tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/gangsters-20339/articlesGangsters – The Conversation2022-07-03T08:10:53Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1855442022-07-03T08:10:53Z2022-07-03T08:10:53ZPlasma gangs: how South Africans’ fears about crime created an urban legend<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470312/original/file-20220622-3417-d2mg4a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Rushay Booysen/EyeEm via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Around the middle of 2013 a series of <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/news/plasma-tv-powder-drug-craze-1570154">stories</a> appeared in the South African press about a new phenomenon called ‘plasma gangs’, presented as the latest iteration of the country’s <a href="https://www.gov.za/speeches/minister-bheki-cele-release-quarter-four-crime-statistics-202122-3-jun-2022-0000">crime crisis</a>. Journalists, broadcasters, police and government spokespeople, social media users and local residents shared tales online and in mainstream media of the frightening <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/news/xenophobia-erupts-over-plasma-tv-gang-1571182">exploits</a> of these gangs, said to be located in Alexandra (Alex) township in the north of Johannesburg. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/place/alexandra-township-johannesburg">Alex</a>, like other South African townships, is an underdeveloped and sometimes precarious area, blighted by the inequality and racial segregation that were central to apartheid spatial engineering. Developed in the early 20th century to house around 30,000 people, it is now home to an estimated <a href="https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/south-africa/2019-10-18-waiting-to-exhale-the-story-of-alexandra-township/">700,000</a>. This density creates intense pressure on infrastructure and resources, as well as a powerful community culture that lends itself to the transmission of urban legends.</p>
<h2>Plasma gangs</h2>
<p>Plasma gangs were not like “normal” robbers, who stole anything of value. They had very specific modus operandi. They were said to break into Alex homes with the express purpose of stealing plasma televisions. According to the stories, the gangs used various technologies to achieve this aim, such as hypermodern electronic devices that could tell from outside which homes contained the TVs. Another method involved techniques of <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/04/19/mandela.muti/index.html">muti</a>, indigenous magic, that sent residents to sleep while their homes were plundered.</p>
<p>They were extremely violent and often caused death or harm. But rather than selling the desirable consumer goods they stole, as one might expect from criminal syndicates, the gangs were said to dismantle them and break them open. Then they extracted a mysterious white powder that was used to make <a href="https://www.newframe.com/nyaope-the-drug-that-never-lets-go/">nyaope</a>, a street drug otherwise known as wonga or <a href="http://www.kznhealth.gov.za/mental/Whoonga.pdf">whoonga</a>. Depending on which story one heard, the gangs were either nyaope addicts themselves or professional dealers of the drug.</p>
<h2>Nyaope</h2>
<p>Nyaope is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfn9o_Aqn6k">notorious</a> in South African cities. It is extremely destructive and the subject of a large body of urban mythology. Experts generally agree that it is comprised of a mix of substances, usually a base of cheap heroin with additions like asbestos, rat poison, milk powder, bicarbonate of soda and even swimming pool cleaner. As is common with drug-related panics, stories about nyaope pull a range of other social anxieties into their axis. </p>
<p>There is no mysterious powder in plasma televisions that can <a href="https://ewn.co.za/2013/09/25/Plasma-gang-myth-busted">be used</a> to get high. Plasma is a descriptor for a technology rather than a substance. The powder contained in these devices is magnesium oxide, a small amount of which coats the display electrodes in a thin layer. Magnesium oxide is easily purchased at health food stores. It has never been shown to have any psychotropic effects. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/anxiety-in-johannesburg-new-views-on-a-global-south-city-147517">Anxiety in Johannesburg: new views on a global south city</a>
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<p>Concerns about drug users and dealers played powerfully into the plasma gangs narrative. The nyaope connection is part of what set this story aside from “normal, everyday” crime and helped it morph into an urban legend that continues to be disseminated as one of the risks of living in South Africa. </p>
<h2>Social anxiety</h2>
<p>The plasma gangs story shows the way in which <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/townships">township</a> residents’ narratives about their own precarity are both hypermodern and related to globalised and transnational anxieties about status, consumption, belonging and identity. It combines the local and the global, the historical and the contemporary, to reveal the social utility of urban legends. </p>
<p>The fact that plasma gangs are not empirically ‘real’ is almost beside the point. The story condenses fears about security and crime, drug dealers and drug users, police failures and corruption, dangerous foreigners, unruly youth, the intersection between crime, witchcraft and technology and the insecurity and visibility of township life. It illustrates the way in which certain South Africans develop and transmit stories and rumours that helped them to make sense of the world they live in. </p>
<p>In considering the plasma gangs we can see how myth, uncertainty, rumour and strangeness inform South African cultures of fear: crime is not just frightening in and of itself but also because it connotes the presence of hidden forces that undermine the predictability of everyday life. This kind of “crime talk” is endemic in South Africa but oddly quiet in academic literature, which often associates fear of crime with whiteness and wealth.</p>
<h2>Making sense of fear</h2>
<p>The plasma gang scare is a compelling example of the power of narrative to condense and codify collective anxieties. A series of existing fears, spurred by the experiences of people living in a place that is both insecure and community-minded, both high risk and aspirational, layered on top of each other to produce a story that had a peculiar amount of social power. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470304/original/file-20220622-25-wqnjag.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover in black and white showing ominous clouds and metal structures. In red, the title Worrier State." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470304/original/file-20220622-25-wqnjag.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470304/original/file-20220622-25-wqnjag.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470304/original/file-20220622-25-wqnjag.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470304/original/file-20220622-25-wqnjag.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470304/original/file-20220622-25-wqnjag.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470304/original/file-20220622-25-wqnjag.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470304/original/file-20220622-25-wqnjag.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wits University Press</span></span>
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<p>A tale of gangster criminality, personal danger, magic, violence and fear offered a way to foreground the contradictions that come with living in the South African township, a place that both defines residents as aspirational global citizens and imposes conditions of insecurity upon them. </p>
