Análisis descriptivo de las variables

Like the Sudanese and Pacific Islander young people in the study’s focus groups, we do not think that the group cultures and behaviours in the Brimbank area explored in discussion with Sudanese and Pacific Islander young people constitute ‘gangs’ at the more formal end of the definitional spectrum in the literature, particularly as these relate to adult groups and collectives with an emphasis on drugs, criminality and violence (White and Mason, 2006; Howell, 2003).

As the foregoing discussion of the data suggests, young people in the focus groups for this study have not identified the groups or activities they have in mind when asked about their perceptions of ‘gangs’ with the formal features of what Sullivan (2005) calls ‘named’ gangs,15 _{which usually include some combination of any or all of}

the following: leadership structures, initiation hurdles, membership rules, ritualised bonding activities, identity constraints, dominance of territory and/or criminal and profit-making enterprises (Sullivan, 2005: 175). Nor do the group formations described by focus group participants always and everywhere meet the criterion of ‘shared ethnicity, language and culture’ identified by some researchers as a characteristic of group membership in the context of youth gangs (White, 2008: 150).

15 _{This is the case even when such groups do have self-nominated, local or transnationally derived names, e.g. ‘Kickback}

On the contrary, the local youth formations canvassed in the focus groups display cross-ethnic membership in which other shared individual and social characteristics – age, neighbourhood, school, gender, social inclusion/exclusion and the desire for belonging, status and/or protection – are likely to be more important. The local groups discussed by the majority of focus group participants are too mixed, too democratic, too disorganised and too fluid in relation to identity, activity and social formations to be characterised as ‘gangs’ at the more highly structured end of the spectrum (see for example Klein, Maxson and Miller, 1995; Huff 1996; White 2006); they are more aligned with White’s (2006) definition of ‘street culture’ groupings or Sullivan’s (2005) ‘cliques’, as well as with what both Australian and American young people involved in similar studies have referred to as ‘crews’.

Nevertheless, the socially bonding, activity-based, identity-building and maintaining formations carried out through some kinds of groups described by young people above can at times constitute more than just unfocused or non-symbolic ‘public gathering’. In our own initial thinking, we termed these formations alliances – a common, consensual bond or connection engaged for a variety of reasons, looser than ‘gangs’ yet more focused and sustained than ‘groups’, similar in many ways to Sullivan’s ‘cliques’. Our data from both the survey and the focus groups suggest that such alliances may be filial (based on biological family or more broadly defined kinship bonds, including those of ethnicity and culture); strategic (as a response to perceived threats from other groups or to consolidate power and dominance); corporate (based on the desire to belong and to feel part of something larger than the individual), or compensatory (to compensate for exclusion from other kinds of filial, social or community belonging).

All of these kinds of alliances – whether filial, strategic, corporate and compensatory – may overlap or combine in some instances, and all are at least implicitly present in the data gathered from focus group participants. Yet none of them appear to have led – at least in the perceptions of the young Sudanese and Pacific Islander people who participated in the focus groups – beyond the ‘street culture’ or ‘clique’ categories of youth alliances that form part of a broader dynamic of social processes around negotiating identity, belonging, marginalisation and social status.

However, while the notion of ‘alliances’, ‘cliques’ or ‘street culture’ may work for police, academics and policy makers who are seeking to analyse and operationalise understandings of youth groups and gangs in the context of strategies to tackle crime and community safety, this phenomenon may be better encompassed from the point of view of the young people we spoke to for this study by the term ‘crew’. In Sullivan’s (2005) three-site ethnography of urban youth gangs in New York City, he includes the following exchange between an interviewer and a local youth, ‘Ali’, regarding the difference for ‘Ali’ between a local ‘group’ and a ‘gang’:

Interviewer: That’s not a gang, is it?

Ali: No. Well, yes….

Interviewer: What’s the difference?

Ali: Not a gang, but the crew. It’s like people you know. (Sullivan 2005: 181)

This echoes the comment above of a Pacific Islander young man in our focus groups who commented, ‘If you’re in a crew, basically you’re all leaders because you’re all brothers.’ The term ‘crew’ – with its associative links to brotherhood, back-up and pulling together and a vague but suggestive connection to stereotypes of more organised bonding (e.g. ‘the Carlton Crew’) – may thus best describe how young people themselves frame the existence of such alliances in the Brimbank region.