Abstract
This article reports on a study which comprised secondary analysis of 112 semi-structured interviews with 50 young people who had desisted from offending and 62 who had never offended. The findings highlight the need to conceptualize desistance as a two stage process. Desistance tales, which featured in the interviews, describe the events leading up to the point at which offenders ceased to offend. However, desistance also involves staying straight and the challenges of this second phase are illuminated. Desisters and non-offenders experienced a lack of kudos, reported being bullied and were tempted to offend, although for desisters this was more pervasive and covered a wider range of offences. The point of divergence was in respect of the pleasures associated with offending, which many desisters observed were now missing from their lives. It is clear that both desisters and non-offenders have something to lose by not offending and that maintaining their non-offending status constitutes a struggle not previously reflected in adult representations of youth. That non-offending is achieved at a price is evidenced by the trials and tribulations they encounter. Finally, the advantages and limitations of secondary analysis of qualitative data are considered and the method is recommended for criminological researchers.
Background
This article reports the findings of a study which comprised secondary analysis of 112 semi-structured interviews with 62 young people who had never offended and 50 young people who had desisted from offending. The research question underlying the study was how young people maintain their non-offending status. While young people as offenders have dominated the social, political and research landscape, young people as non-offenders remain relatively neglected. Young non-offenders are not alone in this respect, but are similar to other ‘non-groups’ who refrain from engaging in certain behaviours. Mullaney (2001: 3–4, emphasis added) observes that:
identity theorists give virtually no attention to those behaviours in which individuals do not engage, the assumption being that those acts are not influential … those actions in which we actively partake influence our identity by becoming available for evaluation by others. The extension of this assumption, then, is that our identities remain unaffected by actions in which we fail to engage, resist, or simply do not perform.
Focusing on acts which are performed rather than on acts which are not performed underestimates the effort required by those attempting to maintain the state of ‘inaction’ – in this case, resistance to offending. Mullaney (2001: 4) coined the term ‘never identities’ to refer to those who are engaged in ‘not doings’ which are ‘not merely absent acts, but ones that involve resistance to a behaviour perceived to be desirable or tempting in some way’. In this article, not offending is the ‘not doing’ which is examined and whether young people sustain effortlessly their non-offending is explored. The focus is on two groups of young people who are currently not offending, those who have never offended and those who are desisting. That somewhat more attention has been paid to those who offend and then cease (Maruna and Immarigeon, 2004) than to non-offenders is explained by the fact that, as Mullaney (2001) notes, if a social actor has previously engaged in a behaviour which subsequently ceases, this behaviour is considered a valid subject of enquiry. According to Muncie (2009: 19), ‘the peak age of known offending is 17 or 18 for males and 15 for females’. So, although many people offend in their youth, many also desist. Matza (1964) was one of the first to conceptualize young people’s desistance, although without using the actual term. Critical of criminological theory at the time, Matza (1964: 22) argued that it had ‘an embarrassment of riches’ as its theories predicted more crime than was committed and did not explain the large proportion of offenders who desist. According to him, individuals participate in ‘delinquent acts’ over a period of time while simultaneously maintaining a largely conventional approach to life by virtue of ‘drift’: drift makes delinquency possible or permissible by temporarily removing the restraints that ordinarily control members of society, but of itself it implies no irreversible commitment or compulsion that would suffice to thrust the person into the act’ (Matza, 1964: 181). While Matza alerted criminologists to the need to understand crime cessation, as well as causation, ‘drift’ actually explains better why young people move in and out of offending than why they finally desist.
