Prevention is the best cure for graffiti say experts

PREVENTION through education is being promoted as a means to overcoming the problem of tagging in Wanganui.
Driving that opinion are two people who have experience at the frontline of this particular battle artist Deidra McMenamin and John Coffey, chief executive of Wai Ora Christian Community Trust.
Both have been taking a keen interest in the anti-graffiti campaign kick started by the Wanganui District Council, but both share the same view that education rather than elimination and punishment is the right road to take.
Mr Coffey's organisation works directly with at-risk youth and has first-hand experience with taggers. Ms McMenamin is a trained artist and has worked in community art and conflict resolution in Northern Ireland the UK.
Mr Coffey said the community was faced with three options to overcome the tagging vandalism around the city.
"There's eradication of the tagging. Then there's elimination by addressing the criminal side of things and prosecuting them. The third one is all about prevention and education," he said.
"Most of the opinion at the moment focuses on the first two options, but my gut feeling is those options aren't going to work."
He said a lot of the tagging was being done by eight, nine and 10-year-olds.
"You pick a war with these kids and the problem's going to escalate."
"What we're trying to do is not keep a lid on it so much as bring some balance to the problem. And that's why, with the help of people with Deidra's experience, we want to explore the prevention and educational side of things."
Mr Coffey has some of these kids already on the Wai Ora alternative education course.
"These kids have made it plain what they want they want to do their own thing and they want space in which to do it."
His trust has got a 30m by 10m wall, which it's prepared to allow supervised access to, to let these youngsters express themselves in an artistic way.
"We want to turn what people call 'tagging' into graffiti art," he said. The trust had other resources including a shed it could convert into a studio.
"Expression is just not in a spray can. It can be in dance, music whatever. Rather than writing on a public wall, we're encouraging them to come in and do it with us," he said.
Mr Coffey said this needs to be happening across the city, not in an isolated suburb or two. He said contrary to the popular view, there was not a strong gang element involved in tagging.
Ms McMenamin said there was overwhelming evidence from around the world that suggests that suppressing young people at this stage means they are more likely to go into illegal activity when they are older.
"If you can find a creative outlet, then statistics prove they have less chance of re-offending and more chance of finding established jobs and income," she said.
"The long-term solution and it's been proved in Berlin, in Derry, in Belfast and various cities in the US where they've taken time to set up youth projects the incidence of tagging and graffiti has diminished significantly."
Ms McMenamin said all people had a "basic need for expression' and a punitive response from the community was not the solution.
She has had frontline experience with graffiti and tagging, working particularly in the Bogside area in Derry and studied the art form in Germany, Israel and Egypt.
"Where communities have embraced these young people and put effort and energy, not into telling them off but recognising a need in these young people that needs to be fulfilled, you get murals and public art that become tourists attractions."
"We've had people come from all over the worlds just to see the murals done in Northern Ireland."
Ms McMenamin said she was "shocked" to find how punitive the New Zealand approach to this sort of problem seemed to be because "it's counter to all the research I've ever studied".
"For such a forward-thinking country, it's a bit of a strange dichotomy."
Meantime, she has had an initial meeting with Mr Coffey looking at future programmes.