<p><em>This is an edited extract from the author’s book Worrier State: Risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa <a href="https://witspress.co.za/catalogue/worrier-state/">available</a> from Wits University Press</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/185544/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicky Falkof receives funding from the University of the Witwatersrand and the South African National Research Foundation</span></em></p>In 2013 stories emerged of gangs stealing plasma TV screens to use to make street drugs. It’s a myth, but it tells us something about South Africa’s social anxieties.Nicky Falkof, Associate professor, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1725322021-12-15T14:33:37Z2021-12-15T14:33:37ZCelebrating Dolly Rathebe, South Africa’s original black woman superstar<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435044/original/file-20211201-27-aij6vy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dolly Rathebe (centre) in detail of the album cover for Dolly Rathebe & Elite Swingsters.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gallo Music Publishing</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/dolly-rathebe">Dolly Rathebe</a>, the musical legend of <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/place/sophiatown">Sophiatown</a>, is part of South Africa’s rich heritage and history. Sophiatown was a much-storied suburb and vibrant cultural hub in Johannesburg that was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/11/story-cities-19-johannesburg-south-africa-apartheid-purge-sophiatown">destroyed</a> by the South African state in 1955. Its 60,000 black residents were forcibly removed to Meadowlands, a township outside the city, as the country’s white ruling party entrenched apartheid’s policy of racial segregation. </p>
<p>Together with <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/miriam-makeba">Miriam Makeba</a>, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/letta-mbulu">Letta Mbulu</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/dorothy-masuku-africa-has-lost-a-singer-composer-and-a-hero-of-the-struggle-112425">Dorothy Masuku</a>, Rathebe’s name represents a golden era of local blues and jazz music that captured the lives of black people. </p>
<p>These mega divas of Sophiatown came out of a golden era of literary and musical genius, a time – the 1950s – often referred to as “the <em>Drum</em> decade” after the popular black urban culture <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/drum-magazine">magazine</a>. <em>Drum</em>’s dramatic first decade, 70 years ago, amplified the names of black South African writers, <a href="https://theconversation.com/journalism-of-drums-heyday-remains-cause-for-celebration-70-years-later-142668">journalists</a>, anti-apartheid freedom fighters, beauty queens, gangsters and musicians.</p>
<p>During these times, South African female musicians rose and became stars. Their names were as big as the names of politicians like <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/biography">Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela</a> and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/gangsterism-sophiatown">gangsters</a> like Boy Faraday. They were gorgeous, they were powerful on and off stage; their pictures graced the covers of magazines and newspapers. Their legendary songs announced South Africa’s race blues to the world – an important record of their disruption of apartheid and patriarchy.</p>
<p>In March 2021 the <a href="https://jias.joburg">Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study</a> held a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=263675351884650">symposium</a> celebrating 70 years of <em>Drum</em> magazine, where I presented a paper, The Mega Divas of Sophiatown. It remembers the impact that these female stars had on popular culture, politics and jazz music globally. I was struck by the role that Rathebe in particular played in inspiring Makeba, Mbulu, Masuku and many others to follow their dreams and become singing stars. I wanted to know more about her, to excavate and celebrate her legacy. </p>
<p>A few months later I was awarded the University of Pretoria <a href="https://www.futureafrica.science">Future Africa Institute</a> Fellowship and a Xarra Books publishing deal to <a href="https://www.up.ac.za/news/post_3000475-esteemed-african-writer-and-academic-appointed-inaugural-fellow-of-up-artist-in-residency-fellowship-programme-">research and write</a> Rathebe’s biography. It is a unique opportunity to share the life of a legend with future generations – and to map the musical links between the past and future.</p>
<h2>Dolly takes Joburg</h2>
<p>Dolly Rathebe <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13696810903488595">paved</a> a glittering path as Africa’s very first black female movie superstar after appearing in the 1949 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZsP88-63A0">film</a>, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0211906/"><em>Jim Comes to Joburg</em></a>. </p>
<p>She was born in 1928, in Randfontein, west of Johannesburg. Her parents named her Josephine Malatsi. She changed her name to the more glamorous Dolly Rathebe, apparently after a young lady from a well-off family. Rathebe was spotted singing at a Sunday picnic by two British film makers – director Donald Swanson and producer Eric Rutherford. The two immediately recognised her star quality and gave her the role of Judy, a club singer, in the movie. </p>
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<span class="caption">Screenshot from Jim Comes to Joburg featuring Rathebe (left) and Daniel Adnewmah.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Warrior Films/Apex</span></span>
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<p>The synopsis is simple: a young man leaves his rural home to find his fortune. He is attacked and harassed in Johannesburg. But he is offered a chance to make it as a singer with a night club’s star singing sensation – Dolly Rathebe. The audience loved Rathebe’s sultry vocals and magnetic screen presence. Overnight her name became slang for everything nice. If it’s “Dolly”, it’s great. If it’s “double Dolly”, it’s out of this world. </p>
<p>Her famous <em>Drum</em> <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/showcasing-photos-that-defined-and-defied-racist-sa-11131464">cover</a> – wearing a bikini made of two handkerchiefs tied together on the city’s famous mine dumps – propelled her to legend status. The picture, taken by <a href="https://theconversation.com/jurgen-schadeberg-chronicler-of-life-across-apartheids-divides-145390">Jurgen Schadeburg</a>, got them both arrested for flouting the <a href="https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01828/05lv01829/06lv01837.htm">Immorality Act</a>, an apartheid law that forbade sexual relations between whites and other races. The police suspected that they were lovers. Rathebe’s arrest just made her legend grow. Everyone was talking about it, and everyone was talking about Dolly Rathebe and singing her songs.</p>
<h2>Musical life</h2>
<p>Rathebe travelled and sang all over southern Africa with top bands like the <a href="https://www.capetownswing.co.za/the-manhattan-brothers/">Manhattan Brothers</a> and the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/benni-gwigwi-mrwebi">Elite Swingsters</a>. She was a star attraction for many years in <a href="https://soulsafari.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/african-jazz-variety-alfred-herbert-1952/">Alf Herbert’s African Jazz and Variety Show</a> which opened in 1954.</p>
<p>Rathebe’s music was not overtly political. She sang mainly about everyday troubles. There was <em>Uyinto yokwenzani umbi kanganka</em> – where she is complaining about her lover. And then <em>Into Yam ndiyayithanda nomi isel’ utswala</em> – where she is complimenting her lover, even though he drinks too much! Her own compositions were mainly about ordinary day-to-day highs and lows, like <em>Andisahambi Netshomi zam</em> about a young lady promising her mother not to go out late at night with her friends anymore.</p>
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<p>Her compositions ranged from the popular talk of parties, gangsters and matters of the heart to the more political <em>Mbombela</em>, a beautiful melodic, deeply emotional classic that laments the fate of workers who have to catch early morning trains to go and create wealth they will never own:</p>
<p><em>Wenyuk’ umbombela, wenyuk’ ekuseni! Wenyuk’ umbombela</em>… (There goes Mbombela the early morning train…) <em>Shuku shuku shuku shuku</em>… </p>
