Abstract
Barry Goldson (ed.) Youth in Crisis? ‘Gangs’, Territoriality and Violence, Routledge: London, 2011; 227 pp.: ISBN 9781843927525 (hbk), ISBN 9781843927518 (pbk)
Chris Cunneen and Rob White, Juvenile Justice: Youth and Crime in Australia (4th edition), Oxford University Press: Melbourne, 2011; 422 pp.: ISBN 9780195574098 (pbk)
Anyone familiar with the area of youth justice will understand the importance of continuing the debate about youth crime and deviancy. Youth crime seems to be a ‘problem’ existing since time immemorial that continues to garner significant interest from media, social, and political commentators. Commentary often assumes young people engaged in criminal behaviours are inherently criminal/deviant and in need of heavy regulation by police and other governmental authorities (Omaji, 2003). Unreliable statistics, pastoral/authoritarian generalisations about the ‘nature’ of young people, and moralistic sensationalism drive a law and order ethic to target young people with retributive ‘crackdowns’ to correct their wayward conduct (Carrington and Pereira, 2009). Young people who congregate in groups are especially demonised as ‘gangs’. In the rush to expunge youth ‘gangs’ from public spaces, recent preventative policies have expanded the net from criminal behaviours to a range of activities which have been cast more broadly as antisocial behaviours (Muncie, 2009; Squires and Stephen, 2005). Activities we would have in the past classified as leisure pursuits have been re-visioned as criminal in this new regime focused on the eradication of young people in various group formations. All this demonstrates the need for more work that critically reflects on these processes, and this makes the two books under review very important. They unsettle assumptions and misconceptions about young people, crime, and crisis, even though they do this in very different ways.
At first glance, these books appear very different in both structure and content, yet they both elaborate the importance of maintaining a critical, open dialogue about young people and crime. Youth in Crisis? was compiled following a University of Liverpool conference of the Youth Criminology/Youth Justice Network of the British Society of Criminology in 2009 and encompasses work spanning the United Kingdom, with sometimes diverse approaches to youth ‘gangs’. Cunneen and White’s leading text focuses on the Australian juvenile justice context and proceeds as an ‘introduction to the main concepts and issues of juvenile justice in a way that is simple and descriptive, yet critical’ (Cunneen and White, 2011: vii). Goldson brings together a diverse (and sometimes conflicting) range of academic perspectives that work against ‘the imagined crisis of youth’ (Goldson, 2011: 12) elaborated in media and politics, with a view to engaging with ‘the real crisis of knowledge deficit and the misappropriation of complex social phenomena’ (p. 12). Cunneen and White engage with a broad range of different issues inherent within youth justice systems in Australia to show how youth crime can be imagined differently across different elements of these systems. They also highlight how these systems are always contending with pressure from populist media and political discourses which present a ‘reality’ of youth crime that is not necessarily supported by research and statistics.
Both texts are detailed in their approach and are united by how they critically address issues related to young people. Each text is underpinned by a commitment to questioning the stereotypical, exaggerated, moralistic, and sensationalised perspectives that dominate discussions about young people and crime. The Goldson text uses contributions from leading international researchers in the area of youth justice discussing primarily empirical research conducted in the United Kingdom to show the idea of young people being in a state of crisis is a myth. Cunneen and White ground their discussion in youth justice research predominantly from Australia to highlight how young people have become so demonised that the preference seems to be that they ‘should not be seen or heard … [nor] allowed in the street or be visible in city centres or local neighbourhoods’ (p. vii). Goldson, too, notes how young people are: conceptualised as both the cause and the product of wider social problems and moral malaise: the ‘disintegration’ of the family; inadequate parenting; ‘fatherless’ households; indiscipline in schools; ‘softness’ in the courts; a corrosive ‘excuse culture’; the clamour for rights without associated responsibilities; and, ultimately, the ‘out of control’ progeny of an amoral and utterly dysfunctional ‘underclass’ – a ‘lost generation’. (p. 3)
These texts leave little doubt of the need to challenge assumptions about young people and their involvement in activities that have become criminalised through the targeting of youthful leisure as a public problem to be controlled. In particular, both texts emphasise that a range of social and structural issues informs the nexus of youth leisure and criminality.
History is a key factor upon which both books reflect. In the Goldson compilation, Pearson (Chapter 1) and Davies (Chapter 2) historicise crises of youth and demonstrate clearly that these crises are not as contemporary as commentators may lead us to believe – as Pearson (p. 34) rightly notes, ‘claims for the novelty of youth crime are quite preposterous’. Cunneen and White similarly challenge the taken for granted categories of youth, adolescence, and childhood and indicate their historicity, and social and cultural specificity. Contemporary media pleas about a need to increase policing to address rising youth violence are contested by Davies whose work shows police have been ‘arresting youths who were merely standing talking to their friends’ (p. 50) for at least 100 years. Cunneen and White also show how young people’s leisure activities have, perhaps ironically, come to be policed through increasing concern about young people’s welfare due to their involvement in the adult system. More recently, welfarist notions of child protection and saving have been marginalised in favour of a focus on young people taking responsibility for their criminal activities, but this shift has not necessarily produced a more socially just youth justice process. Now more than ever there is greater blurring of these categories, with competing explanations of youthful criminality simultaneously at work within youth justice systems.