The last decade has seen a renewed interest in desistance, exemplified by the first international edited collection on the topic (Maruna and Immarigeon, 2004). A longitudinal study of pathways in and out of offending of a cohort of 4300 young people in Edinburgh has desistance as a key focus (McAra and McVie, 2010). Farrall and Calverley (2006) provide an excellent overview of theories (from maturational to social bonds) which have been expounded to explain desistance, and of the factors identified in empirical studies which correlate with it. Much of this research is about why people stop offending. Maruna (2001: 27, emphasis in original) has been key in shaping an interest in desistance as a process and suggests that ‘the bigger question is how ex-offenders are able to make good’. Using narrative theory to inform his research, Maruna (2001) investigated how ex-prisoners exit from offending and concludes that offenders need to make sense of their lives and develop a coherent identity in order to desist. This study and others (Burnett, 2004; Leibrich, 1993; Sommers et al., 1994) focused on desistance by adults with extensive offending careers. In Barry’s (2006) youth transitions study, desisters (and persisters) aged 18–33 were described as heavily involved in offending. By contrast, the current study considers the perspectives of young people who desisted in their teenage years with inevitably shorter offending careers (see details later). It also examines the experience of desisters compared with non-offenders, whereas others (Barry, 2006; Maruna, 2001) have compared desisters with persistent offenders. Situating desisters analytically adjacent to those who have never offended enables a shift towards conceptualizing them as current non-offenders. Desisters may have shared a past with persistent offenders, as they have both offended. However, they share their current experience, that of maintaining their resistance to offending, with non-offenders. Importantly, therefore, this study focuses on one of Mullaney’s (2001) ‘not doings’ – in this case, not offending – and explores the perspectives of teenage desisters and never offenders.
By comparison with desisters, the criminological literature on those who have never offended is rather disparate. They most frequently comprise a comparison or control group for offenders and multiple differences between the two have been identified. In largely quantitative studies findings have indicated that offenders have personality disorders (Ullrich and Andreas, 2004), lower levels of emotional intelligence (Moriarty et al., 2001) and different perceptions of social stimuli (Topalli, 2005) compared with non-offenders. In some studies in which non-offenders comprise the comparison or control groups, their existence as a distinct group is noted, but thereafter they are not discussed (Bushway et al., 2003). Second, non-offenders are portrayed in the criminological literature as innocents. This is premised on a view of childhood as a time of innocence, which, according to Brown (2005: 5), emanates from the work of Rousseau. The finding that not all non-offenders are innocent is discussed in an article on typologies, in which streetwise resisters as well as innocents were identified among the non-offending sample (Murray, 2009). Third, non-offenders are depicted as victims of crime (Walklate, 2000), but as offenders can be equally (or more) victimized than non-offenders, this has limited relevance here. Finally, they are portrayed as conformists, although, as Young (1996: 42) comments, they are not in themselves the object of study: ‘the notion of conformity demands attention for its possessing a group of criminological concern. Their function is to reflect the nature and shape of the criminal.’ This assumption of conformity is challenged by the findings and is returned to later when the norms which are operative for young people, as opposed to adults, are discussed. Finally, the resilience literature is of relevance. Resilience, ‘a capacity to do well despite adverse experience’ (Gilligan, 2000: 37) is a concept which explains, often in psychological terms, the unexpectedness of pro-social outcomes in the face of adverse circumstances. In respect of offending, resilience can be invoked when risk factors do not accurately predict the expected outcome, that is, when high risk young people do not offend nor engage in anti-social behaviour. Gilgun (2005) challenges the position, outlined in Werner’s (2000) review, that the mere presence of protective factors in the lives of children and young people is sufficient to explain pro-social outcomes in adverse circumstances and argues that resilience indicates an active use of the resources available to individuals. It is this more active interpretation of resilience which informs the current study.
The Study
Secondary analysis was conducted on 112 semi-structured interviews with non-offenders and desisters in their teenage years. The aim of the original government funded study (Jamieson et al., 1999) in relation to these two groups was to investigate why they did not offend and why they desisted. A self-report survey was completed by participants in six secondary schools. It was used to determine the offending status of young people and to identify interviewees. Young people who wished to be interviewed completed an attachment to the self-report survey giving their contact details. The questionnaire included a list of offences (theft, property offences and offences involving personal violence) and participants were asked to indicate whether they had committed any of the listed offences ‘ever’ and, if so, whether they had committed these ‘in the last 12 months’. This distinguished the desisters (who reported having offended in the past, but not in the previous 12 months) from those young people who reported no offences at all. The research was conducted in two geographical areas, both medium-sized Scottish towns with crime rates close to the Scottish average. Westburgh is an established town which developed around heavy industry and, in particular, shipbuilding, which is now in decline. Eastburgh is a new town, with an economy developed around new technologies.