<p><em>Mbombela</em> became a Grammy-winning <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXV_dip-HNs">hit</a> after it was sung by Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte on their legendary album <em>An Evening with Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba</em>.</p>
<h2>A political force</h2>
<p>Although Rathebe’s compositions were not overtly political, her celebration of black life, black beauty and black humanity through her films and music was subversive. Apartheid sought to erase black creativity and achievement; Rathebe refused to be silenced. Rathebe, Makeba, Mbulu and Masuku’s music were dazzling and authentic; insisting on recording the humanity, depth and elegance of black lives beyond the cardboard cut-out smiling natives favoured by the apartheid government propaganda machinery.</p>
<p>Rathebe’s bold occupation of public spaces and her proudly African, slick city diva image made her the darling of movie and music lovers all over Africa. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/journalism-of-drums-heyday-remains-cause-for-celebration-70-years-later-142668">Journalism of Drum's heyday remains cause for celebration - 70 years later</a>
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<p>The decade in which the mega divas forged their phenomenal careers is also the decade of the historic South African <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/1956-womens-march-pretoria-9-august">1956 Women’s March</a> where women freedom fighters <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/lilian-masediba-ngoyi">Lillian Ngoyi</a>, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/helen-joseph">Helen Joseph</a>, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/bertha-gxowa-mashaba">Bertha Mashaba</a>, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/rahima-moosa">Rahima Moosa</a>, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/sophia-theresa-williams-de-bruyn">Sophie de Bruyn</a> and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/albertina-nontsikelelo-sisulu">Albertina Sisulu</a> organised 20,000 women to march to the government buildings in Pretoria to stop amendments to the <a href="https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01646/05lv01758.htm">Urban Areas Act</a>. These would’ve meant black women had to carry pass books as well as men. Their movement would have been severely restricted, exposing them to more arrests and harassment. </p>
<p>Dolly Rathebe and the other mega divas navigated politics, life and their music, gaining superstardom locally and abroad despite their third class citizen status in a racist South Africa. In the late 1950s, when apartheid repression intensified and Sophiatown was demolished, Rathebe moved to Cape Town to raise a family and run a shebeen. Her performances and public life faded. Her fellow divas went into exile, ending a golden era of incredible artistic output.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172532/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nokuthula Mazibuko Msimang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Her celebration of black life, black beauty and black humanity through her films and music was subversive.Nokuthula Mazibuko Msimang, Artist in Residency, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1463722020-09-17T10:40:30Z2020-09-17T10:40:30ZNew Dublin on screen – a place of freedom and choice<p>Dublin’s screen history reflects its real-life contradictions – at once the debased urban counterpart to the <a href="https://lovin.ie/news/feature/27-photos-that-prove-the-west-of-ireland-is-the-most-beautiful-place-planet-earth">“real” Ireland of romantic rolling green hills and dramatic seascapes</a>, and the wellspring of literary modernism, rock music and all-night party culture. </p>
<p>If one film best captured how Ireland’s capital imagined itself, it was Lenny Abrahamson’s debut feature, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLXeRNDCaWs">Adam & Paul</a>. The story of two heroin addicts crossing the city in search of a fix. They were <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKYm4-mKNXI">Godot</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7FobPxu27M">Ulysses</a> propelled into the 21st century.</p>
<p>Dublin in Adam & Paul is a warren of threatening, enclosed spaces. In this, Abrahamson’s vision is little different to that of the many gangster films that have dominated depictions of the city, from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srSNhZ8XKnE">The General (1998)</a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paJYAk6Lkmc">Cardboard Gangsters (2017)</a>. However, a recent cluster of productions – including <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tICeNBGp7Fw">Dating Amber</a> (2020), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8DbQTjzMKs">Handsome Devil</a> (2016) and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p5yY0qdsWg">Normal People</a> (2020) – suggest that the capital’s image may be changing. These films provide an interesting commentary on the new relationship between the individual and the city.</p>
<h2>A city mentality</h2>
<p>In Dating Amber, the city is an escape, a place to be free from the stifling nature of the lead characters’ hometown and a place they can be themselves. </p>
<p>Set in 1995, David Freyne’s film follows Amber (Lola Pettigrew) and Eddie (Fionn O’Shea) in their last year at school in Kildare. Brought together by the taunting of their peers, the two admit to each other that they are gay and, in a bid to survive the rest of the year, enter into a concocted relationship that soon develops into a genuine friendship. </p>
<p>Bunking off school one day, they share an illicit booze-fuelled night in Dublin. Stumbling across a subterranean gay bar, the two have very separate but formative experiences. Amber meets Trinity student, Sarah (Lauryn Canny), with whom she develops a relationship. While in the distance, as if in a trance, Eddie dances a slow number clasped to the bosom of the club’s drag queen (Jonny Woo). </p>
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<p>So out of sync is this scene with the film’s otherwise realist aesthetic that it could easily be a projection of Eddie’s imagination. It also uncannily echoes a similar sequence in Handsome Devil, also starring Fionn O’Shea and also set in Kildare in the past. </p>
<p>Here, O’Shea’s Ned finds himself attracted to his rugby player school roommate, Conor (Nicholas Galitzine). On a trip to Dublin city, Ned spots Conor entering a pub. The bouncer prevents him from following his friend, and Ned is forced to leave. As Ned travels back to school on the train, the film suddenly shifts back to the pub, now following Conor through the bar where he glimpses his English teacher, Dan Sherry (Andrew Scott), with another man. On their return to Kildare, student and teacher meet in what is presumably a later train. Awkward small talk ensues, with each apparently reluctant to admit why they were in a gay bar. </p>
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<p>The point of both scenes, it seems to me, is to construct a space outside of the conservative reality (in both instances rural Ireland of the past) where gay desire can find free expression. That this is a kind of imaginary, utopian space is further signalled by the womb-like, cavernous interiors and hazy red lighting. To enter these places freely, the character must abandon their inhibitions from “old” Ireland, and as Amber advises Eddie, don a “city mentality”.</p>
<h2>An open place</h2>
<p>Having a city mentality is also what distinguishes Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) from Connell (Paul Mescal) in Normal People. In this highly regarded adaption of Sally Rooney’s zeitgeist novel of the same name, it is Marianne’s discomfort with the mores of Sligo school life that makes her feel alienated at school. But when she and Connell arrive in Dublin to study at Trinity College, the roles are reversed, and she is easily accepted by the metropolitan set, leaving Connell feeling awkward and excluded. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq9SEb5PhMY">When I spoke to the series’ co-creators</a>, Ed Guiney and Lenny Abrahamson, they explained that one of their aims in making Normal People was to project a new image of Dublin. What they achieved, I would suggest, was to refuse the older associations of the capital as a criminal city, insisting instead on its openness to new experiences. </p>
