Radical Cross Stitch

On the 28th of January 2008 Bruce William Emery was remanded in custody after appearing in a south Auckland court charged with the murder of a teenage boy. The 50 year old business men allegedly stabbed 15-year-old Pihema Clifford because he caught him about to tag his fence.

You’d expect an outpouring of indignant outrage that someone could take the life of a young man over something so minor as small scale property damage. Maybe a public reaction similar to the virtual lynching of Junior Bailey Kurariki? No instead this man received generous helpings of media and public sympathy.

Sympathy for taking a life?

A few months down the track, The Wellingotn Police have jumped on the ‘tagging is the root of all evil’ bandwagon. They have decided to add a layer to the standard clean up duty punishment handed out to taggers. Now when a young kid gets caught scrawling his name on something he will be doing clean up in a bright pink jacket with TAGGER written on it.

Yes, the comparisons have already been made to Nazi Germany and the pink triangles homosexual people were forced to wear. And when the Police representative says “It was no reflection on anyone’s sexuality, it’s a loud colour,” I say ‘bullshit.”

Of course they chose pink because it brings along the homophobic peer pressure shame associations that all boys growing up know extremely well. If the Police claim that they didn’t think that was the first issue that would be raised, then they really are thicker than we already thought.

One of the biggest issues that young men deal with in New Zealand is bullying and the pressure to conform to a very white, sporty, straight, blokey, drinking culture. Sadly, too many of our young men don’t find ways of dealing with this pressure and this is one of the major contributors to our shameful teenage suicide rate.

The whole issue of tagging is symptomatic of a wider issue faced by all young people in New Zealand and that is a complete refusal by older generations to attempt to see the world from their perspective.

Wanna know why kids tag? ‘Cause they’re bored.

Wanna stop them from doing it? Give them something better to do.

It’s not fucking rocket science.

Everywhere on the planet where councils, communities, governments or whatever support street-based graffiti art programs see reductions in ‘illegal’ graffiti. EVERYWHERE. And they don’t cost very much. Certainly not as much as the price of housing a convicted murderer for a year…

And the benefits can be enormous. If you get some experienced graffiti artists with a bunch of kids, a pile of spraycans and a sanctioned space, the kids not only learn some decent skills and some basic behaviour codes. But they get to experience making a positive contribution to their community, learn new skills and all the other positive flow on effects of working in a group on a collective task.

Of course, we know it can also lead on to bigger and brighter things. People are now selling property at premium prices because it has Banksy art on it. Obviously the extreme example, but there’s a huge amount of people making a decent income from street art both commercially and as gallery artists.

I have so had enough of this issue. I think it’s time we start speaking out against this ‘community opinion’ that thinks tagging is such a hideous crime it is comparable with rape. Tagging is only a minor misdemenor and the biggest crime, in my opinion, is a lack of artistic skill.

I have spraypaint on the wall out the front of my house and sure it bothers me. But not as much as the fact that only 15% of women feel confident enough in the Police force to report a rape.

As a way of speaking out on this issue, I decided to cross stitch it.

And if you want to make one like this here’s the pattern for the text. Be as creative as you can.

Love and rage
xox

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