Not unlike the youth justice systems discussed by Cunneen and White, the Goldson text contains compelling exchanges between the authors. The tensions between competing perspectives in Youth in Crisis? demonstrate the complexity of the field. For instance, Kintrea, Bannister and Pickering (Chapter 3) explore territoriality with young people, with some young participants in the study visually drawing clearly demarcated territories in which they can be part and which they cannot. Following this, McAlister, Scraton and Haydon (Chapter 5) and Aldridge, Ralphs and Medina (Chapter 4) move to challenge the boundedness of territory as a concept in itself, with each presenting research demonstrating increasing fluidity, mobility, and ‘blurring of spatial territories’ (Aldridge, Ralphs and Medina, p. 84). This research wears away at police assumptions about how young people create groups which ‘comprise territorial, street-based entities’ (Aldridge, Ralphs and Medina, p. 83). McAlister, Scraton and Haydon (Chapter 5) equally challenge the idea that young people create neat and tidy youth ‘gangs’ and instead highlight social, cultural, and historical factors informing how young people come together and diverge in different group formations over space, place, and time. In similar contradictory fashion, Pitts (Chapter 9) suggests violent youth gangs are well established, growing more violent, and require increased intervention to curb this trend. Squires (Chapter 8, p. 144) challenges this position, arguing that the increasing weaponisation of young people in groups comes as a direct response to ‘the related processes of criminalisation and “gangsterisation”. Squires contends that ‘cultivating a violent identity and carrying a weapon may seem like a sensible precaution’ (p. 155) in the midst of the burgeoning ‘gang talk’ (Hallsworth, Chapter 10: 194) engaged in by media and politicians. By drawing together competing perspectives, Goldson’s collection challenges us to question our position: Are we comfortable with creating a discursive space where ‘youth workers have been known to attempt to have their young people identified as “gang” members precisely so they can access services and support that would otherwise not be available’ (Hallsworth, Chapter 10: 195)?
Cunneen and White draw together an enormous field of research about the potted, ad hoc, sometimes ineffective, and at times useful, sphere of youth justice in Australia. Their work shows how a myriad of perspectives come together to influence an ever-widening network of strategies, frameworks, departments, organisations, conventions, policies, and players which comprise Australian youth justice systems. The strength of the Cunneen and White text lies in its elaboration of the complex role of contexts of class, Indigeneity, ethnicity, and gender at the nexus between young people and youth justice systems. These contexts collide, for instance, in young people hanging out in groups: ‘The mobilisation into crowds simulates the positive experience that young people seek in collective bonding. Periods of boredom and the mundane can be broken by the exciting and the extraordinary - this is the promise of the crowd’ (Cunneen and White: 145). Goldson’s text likewise indicates the variation within these crowding contexts, with Batchelor (Chapter 6) and Young (Chapter 7) focusing on girls in youth ‘gangs’. Batchelor suggests young female gangsters exist and are engaged in gang activities in ways that transgress how we have traditionally thought about the involvement of girls in gangs. Young (Chapter 7) challenges this stance, suggesting that girl’s involvement is not necessarily gang-related so much as it is anchored in a complex social context of neglect and trauma, a context that politically motivated interventions tend to gloss over.
Cunneen and White examine these contexts in such detail that it makes it difficult for the reader to ignore an obvious question: If state intervention in young people’s social, cultural, and at times criminal contexts only leads to negative outcomes, why do governments continue to strongly sanction this approach? It is important to note, as Cunneen and White do, that challenging punitive approaches does not mean ‘that any coercive measures whatsoever should never be used’ (p. 257). Rather, coercive approaches can be useful, but only when they are ‘respectful of young people’ and they do ‘not serve to criminalise their activities and very presence in the public domain’ (p. 257). Cunneen and White leave no doubt in the reader’s mind that there is significant room for improvement in relation to these issues in Australia: ‘when a young person returns to their previous environment, and even though they might have changed and developed in some personal way, the general social conditions within which they operate remain the same’ (p. 323). For instance, Anglo-centric discursive understandings of public space held by police continue to funnel Indigenous young people into youth justice systems at rates which are unquestionably discriminatory, even though being ‘seen, and to watch others, is part of a ritual process of identity formation and affirmation’ (p. 127) for all young people. Failing to adequately consider and engage with the social and cultural contexts of young people like these is, according to Juvenile Justice, the ultimate failing of youth justice systems in Australia.
Taken together, these books embody a strong antidote to the mainstream discourses which continue to demonise young people, and make it clear we need to move towards what Goldson and Muncie (2006: 226) describe as a ‘progressively tolerant, human rights compliant, non-criminalising, inclusionary and participative’ youth justice approach. Regardless of the perspective one takes, the Goldson book represents a more complex, ironic (Haraway, 1991) engagement with perpetually maligned groupings of young people. The collection reminds us of the dangers that can open up if academics that ‘critique conventional understandings … are often considered “rogue sociologists”’’ (White: Chapter 11, p. 200) and that the more fruitful position is to engage the space between oppositional ideas in favour of a neat, less problematic account.
Similarly, Juvenile Justice urges the reader to think outside the boundaries of well-worn populist arguments that ‘once chronic offenders are locked up the juvenile crime rate will be reduced significantly’, and reminds us that ‘[c]onsiderable criminological research on these issues suggests differently’ (Cunneen and White: 301). Even in the move towards processes seeking to restore the impact of the offence by bringing together victim and offender, the context in which the offence happened may be discussed but no less sidelined. As Cunneen and White suggest, ‘[u]nless the responses to youthful offending begin to address wider structural issues of (among others) unemployment, poverty, and homelessness, it is hard to see what, in fact, is being “restored” for the offender’ (p. 376).
Overall, these two books take us forward to what ought to be a common goal for youth justice: foregrounding human rights and letting the lives and experiences of young people tell the story rather than listening to the oft wayward perspectives of politicians and media commentators. Collectively, these texts highlight the importance of continuing to stretch, out-think, contest, and wear away at the concepts of youth and justice, and youth and criminality, at their points of intersection, on the promise of moving towards a future in which they are perhaps outdone on their own terms.