Here We Go Again: Part Three

Today’s post, being as how it is Part Three of a three-part series, will make a lot more sense if you’ve read the first two parts. If you haven’t, you may want to take a moment to read the last two blog entries. Oh, you have? Good, let’s move on …

The engagement tier is the more important of the two, as it is the tier that actually holds promise of a reduction in tagging and graffiti. I’ll take a moment here to remind the reader that I am not offering up a solution, that is, I don’t expect anything we do to actually eliminate the behavior. Rather, I am offering an approach to dealing with and minimizing the behavior. In that respect, tier one, accountability, does little -- at least in terms of the initial problem, as accountability is only relevant after there is something to be held accountable for. I do believe that the restorative justice approach I recommended in Part Two goes a long way toward reducing recidivism and helping to stop the spread of tagging and graffiti, and could be considered an extension of the engagement tier we’re discussing now. But engagement is the real key to the potential of this approach, because it is aimed at the underlying cause of and motivation for the behavior.

I recognize that there are some differences between tagging and graffiti. Graffiti has its roots in ancient civilizations, while tagging is an offshoot of graffiti that has its cultural roots in the punk rock movement of the 1970’s, and later became part of the Hip-Hop culture -- the key word here being ‘cultural’. While the historic roots of graffiti were artistic and political, modern graffiti, or tagging, is a cultural phenomenon. However, before this becomes a treatise, my point is that tagging and graffiti are forms of expression. While the means may be vandalism and criminal behavior, the motivation is to be seen -- and if we can understand that, we can also understand why tagging and graffiti are primarily the actions of the young.

We live in a society that has evolved the old saying children should be seen and not heard into we’d actually rather not see them, either. We have systematically removed young people from formal associations with adult culture. We segregate them by mandate into government operated schools, they can’t vote, and there are restrictions on where they can live and how they can be employed. In almost every aspect of their lives, young people are shut out of the mainstream of our world.

One of the strongest human needs is the need to be relevant, to be useful, to be valued -- to be seen. If we are made invisible enough, we will begin to use extreme methods to become visible. Among these methods are tagging and graffiti.

This is why you see this behavior from the most alienated members of our youth -- the gang bangers, the street kids, the ones we really don’t want to see. So, what is the best way to address this behavior?

We have to see them.

Not as we want them to be, but as they are.

We have to engage. We have to find ways to include them in our discussions, our approaches, our solutions. We have to listen to them and value their contributions. We have to actively seek them out not for punishment or manipulation or to see how we can ‘help’ them -- but to see how they can help us. We have to give them roles to play and ways to participate. The only way we'll ever get them to stop throwing their lives in our faces is to include them in our lives.

What a particular engagement strategy might look like depends on the community in question, and is a longer discussion than a blog entry, but there you have it -- my approach to the tagging/graffiti issue. I believe that restorative accountability and active engagement would be far more effective that knee-jerk solutions such as banning spray paint (which, by the way, only further contributes to the isolation of young people). Of course, banning something is a lot easier and scores more political points, but you know what they say – nothing worth doing is easy. Personally, I think young people are worth a little effort on our part.