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‘Youth’ is...treated as a key indicator of the state o f the nation...it is expected to reflect the cycle o f booms and troughs in the economy;

shifts in cultural values over sexuality, morality and family life; and changes in class relations, concepts o f nationhood, and in occupational structures. Young people are assumed to hold the key to the nation’s future, and the treatment and management o f ‘youth’ is expected to provide the solution to a nation’s ‘problems’, from ‘drug abuse’,

‘hooliganism’ and ‘teenage pregnancy’ to inner city ‘riots’.

(Griffin 1993 cited by Griffin 1997: 17)

Concerns about young people’s involvement in crime are not just rooted in statistical trends o f offending by young people under the age o f 25 years, but as the opening quotation suggests, are also derived from the public and media demonisation o f ‘youth’, as a ‘problem’ group, as

‘Other’. This section begins by acknowledging that while terms such as children and young people arc largely neutral in their portrayal o f normative understandings of a period in life (Muncie 1999a: 5), ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ do not convey ‘natural’ differences and are not

‘biologically given’ (Valentine 2001: 3). Instead, both ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ have been used by adults to represent a shifting set of socially constructed values that express life phases in the social and cultural phenomenon o f the life-course. A competing imagery is attached to both

‘childhood’ and ‘youth’, which as Muncie (1999a: 5) wrote, ranges from ‘notions o f uncontrolled freedom, irresponsibility, vulgarity, rebellion and dangerousness to those o f deficiency, vulnerability, neglect, deprivation or immaturity’. Thus the inclusion o f ‘youth’, by adults, into the life cycle has produced a contested social and cultural category that has been strongly influenced by adult’s preoccupations with the ‘problematic’ nature o f some young people’s lives (Pearson 1983; Griffin 1993), particularly those who are now deemed to encounter increased risks o f crime. An over-emphasis on the problems o f ‘youth’ has meant that it has frequently been defined in terms o f what it is lacking, rather than what it has meant for the everyday experiences o f young people (Furlong & Cartmel 1997: 41). Furthermore, the articulation, by adults, o f what Pearson (1983) described as ‘respectable fears’ has meant that young people, who have engaged with ‘troublesome’ aspects o f ‘youth’, have frequently been enveloped in a temporal and spatial imagery (Valentine 1996a; Valentine 1996b: 207; James &

Prout 1997; Aitken 2001). Therefore, present day perceptions o f ‘youth’ originate in historical constructions o f ‘childhood’ (Aries 1962; Cunningham 1995; Hendrick 1997) and 'adolescence' (Griffin 1997) and, as this discussion unfurls, it will be seen that many of the problems o f

‘youth’ have subsequently been re-conceptualised as risks o f youth crime in discourses o f social exclusion.

Brown (1998) has presented a chronological approach to understanding the associations between ‘youth’ and crime and has identified a series o f domains or territories o f knowledge, which have at different times, and in different ways, produced powerful and distinctive constructions o f youth crime. When considering the relationships between ‘youth’ and deviance, Pilcher (1995) illustrated the influence o f historical variability, cultural specificity and adult- child relationships in shaping the power, control and dependency implicit in notions of

‘childhood’ (Qvortrup et al. 1994). The childhood historian Aries (1962) argued that

‘childhood’, as we presently know it, was non-existent during the Middle Ages. Children were not conceptually different from adults and because they were regarded as ‘miniature adults’ no special allowances were provided for them (Valentine 1996a: 583; Brown 1998: 5; Skelton &

Valentine 1998: 3). It was not until the seventeenth century onwards that ‘childhood’ begun to develop as a historical and cultural product. The separation from ‘adulthood’ was progressed by increasing state intervention into children’s welfare, which took the form o f working restrictions, the gradual abolition o f child labour, the introduction o f compulsory education and the resulting transformations in family relationships (Cunningham 1995). ‘Childhood’ was separated from the responsibilities that ‘adulthood’ implied and was perceived as a time of freedom, play and innocence, which was situated in a privileged private domain o f parental dependence (Dean 1997: 56; Aitken 2001: 7). Thus discourses of ‘innocence’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries laid the foundations for concerns about the vulnerability, safety and welfare of children and young people. Like today, some young individuals were denied this imagined time of dependency because o f their other intersecting social identities, for example poverty, being ‘in care’ (White 1999a; Ridge & Millar 2000), caring for adults and ill-health (Valentine 1996a: 587). Holloway & Valentine (2000a: 335) have argued that although

‘children were no longer treated as small adults, but as a distinctive category of beings (Brown 1998: 5), ‘childhood’ has remained ‘an essentialised concept’ for many social scientists, in particular, for those that have accentuated socialisation theories. To this day, children and young people vulnerable to crime continue to occupy ‘a special position o f exclusion because of theii limited ability to challenge social constructions of themselves and any experiences characteristic o f marginalisation that occur as a result (Matthews et al. 1999a: 135).