The sample comprised 59 girls and 53 boys aged 13–19, and included two ethnic minority young people (reflecting the small percentage of ethnic minority citizens in Scotland). Of the 112 young people, 62 were non-offenders and 50 were desisters. Almost all of the desisters reported encounters with the police, although not for every offence, and this often entailed interventions such as a visit to their home or a warning, rather than a formal charge. Only eight desisters had been referred further to the youth justice system. The sample’s average age of onset for offending was 14, which is close to the national average of 15 (Budd and Sharp, 2005), and the average length of offending was around two years. All 50 desisters reported at least three offences. The most common (in order) were theft, shoplifting, fighting, vandalism and fire raising. Theft included vehicles and credit cards. Shoplifting, the second most commonly reported offence, ranged from trivial items to goods worth over £100. Fighting was usually minor skirmishes, but there were a few serious incidents which resulted in victims suffering cuts or a broken nose and, in the most severe case, requiring hospitalization. Acts of vandalism included graffiti, spray painting and smashing telephone boxes. Fire raising almost invariably entailed fires started in open spaces in the vicinity of their homes.
The original interviews had been audio-recorded for the primary study and so full transcriptions were available and had already been entered for the purposes of analysis into NVivo, a computer software package for qualitative data analysis. An inductive, hypothesis generating rather than hypothesis testing approach to analysis was adopted, in keeping with grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Concepts were not defined prior to coding, but emerged during data analysis. The use of NVivo encourages a systematic approach and every segment of the text was coded from scratch, rather than relying on the original coding. However, as Charmaz (2004: 981) asserts, ‘a few descriptive codes and a powerful computer program do not suffice’. Two influences were key in the analysis. First, Buston (1997) usefully distinguishes between descriptive and conceptual nodes, with the former being nodes at which participants’ responses to a specific question asked by the researcher are located. By contrast, conceptual nodes contain text to which the researcher attributes a common meaning to respondents’ talk (e.g. stigma), even when this had not been made explicit by participants. Second, grounded theory emphasizes the importance of the production of core categories. The criteria for a core category are that it is central, that it relates easily to many other categories and that the indicators of the concept (usually in the form of excerpts from the interviews) appear frequently in the data (Strauss, 1987: 36). It was with these two precepts in mind that the analysis for the current study was carried out.
Secondary analysis of qualitative data
Heaton (2004: 38) identifies five categories of secondary analysis of qualitative data: supra analysis, supplementary analysis, re-analysis, amplified analysis and assorted analysis. It is the first of these types, where the researcher ‘examines pre-existing data from a new perspective’ (Heaton, 2004: 39), which was adopted in the current study. Given the wealth of data often generated on qualitative research projects, it is likely that much of the material remains unexplored when studies end. Secondary data analysis enables such data to be maximized. Yet, while secondary analysis of quantitative data is not uncommon, the re-use of qualitative data is. There has been renewed interest in the latter, with special issues dedicated to the topic (Barbour and Eley, 2007). This attention was re-kindled by the establishment of what is now referred to as the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) Qualidata to encourage researchers to deposit and access qualitative data (Moore, 2007).
The clear advantage of re-analysis is the huge savings in terms of cost and time. There is no access to seek, no travel to research sites required and no interviews to be conducted and transcribed. However, as with all social science research methods, there are limitations to the method. These are well documented elsewhere, either specifically in relation to re-analysis of qualitative data (Heaton, 2004) or in the context of secondary analysis of quantitative data, but applicable in part to qualitative data (Dale et al., 2004). One key challenge which authors identify is the degree of compatibility between the already existing data and the new research question. The key criterion for a strong ‘fit’ between the purpose of re-analysis and the nature of the original data is that the dataset has to be able to answer the research questions posed by the re-analyst. Inevitably, the data from the original study more closely reflected the original focus. Had the new research question, how young people maintain their resistance to offending, been the starting point, some of the original questions could have been omitted from the interview schedule and replaced by ones which enabled further exploration of the new focus.
A second limitation is that the facility for the researcher to probe in interviews (Gillham, 2000) is removed in re-analysis. However, this is ameliorated by qualitative interviews which produce rich and varied data, and this study was no exception. Third, because the secondary analyst is re-using data outside of the original context in which they were collected (Silva, 2007), it is possible that re-analysis may result in some loss of meaning (Goodwin and O’Connor, 2006). This is particularly pertinent to qualitative research because of the centrality of context in the construction of meaning. Purists contend that data can only be analysed meaningfully by the researcher collecting them (which has implications for research teams as well as re-analysts), while others take a middle ground position. Bryman (2004: 415), for instance, points out that the issue of context is less problematic when re-analysing interview transcripts than using ethnographic field notes. It is also suggested that it is less of an issue for re-analysts who were part of the primary research team, as was the case in this study and for over half of the researchers (55%) in Heaton’s (2004: 37) review. Finally, there is the matter of participants’ consent. Given that secondary analysis of qualitative data is evolving and that many researchers may not have considered this option when the primary study took place, consent for re-analysis may not have been sought, in which case the researcher has to decide whether the consent given in the original study extends to the proposed re-analysis. In this study, participants had given the team permission to analyse the data and disseminate the findings on the premise that the study aimed to understand young people’s resistance to and desistance from offending. This remit was considered broad enough to encompass the proposed re-analysis and it was therefore not considered necessary to return to participants for their further consent. With growing interest in re-using qualitative data, researchers are now being encouraged to seek the explicit consent of participants to future re-analysis as a matter of course (Heaton, 2008), and this is certainly the preferred position.