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<p>That they did so through depictions of <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-8305579/TVs-Normal-People-features-eye-watering-41-MINUTES-sex-12-episodes.html">sexual encounters</a> unlike anything ever witnessed on Irish screens (or any screen for that matter) may have distracted from Normal People’s intense engagement with the intellectual life of its central characters. In a way, this harks back to Dublin’s history as a <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/dublin-named-city-of-literature-1.861615">literary city</a>, but one that is now as likely to find its voice in a college room or the tossed sheets of a bed as much as in a smoky pub. </p>
<p>What is new, then, about these productions is their affirmation of personal freedoms: to live a gay lifestyle, to experiment with drugs, to be a writer. In this, these screen productions speak as intimately to a local audience as to the wider world with whom they share their Dublin, imagined or real.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/146372/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ruth Barton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From run by gangster and drug-ridden to a place of sexual freedom and opportunity, a spate of new screen productions are rehabilitating Dublin’s image.Ruth Barton, Head of School of Creative Arts, Trinity College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1217542019-08-15T13:05:47Z2019-08-15T13:05:47ZSoldiers won’t stem gang violence because South Africa’s army is in a sorry state<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288027/original/file-20190814-136186-1grx23m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">South African National Defence Force soldiers in Mitchells Plain on the Cape Flats, Cape Town. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EFE-EPA/Kim Ludbrook</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The initial response to the recent deployment of the South African army to areas of Cape Town hit hard by gang violence evoked relief that peace and stability would be <a href="https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/cape-town-murders-weekend-how-many-cape-flats-sandf/">restored to the area</a>. </p>
<p>But this has been replaced with a much more nuanced view. Some community leaders claim the deployment has fallen well short of <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/capeargus/news/public-seminar-to-explore-army-presence-on-cape-flats-30360488">residents’ expectations</a>. The “lock-down operation” needed to target and identify the culprits behind the violence has not occurred. </p>
<p>Despite their limited mandate, the army has just too few soldiers to patrol the ten suburbs that are home to <a href="http://www.capetalk.co.za/articles/356316/expectations-on-sandf-deployment-were-overinflated-says-expert">over 1 million people</a>. Less than 300 soldiers are on the streets of the Cape Flats, not the 1320 <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2019-07-19-army-deployment-to-the-western-cape-to-cost-r234m/">mentioned by President Cyril Ramaphosa</a>. This figure allows for rotation of troops.</p>
<p>Also, the soldiers will be there for less than the three months, as the deployment is authorised <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2019/07/cape-town-army-deployment-long-term-solution-190719105227447.html">only until 16 September 2019</a>. </p>
<p>The result is that people in the affected areas are fast realising that <a href="https://city-press.news24.com/News/army-or-no-army-residents-live-in-fear-20190803">the army is not the solution</a>. This echoes previous cases were soldiers were deployed to <a href="https://www.defenceweb.co.za/security/civil-security/op-fiela-ii-aims-to-shut-down-crime-hotspots/">crime hot-spots in the country</a> but failed to have a measurable impact. </p>
<p>But, even if more soldiers are requested, the South African National Defence Force simply doesn’t have the capacity to deploy them. This is because it is severely overstretched in terms of both personnel and <a href="https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/330025/south-africas-army-has-run-out-of-money-heres-how-bad-things-have-got/">financial resources</a>. </p>
<p>Of the 37 000 in the army, less than half serve in the 14 infantry battalions. One battalion is tied up in peacekeeping operations and 15 companies are deployed on the borders (far short of the 22 required). Some military analysts claim that the army is 8.5 infantry battalions short (roughly 8500 members) to <a href="https://www.defenceweb.co.za/featured/sandf-personnel-strength/">perform their current tasks</a>. </p>
<h2>Capacity problems</h2>
<p>A great deal has been <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-army-is-in-steady-decline-and-nothings-being-done-to-fix-it-74712">written on the military’s financial woes</a>. In my analysis the real problem lies with its force structure and design. These have driven up personnel costs to unacceptable levels.</p>
<p>In terms of the defence budget the ideal expenditure ratio is <a href="https://theconversation.com/money-has-little-to-do-with-why-south-africasmilitary-is-failing-to-do-its-job-81216">40 % personnel, 30% operations and 30% capital expenditure</a>. Some claim this is closer to 80:5:15 in reality, leading to the defence force being labelled a <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-01-30-the-sandfs-real-challenge-its-become-a-welfare-not-a-warfare-agency/">welfare, rather than a warfare agency</a>. </p>
<p>The ideal ratios in terms of expenditure differ by country. This is influenced by mission priorities, tasks and service. The army, for example, is more personnel than capital intensive, <a href="https://www.defenceweb.co.za/featured/sandf-personnel-strength/">compared to the navy and air force</a></p>
<p>It has enough people, but they are just not deployable. There are numerous reasons for this. The approach associated with the contract-based “flexible service system” of short, medium and long term service <a href="http://pmg-assets.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/docs/2004/appendices/040810dodstrategy.htm">has not materialised</a>.</p>
<p>The result is an escalation in personnel expenditure, the retention of people who are no longer fit for their post profile due to age and health, a high ratio of general officers to other ranks, and rank inflation making the armed forces top heavy. Senior ranks are very expensive with extensive salary and pension costs.</p>
<p>Added to this the military has been unable to reduce the number of people in the full-time force through rationalisation and <a href="https://www.defenceweb.co.za/featured/sandf-personnel-could-be-trimmed-by-ten-thousand/">rightsizing</a>, or to rejuvenate its full-time and reserve forces.</p>
<p>Another challenge is the age profile. In 2003 the defence force introduced the military skills development programme to rejuvenate the full-time and reserve forces. The programme was to provide an adequate number of young, fit and healthy personnel for the full time forces; and to serve as a feeder for the Reserve Force. This has not happened due to financial restraints and lack of career planning, leaving the reserves <a href="https://citizen.co.za/news/opinion/1921038/sa-look-after-your-soldiers">understaffed and underfunded</a>.</p>
<p>The consequence is an ageing force with average troop age of 38 years and the Reserve Force age of <a href="https://citizen.co.za/news/opinion/1921038/sa-look-after-your-soldiers">around 40 years</a>. The average age of an infantry soldier should be around <a href="https://www.defenceweb.co.za/featured/sandf-personnel-strength/">23-25 years</a>.</p>
<h2>Redesigning the defence force</h2>
<p>The other factor affecting the capacity of the military is its force design. The South African National Defence Force is structured, funded and
