Peacock, C. (2023) Amnesia and the erasure of structural racism in criminal justice professionals’ accounts of the 2011 English disturbances. Sociological Review, 71 (6). pp. 1402-1422. ISSN 0038-0261
Abstract
Though the 2011 ‘riots’ attracted a huge amount of political, media and academic attention, the state’s punitive reaction to the unrest received far less analysis, despite being characterised by exceptionally harsh practices at every stage from arrest to sentencing. Drawing on interviews with criminal justice professionals who were at the heart of this response, and focusing in particular on the Crown Prosecution Service’s unusually punitive approach, this article examines the imaginations, assumptions and claims that allowed professionals to variously justify and problematise this vindictive backlash.
The article shows how an imagination of the disturbances as an apolitical and unprecedented outbreak of violence was central to many professionals’ accounts. Yet this imagination, I contend, requires significant amnesia and elision. Forgetting England’s long history of unrest, and ignoring or dismissing the police killing of Mark Duggan that immediately precipitated the disturbances, were vitally important in allowing professionals to ignore the vital connections between the unrest and entrenched structural racism that has consistently underpinned post-war urban unrest – and to position the harsh law and order response as reasonable, proportionate, necessary and adequate.
In doing so, the article makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the unrest, and on the importance of amnesia and ignorance in normalising punitive and discriminatory state practices, both in the wake of the riots and in their longer aftermath.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) |
Keywords: | 2011 riots; Criminal justice; Historical amnesia; Structural racism |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of Law (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Economic and Social Research Council ES/W006537/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 10 Mar 2023 16:36 |
Last Modified: | 03 Oct 2024 08:57 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/00380261231166525 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:197211 |