Findings
According to Farrall and Bowling (1999: 260), several qualitative studies found that ‘desisters experienced a period of re-evaluation before coming to their decision to desist’. A distinctive feature of many qualitative interviews with adult desisters has been the desistance tale or ‘coherent narrative’ about their cessation (Maruna, 2001). Similar stories were told by desisters in the current study, although not by all of them. 1 For those who did tell desistance tales, most involved encounters with the police, a sense of guilt or punishment by parents. Despite the link between desistance and employment (Flood-Page et al., 2000) and gaining a life partner (Farrall, 2002), not many desisters mentioned either, as few were in full time paid work or in a long term relationship. Police intervention, even when no charge ensued, was reported to be particularly effective in encouraging young people to desist. Typically, one 14-year-old told how he had stopped offending two years ago because of the impact the police coming to his house had on him; he had on this occasion stolen gnomes from neighbouring gardens. The reported influence of these and other informal interventions supports McAra and McVie’s (2010) call for increased use of diversionary strategies in the criminal justice system.
What was noticeable in the young people’s accounts of desistance was that there were few of the dramatic tales of adult desisters, such as the moments of ‘conversion’ described in Leibrich’s (1993) study, presumably because young people’s offending is less entrenched. The most vivid accounts in the current study were when desisters were taken into police custody, as was this teenager who was picked up by the police for being in possession of a knife:
I went into the cell and I cried my heart out and my Mum had to come and get us, and never again, never again, no way … That was my only dealings with them and I would never do it again, never. It’s not worth it. When I see the police, I do, I shake. (male desister, 15)
While stories of how they exited from offending did feature in some desister interviews, it was the challenges which they faced in sustaining their desistance which predominated. Likewise, the 62 non-offenders spoke recurrently about similar challenges. The key trials and tribulations are outlined in turn below.
Missing out on the pleasures associated with offending
With the advent of cultural criminology came a renewed recognition of the pleasures associated with offending. As Muncie (2009: 224) explains, ‘the starting point is Jack Katz’s (1988) seminal work on the “seductions of crime” in which he maintains that individual emotions, such as excitement, are central to the criminal event’. These same emotions were reported by many desisters in the current study, who reflected on the ‘thrill’, ‘fun’, ‘buzz’ and ‘excitement’ of offending. Fire starting, a phenomenon explored by Presdee (2000), was especially common in one of the two sites of the study, where there were large open spaces behind many of the houses and desisters referred to the thrill of engaging in this activity. Describing how he set fires alight in the woods near his home, one desister explained how this provided many hours of fun. Several desisters compared the excitement gained from these and other illegal pursuits, particularly vandalism, with the boredom experienced with mainstream activities such as youth clubs. Cultural criminologists posit boredom as a reaction to the modern condition, with a ‘political and economic history’ (Ferrell, 2004: 290), and regard its antithesis, excitement, as highly relevant to crime: ‘excitement, engagement, illicit kicks and explosive possibilities, [are] all thrown up against the relentless machinery of modern boredom’ (2004: 295).
Interestingly, not all desisters valued the pleasures associated with offending, and more girls than boys dismissed the idea. As one said, ‘stealing cars, because you’re just going to kill yourself and kill other people, that’s just total stupidity. I don’t see the thrill in that’ and another thought that offending was ‘daft, there’s no need for it. You can have fun without doing things like that.’ However, what is revealing about such discourse is that these desisters felt the need to assert that it was not a ‘thrill’ or ‘fun’ for them, the implication being that others did experience it as pleasurable. This was made even more explicit by a 15-year-old who thought that ‘some people can’t help it. They just get a buzz from it.’