trained for its primary, <a href="https://www.defenceweb.co.za/sa-defence/sa-defencesa-defence/feature-sandf-outlines-threats-priorities">not secondary tasks</a>. Using the military continuously in internal
secondary roles has stretched it beyond capacity and contributed to its <a href="http://thebrenthurstfoundation.org/workspace/files/2011-07-south-african-defence-brenthurst-paper-.pdf">downward spiral of decline</a>.</p>
<p>There is a clear “disconnect between the defence mandate, government expectation and <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-01-07-south-africas-military-at-a-crossroads">resource allocation”</a>. If the government is serious about providing security for its citizens, it is crucial to fix the structure and design of the force, which have eroded its capacity to function optimally. Failure to do so will have dire implications for the defence force’s ability to carry out its mandate – to protect the country and its citizens as required by the Constitution.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121754/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lindy Heinecken does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Using the military continuously in internal roles for which it is not structured, funded or trained simply speeds up its decline.Lindy Heinecken, Chair of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1213842019-08-07T13:54:55Z2019-08-07T13:54:55ZCape Town’s bloody gang violence is inextricably bound up in its history<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/287054/original/file-20190806-84205-1gxkbed.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Today's gang violence on the Cape Flats can't be divorced from Cape Town's history of forced removals.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EQRoy/Shutterstock/Editorial use only</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When the apartheid government decided <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/how-group-areas-act-shaped-spaces-memories-and-identities-cape-town">to evict people</a> it <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/population-registration-act%2C-act-no-30-of-1950">called Coloured</a> from Cape Town’s inner city, it set off a chain reaction that now requires military intervention. </p>
<p>More than 50 years on from the mass evictions that drove anyone who wasn’t white from the city centre, the South African National Defence Force <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-army-is-being-used-to-fight-cape-towns-gangs-why-its-a-bad-idea-120455">has moved in</a> to guard the areas known collectively as the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/places/cape-flats">Cape Flats</a>. It was to these places that Coloured people were pushed by the Group Areas Act. So it’s necessary to look to history – which I’ve explored in a number of my books, most recently<a href="http://donpinnock.yolasite.com/gang-town.php"> <em>Gang Town</em></a> – as <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2019-07-15-as-army-deployment-is-delayed-43-murdered-over-bloody-cape-town-weekend/">violence</a> in suburbs far from the city centre escalates.</p>
<p>Given the framework within which removals under the Group Areas Act took place in Cape Town, a social disaster was inevitable. As the familiar social landmarks in the closely grained working-class communities of the old city were ripped up, <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1991-38772016000100002">a whole culture began to disintegrate</a>. </p>
<p>Networks of kin, friendship, neighbourhood and work were destroyed. The streets, houses and corner shops that also formed networks were torn away. With this destruction the mixture of rights and obligations, intimacies and distances, solidarity, local loyalties and traditions that bound established communities dissipated.</p>
<p>Above all, what the Group Areas Act’s inroads into the culture of the older districts fundamentally disturbed was the organisation and role of the working-class family. One of the major problems that arose from all this was the collapse of social control over the youth. One of the greatest complaints about Group Areas removals was that individual families rather than whole neighbourhoods were moved to the Cape Flats.</p>
<p>Amid these complex developments and realities, gangs emerged. There <a href="http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/sites/default/files/pdf_files/rejan85.3.pdf">had been</a> smaller, less hierarchical and organised gangs in areas like District Six from which people were forcibly removed. But harsh conditions on the Cape Flats saw much fiercer gangs forming and increasing use of knives and, later, handguns.</p>
<h2>Isolation and fear</h2>
<p>The first effect of the removals into the high-rise schemes on the Cape Flats was <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1991-38772016000100002">to destroy</a> the way the street, the corner shop and the shebeens in the “old” areas had provided the residents with a great measure of communal space. The new areas contained only the privatised space of small, nuclear family units.</p>
<p>These were stacked on top of each other in total isolation, juxtaposed with the totally public space surrounding them – a space that lacked any of the informal social controls generated by their former neighbourhoods. A key control was that houses in the old areas had verandas where older people would sit and informally police the streets. On the Cape Flats you were either behind a door or on the street.</p>
<p>The destruction of the neighbourhood street also blew out the candle of household production, craft industries and services. The result was a gradual polarisation of the labour force into those with more specialised, skilled or better paid jobs; those with the dead-end, low-paid jobs; and the unemployed. </p>
<p>As the new housing pattern dispersed the kinship network, so the isolated family could no longer call on the resources of the extended family or the neighbourhood. The nuclear family itself became the sole focus of solidarity.</p>
<p>This meant that problems tended to be bottled up within the immediate interpersonal context that produced them. At the same time, family relationships gathered a new intensity to compensate for the diversity of relationships previously generated through neighbours and wider kinship ties.</p>
<p>Pressures gradually built up, which many newly nuclear families were unable to deal with. The working-class household was thus not only isolated from the outside, but also undermined from within. The main, and understandable, product of this isolation was fear: fear of neighbours, of unknown people, of gangs and of the strange dynamics of the new environment.</p>
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<p>These pressures weighed heavily on the house-bound mothers. The street was no longer a safe place for children to play in and there were no longer neighbours or kin to supervise them. The only play-space that felt safe was “the home”, the small flat. As stresses began to build up within the nuclear family, what had once been a base for support and security now tended to become a battleground, a major focus of all the anxieties created by the disorganisation of community.</p>
<p>One route out of the claustrophobic tensions of family life was the use of alcohol and drugs. This became the standard path of many men. Children were shaken loose in different ways. One way was into early sexual relationships and perhaps marriage. </p>
<p>Another was into the fierce youth subcultures on the streets which became ritualised in the violent youth-gang culture, reinforcing the neighbourhood climate of fear. The situation was to be compounded by rising unemployment at the younger end of a potential labour force and the consolidation of illegal markets that required “soldiers” to protect.</p>
<p>What these gangs did in order to survive in the face of tremendous odds was to rebuild the lost organisation and domestic economy in the new housing-estates. This time, however, their customers and they themselves were often also their victims.</p>
<p>Then came 1994 and the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/south-african-general-elections-1994">newly elected</a> African National Congress (ANC) government inherited, in Cape Town, a working class that was like a routed, scattered army, dotted in confusion about the land of their birth. </p>
