FSF - Walking away from trouble

please log in to view this image

Many clubs do good work in reaching out to young offenders via their charitable foundations, aiming to turn teenage lives around. But come matchday those same clubs and the police can take hardline approaches in criminalising those very same youths. The FSF has kick-started a scheme which seeks to improve the situation for football clubs, the police and fans. FSF caseworker Amanda Jacks explains more…

Every professional club has a dedicated police officer and, in my time at the FSF, I’ve got to know many of them very well and it’s fair to say there are varying approaches to dealing with young, problematic fans.

Some see a Football Banning Order (FBOs) as the only solution to any boisterous behaviour while others take a more nuanced approach – visiting fans at home, talking to them and their parents, heading into schools ahead of matchdays and talking about the risks of getting involved with football disorder.

We believe the latter approach is usually more appropriate for younger fans who, often, haven’t even been found guilty in court of any crime as FBOs can be handed out without a conviction.

Myself and my colleague Anwar Uddin, who runs the Fans For Diversity campaign, met up with West Midlands Police’s (WMP) football unit and the local young offending team where we presented our thoughts on this subject to them.

To WMP’s great credit, there was an immediate buy in to our thinking and they agreed to work with one of their local clubs – Walsall FC – by extending the family visits they paid to young problematic fans to something far more intensive and targeted.

With the active involvement of the Princes Trust, a series of educational workshops were put together and attended by a small group of Walsall fans, by order of the Court, after they’d been convicted of a football related offence.

These sessions forced them to address their behaviour, the impact it has on their fellow fans, how it harmed the reputation of their club and ultimately the lifelong consequences of a criminal record.

They also learnt how to do something which is very difficult – to walk away from trouble.

I’ve had nothing but positive feedback about this initiative and it was particularly gratifying to learn, thanks the Princes Trust, one of the young men who went through the workshops will now work with them and another succeeded in getting an interview for an apprenticeship.

Expanding the work

To ask if this is better than an FBO is, I’d like to think, a rhetorical question.

We’ve had conversations with other police forces about mirroring the work of WMP and Walsall FC.

It’s early days and will require a lot of goodwill and time (and maybe a bit of money too) but most of all it will mean changing twenty years of thinking that the only way to prevent football related disorder is the Football Banning Order.

I really don’t see any good argument why a young man in a football ‘gang’ shouldn’t be afforded the same opportunities that he would in another context.

This isn’t about being soft on young risk or problematic fans it’s about asking that they’re treated equally by ‘the system’.

When it comes to how clubs themselves deal with problematic fans, despite many of them doing sterling work in their communities with young people or those who are disadvantaged, there is no such desire to work with their own fans, something that strikes me as somewhat ironic.

At best, in conjunction with the DFO, fans are called in to sign an Acceptable Behaviour Contract.

Contrast this with the huge amount of co-ordinated and multi-agency work done around young people involved or on the periphery of ‘street’ gangs, not to say the financial resources available to those who work in this field.

I don’t seek to make or draw direct comparisons between street gangs and problematic football supporters but there certainly are common themes:

• They comprise predominantly young males
• Their behaviour is often at best ‘anti-social’
• There is a sense of belonging
• Once ‘in’ it’s very hard to get out
• Alcohol and substance abuse is a contributory factor to their behaviour

I was talking to a youth worker recently who knows far more than me about these matters. I was amazed as he reeled off the options open to young people (including young adults) to help them away from the criminal justice system.

This in stark contrast to football where the prevailing thinking around football related crime and disorder is not to address an individual’s behaviour, let alone look at why young men find the idea of football violence attractive, rather the blunt and singular tool of the FBO.

That there isn’t even any cross over between the agencies he works with and police football units tells you a lot.

http://www.fsf.org.uk/blog/view/walking-away-from-trouble#sthash.ioWXjhfM.Ng1MWGHP.dpuf

 

Excellent work they're doing with this.

 

To be fair, that lad got banned for causing trouble at five different games.

One of them was the Grimsby pre-season ffs.