Few non-offenders alluded to the excitement of offending and those who did accompanied their accounts by firm assurances that they had not offended: ‘Tipping up a car – that’s fun. They just all get around and tip it up and sometimes set fire to it. I’ve gone past when they’ve been doing it, but I’ve never done anything’ (male non-offender, age 14, emphasis in original). For this non-offender, while the upturning of the car is presented as ‘fun’ and setting the vehicle alight is not directly commented on, it might reasonably be assumed that the latter was also part of the appeal, given that it was mentioned. The comment that ‘I’ve gone past when they’ve been doing it’ emphasizes his peripheral presence; that he is on the outside looking in adds a whimsical aspect to the scene.
Clearly, the appeal of offending in terms of its thrill or excitement does not disappear once young people desist, so this is something they lose by desisting. McNeill (2006: 46) asserts that ‘offender management services need to think of themselves less as providers of correctional treatment ... and more as supporters of desistance processes’. For professionals working with young desisters, it is worth considering that replacements for lost pleasures might be prioritized in post-offending programmes, given that this aspect particularly differentiated the ex-offender from the never offender here.
Resisting temptation
Twenty-five of the 62 non-offenders (40%) reported that they had been tempted to offend, with shoplifting the most common source of temptation. The degree varied from those who had actually begun to commit an offence to those for whom it had been merely a fleeting thought. The following excerpt illustrates the latter:
I’ve never thought about attacking somebody or mugging or stabbing. It’s just like ‘no way’, but I have thought about stealing something, but it’s only like a split second. I know I’d never do it. It’s just not worth it. There’s no need to steal either. I just wouldn’t do it. (female non-offender, age 18)
Even those who asserted their non-offending status strongly, as did this teenager, ‘I would say I was a complete non-offender’, still acknowledged that they had contemplated (in this case) shoplifting: ‘I have to admit lots of times I’ve gone into shops and thought “well, I could easily nick something”, but I’ve never.’ What was striking about these temptation stories was how close some non-offenders had come to shoplifting:
I suppose sometimes it all looks so easy to go into a shop and take something, you know. You’re looking about and there’s nobody about, nobody would see me and you’ve got something in your hand and you know you’ve got enough money to pay for it, right? At that moment you’ve got an adrenaline rush – ‘should I just walk out the shop?’ (female non-offender, age 16)
Many non-offenders considered at length in the interview the push and pull factors of tempting scenarios. The pull factors were often juxtaposed with an assurance that they would not actually offend, for example: ‘If you see something in a shop, I don’t mean I’d be tempted to actually commit an offence and take it, but you think to yourself “aye, I’d really like to have that stereo”.’ They variously reflected on the moral implications of offending, the consequences of being caught and an awareness of the resulting shame or guilt they would feel, while at the same time acknowledging the temptation.
Braithwaite (1989) identified shame or guilt as key to desistance. These were often mentioned by desisters and non-offenders as a reason for not succumbing to temptation. More non-offenders (52%) spontaneously mentioned shame or guilt than desisters (30%), although, as participants were not systematically asked about either, caution needs to be exercised about this finding. Desisters were more likely to cite external deterrents to explain their resistance to temptation: ‘I climbed down the back into the car park. There’s hundreds of cars, but it was tempting just to smash a window, see what’s in it, but, it’s too risky, too many police and that about’ (male desister, age 14, emphasis added).
Clearly, all the desisters in the study had been tempted in the past, as they had already offended, although not (according to the self-report survey) in the last 12 months. However, the majority said they continued to be tempted to offend, as was this older teenager:
I felt like flinging a brick through this person’s window. Now, he used to bully me a lot, so I was getting really annoyed. Every day it got worse and worse, so my anger built up. I waited outside his door at 1 o’clock in the morning, picked up a brick and I was going to throw it, but I stopped myself because if I got caught with flinging the brick, he’d have just got me a lot worse the next day, so I decided not to and just left. I went back home, back to my bed. (male desister, 18)
For desisters who continued to socialize with their offending friends (as opposed to those who avoided them), their presence was key. One desister, for example, who had been tempted to drive away a car when the keys were left in the ignition, said: ‘You’d be more likely to do it if you’d a bit to drink with your mates and your mates are used to breaking the law and you’re with them’ (male desister, age 15).
