political class’s response to the riots, instead of considering the issue of police brutality, became centred around, and directed at, the figure of the bad parent. Jensen shows how, in political and media discourse, the family or certain types of families became the scapegoat for the civil unrest.