<p>The ultimate losers in this type of claustrophobic atmosphere are the working-class families. For those scattered across the Cape Flats, the emotional brutality dealt out to them in the name of rational urban planning has been incalculable. The only defence the young people have had has been to build something coherent out of the one thing they had left – each other.</p>
<h2>Too little too late</h2>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-soldiers-wont-end-gang-violence-a-co-ordinated-plan-might-120775">Bringing soldiers onto the Cape Flats</a> is too little and too late to unscramble the political omelette. What’s needed is not repression but contrition, better intelligence and the rebuilding of damaged communities whiplashed by gunfire.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121384/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Don Pinnock consulted the Western Cape provincial Department of Community Safety in 2018 coordinating its gang strategy.</span></em></p>Given the framework within which removals under the Group Areas Act took place in Cape Town, a social disaster was inevitable.Don Pinnock, Research fellow, criminologist, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/548402016-02-18T08:20:02Z2016-02-18T08:20:02ZGangs offer a tempting ‘home’ to frustrated, unhappy youngsters<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/111663/original/image-20160216-19269-keqokj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Some children from damaged homes and communities seek respect and power by joining gangs.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Siegfried Modola/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Pupils at a school in the Cape Town suburb of Bonteheuwel say they are being <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/girl-gang-fears-at-cape-school-1983896">terrorised</a> by two “girl gangs”. In Kraaifontein, about 20 kilometres away, a 15-year-old boy has been arrested for allegedly stabbing a 16-year-old classmate to death. The attack, <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/when-i-turned-around-he-just-fell-down-dead-1983955">police say</a>, has gang links. This is not a new phenomenon in the suburbs collectively known as the Cape Flats, which were created during the apartheid era when working class coloured people were forcibly relocated to housing projects.</em></p>
<p><em><a href="http://reference.sabinet.co.za/document/EJC183381">Research suggests</a> that the problem of school gangs is actually growing. Conversation Africa education editor Natasha Joseph asked Professor Rajendra Chetty to unpack the issues.</em></p>
<p><strong>You’ve recently <a href="http://reference.sabinet.co.za/document/EJC183381">published research</a> that explores school gangs in the areas broadly known as the <a href="http://capeflats.org.za/modules/home/overview.php">Cape Flats</a>. Why do children join gangs?</strong></p>
<p>The problem is complex. It should be viewed from a social, political and economic perspective. Social problems on the Cape Flats include poverty, the breakdown of family control and a loss of ties to extended families. The divorce rate is climbing and there are more single parent households. Boys from such disrupted households, full of anger and humiliation, form gangs to demonstrate a degree of manly defiance and pride in their desolate communities. </p>
<p>Youngsters copy the kind of endemic male brutality in South African society that’s evident in the country’s high rates of <a href="http://rapecrisis.org.za/rape-in-south-africa/#prevalence">rape</a> and <a href="http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2015-09-29-factsheet-south-africas-201415-murder-and-robbery-crime-statistics/#.VsRSlvl97IU">murder</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/teaching-students-about-africa-may-be-one-way-to-stem-xenophobia-50083">xenophobia</a> and a militarised police service. This culture of anger, violence and criminal behaviour in the community spills into schools. Pupils proudly identify with the dominant gangs. Schools themselves then become fertile grounds for criminal and antisocial behaviour like drug abuse. </p>
<p><strong>After these latest attacks, the education department in the Western Cape province has called for the police to step up patrols and keep schools safe. Can policing alone make the gangs disappear?</strong></p>
<p>Increasing police involvement would not address the Cape Flats’ myriad problems. Steps should first be taken to heal the breakdown in relationship between the community and police and strengthen the partnership between schools and the community.</p>
<p>Police brutality against young offenders has been on the increase in these communities and the situation has been exacerbated by police <a href="http://www.corruptionwatch.org.za/w-cape-cops-play-robbers/">corruption</a> and police <a href="http://www.uct.ac.za/mondaypaper/?id=9646">collusion</a> with the drug merchants. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/111787/original/image-20160217-30543-15ho34e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/111787/original/image-20160217-30543-15ho34e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/111787/original/image-20160217-30543-15ho34e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111787/original/image-20160217-30543-15ho34e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111787/original/image-20160217-30543-15ho34e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111787/original/image-20160217-30543-15ho34e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111787/original/image-20160217-30543-15ho34e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111787/original/image-20160217-30543-15ho34e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The police are not trusted on the Cape Flats.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nic Bothma/EPA</span></span>
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<p>It would be valuable if the police could play a key role in schools’ drug abuse awareness programmes. This would not only engender a collaborative partnership with the schools, but also create a way for the police to regain credibility among youth. The programme must shift from a punitive approach to an enabling, caring and supportive methodology to address gangsterism and drug abuse in schools. </p>
<p>Society would benefit greatly if the police, school and community focused their efforts on prevention instead of tackling the <em>aftermath</em> of gangsterism among learners.</p>
<p>In South Africa, policing is a national government responsibility. The state should provide specialised policing resources and introduce expert drug units to control gangsterism and drug abuse in the Cape Flats. </p>
<p><strong>You’re very critical of the Western Cape Education Department in your research, arguing that it could be seen to deliberately have let the situation in Cape Flats schools get out of control. Why do you say this?</strong></p>
<p>It is unfortunate that inequality in schooling is not being addressed. It is ironic to note that the Western Cape Department of Education has decided to <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/western-cape/323-western-cape-schools-face-closure-1872137">close</a> low-income, low- performing schools and is ignoring the social needs of struggling communities in the Cape Flats. Poor communities like those on the Cape Flats seem to be on the fringe of the department’s agenda.</p>
<p>It is also concerning that there has been no urgency by the national education department to develop, implement and evaluate school-based interventions. </p>
<p>For instance, the national Drug Abuse Policy <a href="http://www.education.gov.za/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=L90l7xsPb9g%3D&tabid=689&mid=2610">Framework</a> stipulates that teachers receive suitable training to equip them to deal with social problems as they arise in the classroom. Teachers on the Cape Flats have not received such specialist training. </p>
<p><strong>What are some immediate, concrete steps that the government, schools and communities can take to really start turning the situation around?</strong></p>
