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Poor men and women are blamed for anti-social behaviour by Labour. But violence is an attribute of men of all classes, and is a product of gender conditioning, says Beatrix Campbell.

It is a year since former home secretary Jack Straw responded to the football riots in Belgium by bemoaning local authorities' failure to implement anti-social behaviour orders.

It did not seem to matter that the orders were designed to deal with children, and in particular the children of poor parents marooned in poverty, and that the rioters were neither children nor poor. They were, in fact, well-resourced men with mobiles and money enough for foreign travel and tickets.

For professionals working in the juvenile justice and family welfare systems, Straw's ire merely confirmed the collective suspicion that the sound of his fury was more important than doing something useful and relevant about both the problem of anti-social behaviour in general and football riots in particular.

But the muddle was instructive. It told us that the government was making up law and order as it went along, unconcerned, apparently, that its own pronouncements weren't joined up to its own policies.

It also told us, however, that the government's law and order politics are pre-occupied with the poor. The riots were a golden opportunity for the government to address what everyone knows - that crime and disorder do not belong to a particular class - but rather to a particular gender.

Until relatively recently theorists who sought to explain football hooliganism tried to assign the problem to the lower orders who, it was claimed, brought their irrational and unfettered beastliness to the respectable territory of the football terraces.

What we now know - though football fans still try to keep it a secret - is that it is football culture itself rather than class that is responsible for football violence. That culture is the creation of a sport that sees itself as character-forming and crucial to the construction not only of masculine identity but national identity.

Euro 2000 revealed that the visceral rivalries, hate-speak and xenophobia that are the currency of football culture also sustain football violence. This is, of course, a conversation we can't have in Britain. It's not just that football is "kind of a guy thing", it's that the sport enjoys passionate endorsement at the highest levels of British society.

We know that Tony Blair bonded with Labour Party selectors in Sedgefield over beer and football. We know that nothing comes between football and his former press secretary Alastair Campbell. And we know that football is what connects the chancellor of the exchequer to popular culture.

These men bring to politics that passion for dominion that football legitimates in popular culture, whether it is in the playground, the neighbourhoods from hell or the politicians' own imaginary country - middle class, middle England.

They could, at a stroke, do something surprisingly radical about the perceived problem of disorder and incivility by confronting ordinary, everyday violence that lies at the core of the male gender of all classes and creeds. But of course, they won't.

Instead, the government's anti-social behaviour agenda targets poor children and young people and their parents. Or rather, their mothers.

Some of these troubled and troubling young people - overwhelmingly boys - are only doing with their pain or distress what, of course, other men do with their power: take control of social space. Crime and chaos become a resource in conquering space, and a context for making their identities.

They are entitled to expect that adult society will address their griefs. But we are entitled to expect that both politicians and professionals will address a bigger issue: the connections between mainstream values and anti-social behaviour.

Football exemplifies the problem. Respectable fans may disavow the hooligans, but they share the same pleasures and passions that produce the hooligans.

The dilemma for the professionals who are supposed to respond to anti-social behaviour by children is that they may have little faith in the government's heavy agenda, they certainly weren't consulted during the formation of it, but they have no alternative than to take the money and run with it,

They'll be doing their best to intervene in poor households where violent children have become a danger to everyone around them, including, sometimes, themselves, without any political and professional consensus about the causes of the problem. At last, many of these professionals sigh, there's money around and plenty of people on whom it needs to be spent.

We need more than individual casework, we need institutional investment in childhood. But much of the current money will be consumed by projects whose life will come to an end a year or so after they've been born.

Investment in "inclusion" projects designed to discipline young people and discourage incivility is significant but it is also short-term. They will make do and mend, in the knowledge that much of their effort will be a waste of time.

Poor children and their communities seem doomed to go on getting poorer. And resources are being targeted at anti-social individuals, not the contexts and cultures that make bullying and disrespectful behaviours endemic, not to say, valorised, in our society. The source of the anti-social behaviour, therefore, remains invisible and untouchable.

Beatrix Campbell is a writer and a broadcaster.