It is not the purpose of this article to revisit the strategies employed by young people to maintain their non-offending (see Murray, 2010). However, it is relevant to note that despite the fact that few non-offenders and even fewer desisters entirely separated themselves physically from offending peers, they did employ strategies which enabled them to occupy a separate conceptual space, for example, by ‘othering’, that is, ascribing to offenders different and usually negative characteristics. As Hall (2000) notes, it is by accentuating difference that identities are forged, so such strategies were important to the maintenance of non-offending.
There were two characteristics which distinguished the temptation experienced by desisters from that of non-offenders. First, the constant nature of temptation for many desisters was evident, as the following excerpt from a teenager, who had shoplifted on many occasions, indicates: ‘I’ve thought about it all the time when I’ve gone into shops. I’ve always had the thought in my head “I could just go and get that” and I know how easy it could be sometimes’ (male desister, age 13). Second, desisters were tempted to do a wider range of offences than non-offenders, including fighting, reckless driving, ‘breaking in’, stealing vehicles, ‘drinking on the streets’, ‘smashing windows’, ‘writing on walls’, theft and shoplifting. These differences aside, desisters and non-offenders shared the temptation to offend and this is further evidence that the maintenance of resistance constitutes a struggle for both.
Being bullied
Bullying accounts for the highest proportion of telephone calls made by children and young people aged 5–18 to a national helpline (ChildLine, 2005: 15), and is a matter of increasing concern (Ahmed and Braithwaite, 2005). In this study, a substantial minority of young people reported they had been bullied, either physically or verbally. The worst reports of bullying, in terms of physical impact, were from two male non-offenders: ‘I got my head split at school, a guy just lobbed a brick at me’ and ‘the boy ran up behind me, picked me up, spun me round and just slammed my head into the ground, so I ended up losing a tooth’. In terms of psychological impact, a female non-offender who had been ‘battered’ reported feeling suicidal. The following passage gives an indication of the widespread nature of bullying: ‘I was 16 and desperate to leave. Our school was full of bullies basically, so it was quite hard to go to school and enjoy it, but you all just – everybody got used to it’ (female non-offender, age 18).
Less serious than the physical assaults, at least judging by young people’s reported reaction, were verbal taunts, such as: ‘it’s not like a posh place we live in, but the people from [there], we always get kind of slagged off for being posh’. One of the difficulties reported by many desisters was that just because they had stopped offending, this did not mean that their peers also ceased. One male desister had been bribed not to tell about an (unspecified) offence he had witnessed, which involved a boy who was one of a gang who ‘had bullied me a lot, so I was pure scared to tell anybody in case I got a kicking’.
So what, if any, is the relationship between non-offending and bullying? A connection was made by several young people. One reported that when he stopped offending: ‘I’ve had my hand split open which I’ve still got the scar, and my thumb slashed open, all my knuckles were burst once, so I’ve had quite a bad time with bullying since.’ Another suggested, as does this 15-year-old, that their peers had been bullied into offending:
Why do you think some people offend while others don’t?
People I know that are in trouble, they’ve had family problems and have been bullied before.
They’ve been bullied?
Yes.
When you say bullied, do you mean that they’ve been bullied into doing things – offending?
Yes.
One non-offender, who disclosed that she had been bullied for several years and had been exhorted on numerous occasions to shoplift, said ‘they’d stop if I’d just do it [offend], but I’m not going to’ and another ‘they expect people who don’t offend, people who they’re bullying, just to stand back and take stuff’.
Several strategies for dealing with bullies in the street, such as ‘you get edgy when you go past those kind of people – you do – you’re like “look straight on, just walk”’ (emphasis in original). One girl resorted to pretending that she was speaking to someone on her mobile:
… every time I walk past this group of folk, I pick my phone up and say ‘aye Mum, I’m coming up the road now’. And if the phone really started ringing, I don’t know what I’d do. I’d just have to keep on walking. (female non-offender, age 14, emphasis in original)
These threats outside the home echo Harden’s (2000) observation from a study of nine to 15-year-olds that they associated risk with the public rather than private sphere. While there is a growing literature on bullying (Smith and Shu, 2000; Spilsbury, 2002), this link between bullying and non-offending was not made and is another challenge which young people face as they try not to offend.
Foregoing kudos
That kudos, an appreciation by young people of particular actions, attributes or possessions of their peers, may be gained from the act of offending is recognized by Salmon (1992: 118):
[A]s against the traditional image of the young law-breaker as a social isolate acting alone and in secret, the acts of vandalism, theft and aggression reported by these young people are typically well publicised and committed in company. Of paramount importance to those involved is their reputation in the peer group.