<p>Community development needs serious consideration in any efforts to address poverty and social ills. The capitalist democracy foregrounds the interests of business, profits and the middle class. This happens at the expense of poor communities, which has resulted in the increased levels of poverty and crime seen in some areas. These schools don’t exist in a vacuum, so providing them with basic educational resources, organising leadership seminars for principals that focus on tackling social problems and setting up feeding schemes for the children who go to school hungry could make a huge difference. </p>
<p>There also needs to be better support for pupils with behavioural problems. All schools once had guidance counsellors - this position should be recreated and filled in every school on the Cape Flats. He or she should be tasked with implementing, monitoring and evaluating the substance abuse prevention programme in schools. </p>
<p>A collaborative strategic intervention programme should be formulated that involves communities, schools, the education department - provincially and nationally.</p>
<p>Importantly, data is needed to identify spatial patterns of drug abuse and gangsterism in schools. Policy makers and service planners could use this data to allocate resources for prevention and treatment at schools with the highest level of problems.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/54840/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rajendra Chetty does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Youngsters who grow up in a culture of anger and violence may be drawn to gangs, and schools then become fertile grounds for criminal behaviour.Rajendra Chetty, Head of Research, faculty of Education, Cape Peninsula University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/532442016-01-15T16:31:57Z2016-01-15T16:31:57ZThe great Hatton Garden heist: why are we so fascinated by crime capers?<p>Over the Easter weekend of 2015, the “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35315472">largest burglary in English legal history</a>” was committed. This jewellery heist in which a criminal gang drilled through a 50cm-thick concrete wall and broke into 73 security boxes in London’s diamond district stealing £14m in bullion, jewels and cash has captured the public imagination.</p>
<p>There has already been speculation on social media sites on who might play the protagonists in what is widely seen as the inevitable “caper movie” that will surely be made about the crime – for which eight men and a woman have either been convicted or pleaded guilty.</p>
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<p>Public fascination with crime and a love of rule breakers has a long history. Instances date back as far as Robin Hood and stretch forwards in time to 20th-century villains such as <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases/bonnie-and-clyde">Bonnie and Clyde</a> and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21619150">The Great Train Robbers</a> – and over the centuries their exploits <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9780230224681">have been celebrated and pored over</a> in the media of the day, from ballads and broadsheet newspapers to big screen movie epics. </p>
<h2>Rule breakers and ripping yarns</h2>
<p>Romanticised crime and criminal exploits have even been enjoyed by royalty – when <a href="http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/The-Theft-of-the-Crown-Jewels/">Colonel Blood</a> stole the crown jewels from the Tower of London in 1671 his audacity caught the imagination of the country. Charles II was so amused when Blood declared to his face that the jewels were not worth £100,000 but only £6,000 that he pardoned the thief and even gave him land in Ireland.</p>
<p>Later we had the era of the highwaymen, who were cast as romantic heroes, the most famous of whom was <a href="http://www.stand-and-deliver.org.uk/highwaymen/dick_turpin.htm">Dick Turpin</a>. Throwing himself off the scaffold at his hanging – making what was seen by many as a “good death” – has only added to his legend. And the age of the pirates threw up its share of dubious heroes whose exploits found their way into popular culture via books such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The reality, obviously, was quite different, but even brutes such as <a href="http://www.nationalgeographic.com/pirates/bbeard.html">Edward Teach</a> (Blackbeard) enjoyed popular fame and left behind them a fame that grew ever more unlikely with the passage of time.</p>
<p>To achieve criminal hero status it is essential to have a ripping yarn. According to historian <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=7639796&fileId=S0038713400084517">Thomas Ohlgren</a> your story needs to involve daring deeds, vile villains, adventurous chases, disguises, tricks, cunning and narrative suspense. These elements are crucial to achieving a successful crime caper which will be embraced by the public.</p>
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<p>And there’s little doubt that the Hatton Garden Heist falls within the category of a “good tale”.</p>
<h2>Police and thieves</h2>
<p>Of course, whether you will make it into the pantheon of “glamorous” villains depends very much on the type of crime you commit. Drugs, child abuse, prostitution and people smuggling, for example, are not the stuff of which underground heroes are made, needless to say. But what is widely seen as the cunning, daring and planning that went into the Hatton Garden heist is considered by many as an “acceptable” crime for celebration.</p>
<p>The time period and place in which prospective criminal heroes live and in which crime capers occur are also important. In 21st-century Western society, some criminal behaviour is often seen as more acceptable than others, particularly, these days if it’s perceived as a victimless crime – or a Robin Hood-style criminal enterprise that strikes against the rich. Highwaymen, pirates and even the Great Train Robbers all targeted what was perceived – rightly or wrongly – as faceless or wealthy authorities, such as Spanish galleons with their haul of other people’s gold and the Post Office train carrying large sums of money that were insured.</p>
<p>The image of the actual criminal is also vital. Despite their propensity for violence, the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/10727427/The-unseen-Kray-twins-in-pictures.html">Krays were known to be snappy dressers</a> and mixed in 1960s London society. The Great Train robbers came across as being likely lads from south and east London, the type you might have seen in your local pub – and their image was eventually softened by movies such as Buster, starring likeable pop star Phil Collins (pop stars appear to make good criminals – Mick Jagger was <a href="http://www.mickjagger.com/films/ned-kelly">cast as Australian outlaw Ned Kelly</a> and the Kemp brothers from Spandau Ballet <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/ronnie-reggie-kray-hated-martin-5980535">played the Krays</a> in the successful biopic).</p>
<p>It remains to be seen whether the men behind the Hatton Garden Heist will gain celebrity status. But it’s clear that their caper is fascinating the public. Whether the public will take this group of elderly men to their hearts is debatable and may well depend on who is cast in the movie. But what’s beyond debate is the enduring appeal of the daring criminal challenging the establishment with criminal endeavour. </p>
