New report on gang culture in the UK

I know this post will be of interest to you if you're studying youth justice, criminology or the general problem of gang culture. I also know a few of you are looking at choosing gang culture as dissertation topics so this will be definitely be worth taking a look at.

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has just published a very readable report called 'Time To Wake Up' on what they feel needs to happen next to alleviate the problem. It's somewhat critical of the approach the police took of rounding up senior gang members after the riots last year, instead of addressing the issue of why people were joining gangs in the first place.

You can find the CSJ website here (have an explore as there's a few interesting pieces) and here is a link to the Today programme discussion that ensued.

DISCOVER: your feedback after the first month.

When the librarians started talking about killing the library catalogue (RIP: 2005-2012) in April we all said this is going to be mayhem. The students will all wail and light torches, the lecturers will have a collective breakdown and within minutes we'll be nostalgic for those simple days when you had to go to 37 different webpages to get access to lots of abstract only journals.

So to all the hundreds of students who've been remarkably positive and open about DISCOVER I'd like to say a big thank you, and a further thank you for proving my initial misgivings to be the groundless ramblings of a paranoid lunatic.

Manuel Castells

I saw on BREO the other day that Alex DeMont, a lecturer who I've a great deal of time for, had highlighted a radio 4 show called Analysis featuring a Q & A with Manuel Castells. If you haven't come across Castells before, he's a really interesting sociologist who has been predicting what the web might do to us as individuals for over a decade.

The radio 4 show is here. We also have plenty of his books (I've just ordered a couple of his older books as e-books too) on the shelves and I hope you'll find his theories intriguing.

Let me know if you do.

Illegal drugs and evidence based practice.

My last post concerning academic standards and social work prompted some really interesting emails from you, plus a spate of people unsubscribing. The unsubscribing may have been coincidental, but there's part of me that hopes it wasn't.

So I thought I'd better stay away from controversy for a while which is why this post is about drugs.

Do you see what I did there?

Anyway. The Today programme ran a piece on Monday concerning a new report from the UK Drugs Policy Commission (UKDPC) which has been 6 years in the writing; it's evidence based and offers some interesting ideas on tackling drug misuse in the UK. The subsequent debate between a UKDPC representative and Sarah Graham, who's the government's advisory council on illegal drugs, touched on the methodology of the report. Really interesting stuff.

The report itself can be found here and the audio of the debate is here (after the link opens, scroll down to 7:51 in the running order and you'll see it there). 

New scheme proposed to increase 'front-line social workers'

I nearly didn't blog about this because I didn't want any social work students to misconstrue my intentions.

So can I first state (not for the first time) that anyone prepared to come to UoB and do the course and be a social worker has my unadulterated admiration. Is that plain enough? Good.

With that in mind I thought I'd ask you for your opinion on this. Read it?

Just to give you some background details, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) who've published this report is a think-tank charged with coming up with radical solutions to perceived problems in different areas broadly related to public policy.

The full IPPR report on the proposed changes required to social work is available here.

I would be very interested on whether you think the educational standard of social workers is one of the issues effecting the perceived low status of the profession.

John Pitts' 'Spinning the Crisis' lecture

Are you studying criminology? Then this is for you.

John Pitts is one of our best known lecturers at UoB, focussing on youth crime and gangs. A few months ago he gave a lecture on the fall out from the UK riots last year.

Unfortunately I couldn't go on the actual night, but thanks to some bright spark videoing it the whole thing is now on YouTube. I'll be checking back in a week or so to see if the number of views online has increased!
I hope it does as it's an interesting talk.

The findings of the safeguarding report in Rochdale

I suspect you may have already read about how a number of teenage girls in Rochdale were abused, resulting in the men who perpetrated these crimes going to prison.

The subsequent report that these events prompted can be viewed and saved by clicking here.

I also heard an interview on Woman's Hour with one of the girls who was abused. Inevitably it's pretty upsetting stuff, but it does give some insights into how the abuse continued for so long. I'm not sure how long the link will work for (the BBC only leave their stuff on iplayer for so long) so my advice would be to listen to it as soon as possible. The interview is the first feature on the programme and can be heard here.

As always, let me know if you want more information on how to find reports online.

Welcome back.

Hello again. You're looking fabulous after a good break I see.

After a summer of swanning around the south of France with kings, knaves and Lana Del Ray I suppose it's about time I got back to work myself. Sorry the blogging has been quiet in the last few months. The genuine reason is that with many of you not around I decided to work on other projects for a while.

But I'll be sending out posts regularly again from this week onwards. Many of these will certainly mention DISCOVER. I want you to learn to love DISCOVER. Not just like it, but truly love it. Because the old library catalogue is no more and DISCOVER is so much better. I know that 'new and improved' often means 'new and about the same, but more expensive'. Well in this case I really do think DISCOVER has made searching for information easier.

If you haven't had a go yet then DISCOVER can be found here. You'll need to use your log in as it contains journals as well as books and everything else we have electronic access to.

If you're reading this you're probably a second or final year student. Which also means you'll be used to searching the databases one at a time. And that's where DISCOVER wins. Not just wins, but wins and gloats about it by singing "I AM THE CHAMPION" at unedifying volume. Because DISCOVER searches all the databases at the same time and that's even better than two weeks in France with Lana Del Ray.

Trust me. I should know.