In this study, awareness of their relative lack of kudos among their peers was captured in the terminology which the young people (particularly non-offenders) used to describe themselves, such as ‘the goody ones’, ‘the angel boy’ and ‘goody two shoes’. They were also conscious of how differently their (offending) friends might regard them if they were to offend in future: ‘Some of them, who commit crimes themselves, would probably say “oh yes, good on you, you’ve done something bad in your life”’ (male non-offender, age 15).
The choice between being accepted as ‘one of the crowd’ and potentially jeopardizing a close friendship is captured by this girl, who, asked what effect it would have on her friends if she were to offend in future, replied: ‘Well if it was my best friend, I don’t think she’d be too happy with me, but my other friends would just say “well, you’re one of the crowd now”’ (female non-offender, age 15).
Not offending was frequently portrayed as a deficit, and non-offenders variously described themselves as ‘scared’, ‘too chicken’ and ‘I don’t think I’d have the courage to offend. I wouldn’t dare to do it.’ There also emerged a perception of an imperative to offend, as indicated by the following examples: ‘well, I don’t agree with it. I don’t see why you have to steal, break into cars, all that kind of thing’; ‘I don’t really think – see – why people have to offend’; ‘I don’t see why I should go and do what I don’t need to do. I know everybody does it, but, well I’m just too busy really’ (emphases added).
Some desisters recognized their lesser status post desistance. One tellingly said that she was regarded as the ‘black sheep’ among her offending peers, and others reported having fewer friends since they had stopped offending. Lack of kudos was related to being ‘different’ or ‘the odd one out’ because non-offending was seen to be a choice made by the minority of young people. A view emerged from the interviews that ‘normal people’ offend, as the following excerpt indicates: ‘Well you got your real baddies, you’ve got your wee goody two-shoes, then you’ve just got the normal people in the middle, a wee mixture’ (female non-offender, age 15).
That offending was ‘normal’ was related to the belief that it was widespread, as was evident in one male desister’s assertion that ‘I mean it doesn’t bother me, like crime’s going on all the time’ and, referring to his friends, they ‘still do usual things like they go in to the town on Saturday nights, stand about, fight, take drugs, things like that’. A female desister stated, ‘I mean most of my class they’ll steal and they’ll smoke and drink and everything.’ Others suggested that everyone offends, as did Sean:
And do your friends’ views or feelings about offending make any difference to you?
No.
Why not?
It doesn’t bother me. I find if you’ve, if you offend – I mean everyone has at one point. (male desister, age 15)
Others referred to the acceptability of offending in their community: ‘Yeah. There’s quite a lot. Like drugs and things, they think that’s acceptable, quite a lot of people stealing things and beating up people … mainly teenagers roughly my age’ (male desister, age 15).
Less expected was the finding in the current study that the same view, albeit less frequent than desisters, was also evident in the discourse of those who had reported never offending. For example, a 14-year-old said: ‘I know that practically everybody in my class does it.’ Another, asked about their family’s attitude to offending, replied: ‘well my Dad when he was a bit younger he was a little bit wild and he was in X [town], where lots of people get into trouble – that’s just normal.’
That young offenders are conscious of the kudos gained from offending confirms the findings from other studies in which offending is used as a strategy for gaining, albeit temporarily, status and recognition (Barry, 2006). What the current study highlights is that desisters and non-offenders are acutely aware of the lower status assigned to them by their peers when they refrain from offending. Interestingly, lack of kudos appeared to be less of an issue for desisters than for non-offenders, perhaps because desisters had already gained kudos from their previous offending. They were also more likely to be currently engaged in anti-social behaviour (such as under-age drinking). These excursions into anti-social behaviour enabled them to save face in front of offending peers and served as a mechanism by which they could gain kudos without overstepping the line into illegality.
Discussion
Mullaney (2001) was the starting point for this article, providing as he does a conceptual rationale for exploring young people’s perspectives of not offending as one of his ‘not doings’. The findings here show that both desisters and non-offenders have something to lose by not offending and that maintaining their non-offending status is achieved at a price, as evidenced by the trials and tribulations they encounter. Derrida’s (1981) work on binary oppositions sheds light on why this may be different for young people than for adults. Derrida’s observation is that contrasting terms, such as masculine and feminine, depend on each another for meaning. As Collins and Maybin (2000: 20), writing on Derrida, state, there are many binary oppositions and they are:
all governed by the distinction either/or. If we accept this, it establishes conceptual order. Binary oppositions classify and organise the objects, events and relations of the world. They make decision possible and they govern thinking in everyday life, as well as philosophy, theory and the sciences.