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<p>The Hatton Garden Heist is not the first story to capture public imagination. However it may turn out to be one of the last; fewer dramatic old-school heists and stick-em-ups tend to happen these days as huge, financially lucrative, crimes shift into the cyberworld. Although it’s hard to picture how a bunch of cyber geeks sitting in front of their laptops would beating the thrill of watching Michael Caine and his mates <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064505/">in a breakneck car chase</a> through the streets of Turin.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/53244/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ruth Penfold-Mounce does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>People have always loved a bit of old-fashioned villainy.Ruth Penfold-Mounce, Lecturer in Criminology, University of YorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/470582015-09-14T12:45:43Z2015-09-14T12:45:43ZLegend portrays Kray twins through prism of current attitudes to violent crime<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94478/original/image-20150911-1551-sfmazm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dapper ... and dangerous.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">STUDIOCANAL</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the very first line of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3569230/">Legend</a>, the new Kray twins film starring Tom Hardy (and Tom Hardy), we hear that everyone in the East End has a story about the Krays and that therefore separating the truth from the lies is rarely straightforward. Yes, Legend is a highly appropriate title for the film.</p>
<p>The enduring fascination of the story of the Kray twins may well be down to its ability to twist and turn. It is frequently retold and reinterpreted as a metaphor for a host of wider social, political and cultural debates that have raged since Ronnie and Reggie ran their extortion rackets in the early 1960s. Legend is no different – casting more light on current social concerns than those of 50 years ago.</p>
<p>Of course, all the clichés are here – the “boys” sharply dressed, associated with (and becoming themselves) minor celebrities, kind to their mother and good to their neighbours. But unlike many previous fictional accounts this film explicitly addresses the stories, the narratives, and the folklore surrounding the Krays. </p>
<h2>Entrepreneur or gangster?</h2>
<p>This folklore is recast in order to shine particular light on to the blurred line between legitimate business and disreputable criminality, something of particular pertinence in the aftermath of the banking crisis. The film also speaks of contemporary concerns about corruption among political and social elites and celebrity culture.</p>
<p>Some of these themes are fairly well established in relation to the Krays. Fictional and <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hwShMAEACAAJ&">academic studies</a> have viewed the organised crime of the Kray twins and their contemporaries (most notably the Richardsons, their south London rivals) as entrepreneurial firms that developed among sections of the working class during a period of enhanced social mobility and post-war consumerism. </p>
<p>In Legend, it is through the relationship between the brothers that this viewpoint comes to the fore. The tension between them is central to the film mostly because it acts as a thinly-veiled metaphor for a wider tension between the yearning for respectability and legitimate entrepreneurialism on the one hand (Reggie) and the enjoyment and celebration of extreme violence and gangsterism on the other (Ronnie).</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94544/original/image-20150911-1578-1saxksd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94544/original/image-20150911-1578-1saxksd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94544/original/image-20150911-1578-1saxksd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94544/original/image-20150911-1578-1saxksd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94544/original/image-20150911-1578-1saxksd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94544/original/image-20150911-1578-1saxksd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94544/original/image-20150911-1578-1saxksd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Twin terrors.</span>
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<p>This slots in nicely to another branch of study related to the twins: their fraternal relationship. Research into twins is a staple of psychology, criminology and behaviourism. And so the Krays – violent criminals both, but one psychopathic – have provided considerable scope for analysis among both expert and amateur pundits. </p>
<h2>Where violence sits</h2>
<p>When he first meets Frankie (his future wife and our narrator), Legend’s Reggie describes himself as an entrepreneur and nightclub owner: never a gangster. Later in their relationship Frankie issues various ultimatums, threatening to leave if he continues in crime. Similarly, one of the Krays’ gang – Leslie Payne – runs their business activity and tries to oppose any rash violence that might endanger their considerable income generation. </p>
<p>Ronnie, on the other hand, proudly celebrates his identity as a gangster and relishes opportunities for violence for its own sake. The film portrays Ronnie as someone for whom the opportunity for a shoot-out is always welcomed. A couple of times he bemoans the paucity of opportunities for violence available to him. </p>
<p>So how do the scales balance? </p>
<p>Just as in Tarantino movies and many computer games, violence is celebrated in Legend. Although presented in brutal terms, the many fight scenes in the film are underscored by music – and are staged, choreographed and filmed in ways that celebrate the spectacle of violence. In one important scene, a highly violent fight is presented in graphic terms but is also played for comedy value in a way reminiscent of the slapstick brutality of the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0135086/">Dangerous Brothers</a> portrayed by Ade Edmonson and Rik Mayall. Indeed, there’s a lot of comedy in the film – especially from Ronnie. Contemporary concerns about such celebration of violence don’t seem to have much traction with the filmmakers.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94543/original/image-20150911-1575-1waozbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94543/original/image-20150911-1575-1waozbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94543/original/image-20150911-1575-1waozbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94543/original/image-20150911-1575-1waozbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94543/original/image-20150911-1575-1waozbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94543/original/image-20150911-1575-1waozbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94543/original/image-20150911-1575-1waozbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">I’m a businessman, honest.</span>
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<h2>Violence today</h2>
<p>However, this portrayal of violence contrasts sharply with one of the few moments of Legend that calls into question the dominant presentation of Reggie as a relatively sympathetic character. His violent domestic abuse of Frankie is presented in very different terms – in silence and with a notable lack of obvious choreography. It is not celebrated, not graphically represented, not played for comedy value. </p>
<p>This is entirely unsurprising, of course. Any other portrayal would be greeted with outrage – and for good reason. But the different ways in which violence is presented in the film reveals much about wider social and cultural attitudes. Domestic violence, which in earlier accounts of the folkloric tales of the Krays featured barely, if at all, is now used to signify the serious moral concerns of the film, whereas the uber violence of gang fights and the streets is presented as entertainment.</p>
<p>So Legend reveals much that is criminologically interesting. Not in the sense that it seeks to explain or document the behaviour of a couple of relatively small-time and relatively unsuccessful gangsters, but rather in what it reveals about current attitudes toward crime and deviance. And crucially, it reminds us that the particular tale of the Kray twins is above all a socially constructed, folkloric narrative account.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47058/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mike Rowe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The folklore of the Krays is recast in order to shine light on current attitudes toward crime deviance and in particular, violence.Mike Rowe, Professor of Criminology and Head of Department, Northumbria University, NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.