Researching Community Cohesion

Roger Green and Rebecca Pinto discuss their research into community cohesion and young people.

Background
Official reports examining the underlying causes of the riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2001 described localities where communities were polarised along racial, cultural, socio-economic and generational differences. Divisions were so entrenched that many of the community groups led “parallel lives” (1). The range of core thematic issues highlighted by the reports underlined the need for a multi-faceted agenda that overlapped into many policy areas. The proposed policy solution to the witnessed segregation and rising inter-ethnic tensions was ‘community cohesion’, a term which has since developed as a key political and policy issue, and an important area of research both nationally and locally. (2)

This article will look at a recent research project which reviewed the progress of youth service provision and practice in terms of developing community cohesion in a local authority area in the South East of England. Whilst the authority cannot be identified until after the publication of the report, it is notable that the area in question shares many of the demographic characteristics with the towns that experienced riots in 2001, being culturally diverse with concentrated pockets of severe deprivation. Following an initial report into community cohesion issues specific to the local authority, the role of the youth service in delivering community cohesion was identified as an area needing further research. As the predominant perpetrators of the 2001 riots, young people have a special position within community cohesion discourse and youth work and schools are crucial settings to deliver the Government’s community cohesion agenda.

Research
The research was conducted over a twelve-month period starting in February 2003. It involved focus groups and interviews with young people and community stakeholders, including members of the police, local authority, statutory and voluntary youth service staff and members of the local youth cabinet. The research adopted an action research model, central to which was the establishment of a research project steering group involving key community stakeholders, and including young people’s representatives. This involved participants of the group, being in at the start of the research, reflecting on the research process as it progressed, discussing findings as they emerged, and using these findings to inform the next stage of the research (e.g. the design of an interview schedule or questions to discuss with a focus group). This cyclical model of research gave the opportunity for the steering group to act as co-researchers, by meeting with the research team on a regular monthly basis as part of the research process, and to both monitor the progress of the research and provide valuable feedback. Allocating the responsibility for overseeing the development of the project to the steering group members facilitated active participation, real ownership, and grounded the research.

The research was intended to identify the extent that the youth service and its partners had assisted in delivering the council’s community cohesion agenda, by identifying examples of good practice and gaps within local youth service provision. It was hoped that the research would inform future youth service policy and practice in delivering community cohesion.

Findings
The research revealed that young people’s experiences of a cohesive community were limited with many viewing their daily experiences as having become increasingly fractured along racial and cultural lines. Indirect experiences of racially motivated acts of violence, in addition to the treatment of specific racist incidents by the local media, had contributed to a fear of racism in the borough amongst the majority of the local youth population surveyed. This perceived fear, coupled with a pattern of territorialism within certain wards, partly due to drug dealing and corresponding turf wars, impacted on the daily lives of young people, both physically, by restricting their mobility, and emotionally, by creating unease and anxiety.

Within the school environment, racism was found to be more prevalent in schools with a less culturally mixed student population whilst more culturally mixed schools were characterised by patterns of self-segregation, with young people of Asian heritage particularly most likely to display self-segregation tendencies. Consequently more cross-cultural friendships were found amongst the young white and young African-Caribbean’s surveyed than amongst their Asian counterparts.
Despite the tendency for self-segregation along ethnic lines to occur in more multi-cultural settings, young people argued that there was a need for more opportunities for cross-cultural interaction, which was particularly lacking in current youth service provision. Although there were examples of collaborative relationships between the statutory sector and different agencies within the voluntary sector, these were limited and needed strengthening. A majority of young people acknowledged the value of targeted youth work as a support system to some of the more ‘hard-to-reach’ and marginalised groups, such as young refugees, and young offenders. However, without any twinning initiatives in place to reconcile divisions and build bridges, such provision was viewed as contributing to disintegrating inter-community relations by effectively excluding some young people and thereby hindering cross-cultural interaction.

Young people claimed that there should be more emphasis directed at catering for sectional interest groups, such as book clubs, photography workshops, and music-based clubs. In addition they viewed the lack of diverse provision to be indicative of their disempowerment and their failure to be listened to, despite the previous two years being viewed as a period of consultation overload.

Youth workers argued that whilst there was no programme with a specific community cohesion remit, youth work practice did contribute towards cohesion. They claimed that the service was over-stretched, under-valued and under-resourced and that community cohesion training had been being neglected. No frontline youth workers in the statutory or voluntary sector had received support and training relating to community cohesion, despite this being singled out by the Ministerial Group on Community Cohesion as crucial in its promotion. Only a third of voluntary youth service staff had heard of the term ‘community cohesion’; even less had a basic understanding of the concept. Whilst the majority of statutory youth service staff had encountered the term, many lacked a clear definitive understanding, claiming that it overlapped with other concepts such as social capital, race relations and equal opportunities.

Youth workers argued that they could not develop community cohesion in isolation and schools were repeatedly identified by both young people and youth workers as a potentially important arena for cohesion. Despite being well placed to be an effective vehicle to build community cohesion in partnership with the youth service, the education system was found to be, in effect, a silent partner. Twinning programmes and the inclusion of community cohesion as part of the curriculum in the citizenship education agenda were outlined as areas that could contribute to the development of community cohesion. Furthermore, schools could gain significance as active participators in delivering community cohesion with the implementation of the Government’s ‘extended schools’ agenda, placing schools at the centre of local communities with extended opening hours and offering on site services such as childcare, youth clubs, and health care centres.

Conclusion
Whilst the voluntary and community sector has a key role to play in ensuring that young people's voices are heard and that local services respond to their needs, it is crucial that the youth service and its partners do their part to ensure that community cohesion is properly understood and delivered. According to this research, community cohesion has had a limited impact on youth service policy and practice, and has been treated much like an add-on activity rather than a priority. The lack of attention directed at developing community cohesion policies through the youth service and its partners has been very limited.

Nationally community cohesion remains a struggle to deliver, indicated by BNP electoral successes, rising Islamophobia, growing hostility towards asylum seekers and refugees, and the hotly contested issues of state-funded faith schools and religious dress. The current climate of race relations The findings provide an overdue empirical dimension to the subject of community cohesion. has placed community cohesion high on the political agenda. This research provides an overdue empirical dimension to the subject of community cohesion and raises implications for community cohesion policy and practice across the UK.

1 - Cantle, T., 2001, Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. Home Office

2 – Community cohesion was defined by the government in 2002 as a common vision and sense of belonging for all communities; an appreciation of and value for the diversity of people’s backgrounds and circumstances; similar life opportunities for those from different backgrounds; and strong and positive relationships between people from different backgrounds in the workplace, schools and neighbourhoods.

The report is provisionally titled ‘Young People, Youth Work and Building Community Cohesion'. A date for publication will be decided by the local authority and the Government Department that commissioned the research.

Dr Roger Green is Director of the Centre for Community Research, School of Social, Community and Health Studies, University of Hertfordshire.

Rebecca Pinto is a Researcher at the Centre. Contact: r.pinto@herts.ac.uk top