Derrida further asserts that binary oppositions are rarely neutral, but rather that one is dominant or privileged, which provides binary oppositions with explanatory power. To illustrate, in western society the first words in italic of the following binary oppositions are usually regarded as the dominant or privileged pole: white/black, presence/absence, masculine/feminine and mind/body. By drawing attention to the existence of binary oppositions with a dominant pole which underlie belief systems, Derrida challenges the essentialism inherent in the dualisms. Using Derrida’s conceptualization, the binary opposition at the centre of the current study is offending/non-offending. The dominant pole, at least in respect of adults, is non-offending. For adults, for whom non-offending is the dominant pole, non-offending is hailed as the norm, as exemplified by Bottoms et al.’s (2004: 380) assertion that desistance is ‘coming back from criminality to the (majority) conformist position’. However, this is an adultist perspective. The normative view of offending which emerged in this study suggests that, in contrast to adults, for young people the dominant pole in the binary opposition is offending and Meisenhelder’s ‘pull of normality’ is in a direction towards (not away from) offending. Resistance to offending, evidenced by the trials and tribulations reported here, is against this pull. This explains the compensatory strategies, such as engaging in anti-social behaviour, as a face saving device in front of offending peers, which would not be required if non-offending was, in Derrida’s terms, the dominant pole for young people. This inverted world has an impact on adult understandings of young people’s resistance to offending. As non-offending is the modus operandi in the adult world, to be an adult non-offender requires less effort. As evidenced by the trials and tribulations reported, to be a non-offender is far more challenging for young people than it is for adults and maintenance of resistance constitutes a struggle not previously reflected in adult representations of youth.
The findings are also significant in that they highlight the need to conceptualize desistance as a two stage process. Desistance tales describe the event(s) leading up to the point at which offenders cease to offend and they were present in the interviews with young desisters, as in the narratives of adult desisters (Maruna, 2001), albeit with some differences, as discussed. However, desistance involves not only the point at which desisters start to go straight, of which desistance tales are an audit, but also involves staying straight. The perspectives reported here have illuminated the challenges of this second phase. It is also in maintaining non-offending that the experiences of desisters and non-offenders converge and what has emerged, for the most part, is a shared experience. Both noted their lack of kudos, reported being bullied and were tempted to offend, although for desisters this was more pervasive and covered a wider range of offences. The point of divergence was in respect of the pleasures associated with offending, which many desisters observed were now missing from their lives. Previous thinking about the pleasures associated with offending has been in the context of crime causation rather than in the context of desistance. In the current study, this issue arose spontaneously, rather than being systematically explored, which prevents firm conclusions being drawn from the data. However, useful areas to be explored systematically in future research include the extent to which desisters miss the pleasures, if any, which they experienced from offending, and whether this phenomenon is gendered.
Methodologically, the experience of adopting secondary analysis of qualitative data analysis caused me to reflect on whether there might be a higher uptake of this research method by criminological researchers. The key practical advantages of re-analysis were the savings in time and cost for the researcher with no access to negotiate, the fieldwork already conducted and the interviews transcribed. Secondary analysis of qualitative data in this study provided new ways of conceptualizing non-offending, so concerns about the lack of ‘fit’ between the data from the original study and the new research question proved to be unfounded. The method reduced the demand placed on potential participants in research by not recruiting further participants, an approach in keeping with ethical guidelines. The current Social Research Association’s (2003: 25) Ethical Guidelines indicate that researchers should not ‘waste people’s time’ and the British Sociological Association’s current guidelines remind researchers that they ‘must satisfy themselves that a study is necessary for the furtherance of knowledge before embarking on it’. Re-analysis also prevents the exposure of researchers to danger in the field (Bloor et al., 2007; Lee-Treweek and Linkogle, 2000), which is of particular concern in many areas of criminological research. There is considerable scope for re-using qualitative data and more criminological researchers might reflect on how they can locate, share and re-analyse such data in the furtherance of knowledge in their field, rather than using constrained resources to produce new data.