By the nineteenth century, the divergence between ‘childhood and adulthood was further extended by middle-class preoccupations with 'controlling' working-class ‘youth’. Anxieties associated with young people and their lifestyles became a feature o f social commentaries and

Pearson’s (1983) detailed history o f adult perceptions o f young people has related the emergence o f ‘hooliganism’ with the growing threats associated with youth at this time.

The name o f the Hooligan...provided a crystallising focus for any number o f overlapping anxieties associated with imperial decline, material incapacity, the erosion o f social discipline and moral authority, the eclipse of family life, and was feared to be the death rattle o f ‘Old England’.

(Pearson 1983: 107).

Therefore, by the start o f the twentieth century, the divide between ‘youth’ and the adult world was widening (Stainton Rogers 1997) and youthful behaviour, as a channel of broader social and moral uncertainties, prompted the quest for the ‘golden age’ o f ‘untroublesome’ ‘youth’

described by Pearson (1983: ix) in the following:

The myth o f the ‘British way o f life’ according to which, after centuries of domestic peace, the streets o f Britain have been suddenly plunged into an unnatural state o f disorder that betrays the stable traditions with the past.

More recently, public perceptions of the ‘decline’ of ‘youth’ have been theorised as a series of

‘moral panics’, which have not only structured perceptions of young people’s involvement in crime, but have impacted on young people’s engagements with place, in particular, their visible presence in street spaces (see section 2.4.3). The following subsection continues to explore the development o f social and cultural constructions o f ‘youth’ before returning to interpretations of

‘youth as trouble’ (see section 2.3.1).

2.2.1. ‘Y o u th ’ as a separate identity

With the emergence o f Stanley Hall’s (1904) research on adolescence, ‘youth’ has increasingly been constructed as a discrete social category that is inextricably linked with ‘adulthood’. The precise boundaries between ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘adulthood are uncertain (Muncie 1999a.

5), although in contemporary western societies, the physical age o f our bodies conveys multiple meanings to our actions as well as shaping our individual identities (Skelton & Valentine 1998.

2). Brown (1998: 15) has argued that Griffin’s (1993) work on ‘adolescence’ has had two crucial impacts on later studies o f ‘youth’ and crime. Firstly, studies have been overly concerned with the behaviour o f young white males, who have been constructed as a social barometer’ (Brown 1998: 20) and, secondly, the voices of non-white, non-male and non­

heterosexual young people have been subject to even further exclusion than their counterparts.

In the years preceding World War II, young people’s passage into ‘adulthood’ was structured around their transitions to work and the additional rewards and responsibilities that it brought (Cashmore 1984). However, in post-war industrialised societies, an extended period of

education and training combined with relative affluence allowed many young people to acquire a personal economic identity, which was closely allied to consumption, style and leisure. The development o f goods and services specifically targeted to the young led to the invention of the

‘teenager’, thus raising status identities associated with age (Hebdige 1988). As a consequence o f young people’s new spending power, their reputation as a consumer group and their perceived lack o f respect towards their elders, Talcott Parsons (1942) coined the term ‘youth culture’, which gradually came to be positioned in opposition to adult culture (Muncie 1999a:

160). A growing generational conflict, regarded as classless, emerged as a result o f young people’s ‘youthfulness’, autonomous identity and growing independence rights. Much emphasis was placed on the threat that young people’s increasingly blatant consumerist lifestyles posed to the established adult social order and its future.

2.2.2. Y outh and resistance

Youth was created after 1955; after that it was recreated over and over again. The cycle o f teds, mods, rockers, skinheads, hippies, etc. is a regenerative one and tells us much about the vitality and resolve o f young people to stake out a difference between themselves and the rest o f society.

(Cashmore 1984: 9)

Many young people have not opposed the social order through direct action, but as Cashmore (1984) discussed, have responded to it by creating their own lifestyle identities. The contested social and cultural boundaries between adults and young people have provided a liminal and ambiguous space for the forging of identities o f resistance (Sibley 1995). Narratives o f ‘youth’

cultures have therefore acted in opposition to and outside of adult society and have been perceived as a symbolic critique of and a site o f resistance to adult authority and cultures (Newburn 1997; Muncie 1999a). Individuals or groups have perceived their place, or lack o f it, in society and some have reacted by participating in smaller, yet unique subcultures, whose diversity was obscured by Talcott Parson’s generalised view o f ‘youth’ culture. Subcultural approaches to understanding young people’s displays of social and spatial resistance have emphasised the hybridity, difference and diversity apparent in young people’s lives and have challenged earlier interpretations of ‘youth’ as a singular identity. The notion of subculture has appealed to geographers, who recognise that the neighbourhood acts as a territorial base for social life based on proximity and shared social space (Cater & Jones 1989).

