A form of legalised witch hunting

Gabriel Tabar will not be allowed to lead a normal life any time soon. Under the terms of an ASBO he is banned from goin within 50 metres  of some 38 schools dotted around his locality. To put it another way he is banned from setting foot within a whole multitude of areas which between them stretch to 12,000 square metres. In addition he may not “approach, stare at, confront or communicate with any female in circumstances where that female is likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress by the defendant’s behaviour”. Approaching and communicating with members of the opposite sex is an inevitable part of daily life. Meanwhile the threshold for making such activity a breach of his ASBO is incredibly subjective and open ended.

Were I Gabriel Tabar I would be going around in a state of constant paranoia. I would be wondering if I had set foot in the wrong place or addressed somebody in the wrong tone. And this is without even mentioning that his picture has been plastered all over the local press. You would think that for the state to apply such life ruining sanctions to an individual, some kind of serious misdemeanour might have proven against him. If, like me, you are a bit  old school about your civil liberties you might even suggest that before the state imposes serious punitive sanctions against an individual it should have to show that he has broken a specific law and committed a particular crime. This, after all, has long been seen as the basic parameter under which the state may dispose of its monopoly on physical force.

Yet Tabar has not been accused of, let alone convicted of, breaking any particular law. Rather the ASBO has been brought in after numerous complaints that he stared at women in such a manner as to frighten them, and also that he followed them.  As one woman put it “He is a very frightening man because you don’t know where he is going to turn up. You don’t see him and then suddenly he is to or three feet away. We don’t know where it’s going or what he might do.”

Now don’t get me wrong, I am sure such behaviour is distasteful, and that life would be better if people didn’t behave like this. Yet it is also apparent that the pain of those concerned arises as much out of a fear of what he ‘might do’ as out of anything he has actually done. And it strikes me that this is a novel solution to an ancient problem. Namely, in any large community there are wierdos. And because they are wierdos their behaviour causes us discomfort, and unease about what, as wierdos they may or may not do. In the 17th century we called them witches. In the 20th century we institutionalised them so that we wouldn’t have to deal with. And today we have a whole legal mechanism set up to sanction and punish people whose behaviour is not criminal or materially harmful but generates fear and unease. In reality, we need to accept that a certain amount of discomfort – arising from encounters with the strange, unusual and disconcerting – is the price we pay, and that we should pay, for living in a free, open and pluralistic society.