Operation Goodnight

This is an article I found in the 'Telegraph Magazine' July 2008. It describes the curfew that was placed on the teenagers of the town of Redruth at the beginning of the summer holidays. Apparently Redruth had one of the largest teen crime rates of the UK, and 'Operation Goodnight' was set up in order to combat this. Children of 10 and under were to be home at 8pm and children of 16 and under were to be home by 9pm. If the curfew was a success - which according to the article it was, then the initiative was to be rolled out in other places such as Manchester and the larger inner cities.

Redruth town is located within the old mining district of cornwall, and falls within an area which has been subject to much regeneration. It is about 3/4 miles from Cambourne another area earmarked for regeneration that is part of the "Heartlands" Scheme a project that was awarded big lottery funding of £22m.

" Voluntary" is the difficult word. There was no residents assembly, no vote on the matter. Instead there was a unanimous agreement by the dozen or so people who attended one meeting that the curfew would be a good idea. The scheme was conceived and being monitored by "the partners". Griffin (police officer) is untroubled by these niceties. "I thought lets just try it," he says. "It's not been imposed. We wanted a chance for the community to be part of something this summer: a low-key locally delivered initiative."

Bearing in mind the statistics would have taken into account things like population and also location, it cannot be fair to suggest that Redruth has the highest crime rate in the UK, only highest in crime rate when taking into account certain geographical considerations, that said the crime rate was sufficient that the town was used as a 'controlled test' to work out whether or not the curfew would work.

There are similar articles on the Telegraph website which talk about the curfew.

Semiotics

Semiotics is a subject which I am interested in and looked at during my degree, but I know that I never fully understood it so I am now taking another look in the hope that it makes a bit more sense.

I'm looking at a book called Structuralism and Semiotics.


The book examines the use of language, and how language fundamentally affects the way we think and behave. An example of this might be, when two people from different regions or countries say the same thing and what they say is varied by an accent, language or by the intonations in speech. The 'changes' may be subtle, but distinct enough to carry colloquialisms (or systems of information) which effectively set apart the language from a neighbouring district so-on. This difference is what gives us identity (within language eg. gaelic, or welsh) and therefore individuality. We also find that these meanings can be 'lost in translation', the result of this clearly changes the meaning of the sentence, not unlike that of Chinese whispers.

"..There is therefore, concluded Sapir in a classical statement no such thing as an objective, unchanging 'real world':

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the real world is to a large extent built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different label attached....We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality, p162) "

Liinguistics and Anthropology pg 31.Terence Hawkes, 'Structuralism and Semiotics'