In the 1970s, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) provided a new analytical approach to discourses of ‘youth’ that focused on difference. Their Marxist perspective considered how young people’s appropriation o f different styles and forms of expression enabled them to resist the hegemonic structures and ideologies o f a rigid class-based society.

The in-depth ethnographic research characteristic o f the CCCS prompted the rejection of the

generic category o f ‘youth’ and instead related ‘youth’ subcultures to social class. These findings challenged earlier views o f a ‘youth’ culture that were purely stratified by age.

Wilmott’s (1966) influential study, Adolescent Boys o f East London, concluded that the new teenage leisure culture did not replace existing class-based cultures, but existed alongside them.

Young people used their newly acquired disposable income to access locally situated resources (for example, clubs and discos), although class-based inequalities were influential in determining young people’s access to leisure and work opportunities. Later research, for example that by Cohen (1972), considered the succession o f working-class ‘youth’ subcultures, as a form o f resistance, in London’s East End. This argued that earlier changes in housing, employment and income trapped the majority of working-class young people between two contradictory ideologies - the new ideology of consumption and the traditional ideology of work, which had been undermined by mass manufacturing processes. Young people were particularly affected by the lack o f local employment opportunities and their search for work forced many to leave their neighbourhoods. In this context, working-class subcultures o f young people emerged in an attempt to retrieve and develop the socially cohesive elements of

‘communities’ that young people believed had been destroyed. For example, the shift to high- rise accommodation cleared many of the locally significant social spaces associated with the corner shop and the public house. It may be argued that through oppositional subcultures, working-class young people were not only seeking to carve out a space for themselves by contesting wider class conflict and ‘parent cultures’ (Muncie 1999a), but were reconstituting the sense o f ‘community’ that they perceived had been lost. However, more recently, Figueira- McDonough (1998) has argued for a more nuanced understanding. She maintains that young people residing in American inner city neighbourhoods in Phoenix, Arizona, did not universally reject the ideals o f the dominant cultures. The extent to which young people aspire to

‘mainstream’ ideals forms a central part o f this thesis’ understanding o f young people’s personal accounts of the social concepts o f ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’.

While recent research acknowledges the contributions o f the CCCS to ‘youth’ research, it has been criticised for its adult-centred interpretations, strong masculine overtones (McRobbie 2000: 14) and its overstating o f the common status attributes, associated with age, that young people were thought to share. Later approaches to ‘youth’ have demonstrated that young people’s claims to resources and power are influenced by their social and spatial positioning in society, in particular, their experiences o f difference connected to, for example, class, gender,

‘race’, disability, sexuality and the locality in which they live (Roche & Tucker 1997; Muncie 1999a). Therefore, the meanings o f the concept o f ‘youth’ vary over space and time and overlap with other important social and cultural identities. Although the analyses o f the CCCS explored the impact of class inequalities on young people’s possible engagements with deviancy, they

often assumed that the majority o f juvenile ‘delinquents’ were derived from lower social classes and their sense o f naive idealism re-imagined working-class life (Davies, Croall & Tyrer 1998).

A point o f debate between academics has been the extent to which ‘deviant’ qualities o f ‘youth’

subcultures are found in criminal and delinquent activities, as opposed to non-conformist lifestyles. It may be contended that ‘youth’ subcultures are a form o f resistance and it is their non-conformity and place beyond the ‘normal’ that remains subject to criminalisation (Muncie

1999a).

This section has demonstrated that ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ are socially constructed categories that are continually contested, resisted and (re-)negotiated by young people and adults (Valentine 2001). As a result, Brown (1998: 5) has pointed to their ‘increasingly controversial and confused’ nature in understandings of ‘youth’ and crime. Their construction as powerful cultural and ideological tools in adult imaginations has resulted in the production o f an age status that is simultaneously strange to adults, while continuing to be familiar (Griffin 1993;

Brown 1998). Constructions o f ‘youth’ are therefore best understood as a socially charged process o f definition and re-definition (Saraga 1998: 10), which has not only situated ‘youth’ on the margins, but has meant that already vulnerable young people, as a result of their risks o f crime, have found themselves increasingly marginalised by society. The extent to which criminality is bound up with constructions o f ‘youth’ will be explored in the following section, which illustrates the potential impact of constructions o f ‘youth’ and crime on the future exclusion of young people ‘at risk’ of crime.