BOOK REVIEW / Boys will be blamed: Goliath: Britain's Dangerous Places by Beatrix Campbell - Methuen pounds 9.99

JOYRIDING and ram-raiding, this book argues, are jobs for the boys: a spectacular appropriation of public space by young men denied access to the more conventional public arena of work. According to Beatrix Campbell, unemployment produced the riots in British cities in 1991 not as a response to poverty but because it stranded man in the domestic world traditionally associated with women.

'Archetypal proletarian employment', she writes, 'no less than the City, the Church, Parliament or the police, has been characterised by sex segregation. Masculinity established its identity by enforcing difference, by the exclusion of women.' Campbell argues that young men brought up in an age of 'macho propaganda' (she mentions the car chases in popular films such as Lethal Weapon and the Terminator series) took over the streets of Oxford, Cardiff and Tyneside because they had nothing else to do. In the age of the camcorder, joyriders on Oxford's Blackbird Leys estate were able to emulate their cinema heroes, and achieve celebrity status, by filming each other as they performed hand brake turns in high-performance stolen cars.

There is, at first glance, a compelling piece of evidence in support of Campbell's larger argument, which is that the 1991 riots were sex-segregated to an extraordinary degree. The stone- throwers, arsonists and reckless drivers were almost exclusively male. This reflects a general trend: in 1990, in the Ely district of Cardiff, the juvenile court dealt with 417 offences committed by boys and only 42 by girls.

But Campbell's rhetoric ignores the inconvenient fact that riotous behaviour in Britain is not confined to unemployed males. The 'lager lout' phenomenon has produced disturbances in town centres as well as on the run-down council estates she discusses in the book; university cities like Oxford are periodically the setting for destructive rampages by well-heeled undergraduates. Perhaps this is what Campbell means when she argues, somewhat inelegantly, that unemployment 'reveals a mode of masculinity whereas the commonsense notion has been that it causes a crisis of masculinity'. Yet if, as she asserts, it is exclusion from the traditional masculine power- base of work which tips men over into violence, how are we to account for the young men with jobs and flashy cars who congregate in menacing groups outside pubs on hot summer nights and fight running battles with the police?

Campbell is a journalist and the most effective sections of her book contain the testimonies of individuals caught up in the 1991 riots. She conveys the terror of Asians trapped above their burning shops and of tearful mothers trying to find their adolescent sons. And she creates a powerful account of everyday life on estates where crime had become endemic and the police response was 'absence, then inertia and paralysis and finally havoc before they took control'.

Yet despite her journalistic instincts to tell all sides of a story (and Goliath isn't crudely anti-police), Campbell's book is flawed by the radical feminist's tendency to stereotype men and to romanticise the world of women. It is quite clear that she is writing about a particular group - young males - yet this does not deter her from a wildly hyperbolic conclusion: 'Crime and coercion are sustained by men. Solidarity and self-help are sustained by women. It is as stark as that'. It isn't, and lumping all men together in this way is no more defensible than the police habit - rightly criticised in Goliath - of stigmatising all the inhabitants of certain council estates as criminals and abandoning them to the mercies of marauding groups of young men.