Our Director, Phil Bowen, reflects on Behavioural Control Orders, outlining that though these are often introduced with the best intentions, their implementation often fails to meet expectations.
Whether it be due to our work on anti-social behaviour, or knife crime or violence against women and girls, we have at times explored the strange, and at times unchartered, territory of Behavioural Control Orders. Behavioural Control Orders is a loose umbrella term, coined by JUSTICE, to cover a range of civil orders which impose conditions upon a person’s behaviour to prevent them from carrying out a form of unwanted conduct. Where the conditions are breached, the recipient of the order is guilty of a criminal offence. Due to the introduction of Respect Orders within this Government’s first major piece of criminal justice legislation, the Crime and Policing Bill, we have fresh cause to journey into that land once again.
We have found Behavioural Control Orders to be a liminal landscape, where the crowded cities and suburbs of the criminal justice world meets the sparser and less formalised places of the civil justice system. In our work on domestic abuse and civil protection orders, for example, we have come across a topography “fractured, under-resourced, insufficiently specialised and inconsistent”, where implementation is “largely determined by local resources, local agency prioritisation and local practice, which leads to significant variation across the country (although the lack of national data on protection orders more generally means there is no national picture of this variation).” A Civil Justice Council report similarly found the territory of Anti-Social Behaviour Injunctions (ASBIs) opaque, where courts were left hamstrung by the lack of services to assess and refer people into positive interventions, the lack of information sharing and collaboration with the police (especially to enforce conditions) and the lack of national data to develop a clear picture on their use. (It is just these same ASBIs that new Respect Orders seek to supersede.)
Behavioural Control Orders is a public policy space where laudable intentions to reduce crime and social harm, aims that we share at the Centre, become laws and plans from on high but with little thought or intention what it will look like where the rubber meets the road. Another civil protection order, the Knife Crime Prevention Order, is a case in point. Just published research found that the piloting of KCPOs in London came up against a number of foreseeable and unresolved implementation barriers: (i) a widespread perception amongst those being asked to deliver them that KCPOs added no new useful powers; (ii) concerns amongst practitioners that using the KCPO would most likely end up penalising individuals from specific communities without helping them move away from knife crime; (iii) a lack of specific funding and personnel to change the reality of staffing/service user ratios or the range of services available to practitioners to sue with people enmeshed within knife crime offending. Frustratingly, all the effort of this pilot therefore led to an (expensive) outcome evaluation which found no statistically significant difference in re-offending rates (though this may be as much due to the lack of people in control and treatment groups as it is revealing of a real lack of causal change).
At present, the land of Behavioural Control Orders is wild, arid and littered with half failed settlements. At its saddest, it is a wilderness that has required people— people who are trying to keep fellow citizens safe--- to invest precious time and effort into initiatives which can never truly flourish. In the area of anti-social behaviour, we suggest that instead of absorbing energy on piloting Respect Orders, we should be investing it instead in implementing things that we know work— like effective prevention and diversion for children and young people, the better use of hot spots policing, in enhancing existing place-based community justice centres to co-create solutions locally. In areas like the new Domestic Abuse Protection Orders, we strongly believe that, with the right support and supplies, we can use behavioural control orders to keep people safe. In short, we urge Government to not incur the opportunity costs of new and unneeded legislation and focus on the hard yards of evidence-based frontline delivery.