Youth in Society

Contemporary Theory, Policy and Practice

Jeremy Roche, Stanley Tucker, Ronny Flynn, Rachel Thomson, Jeremy Roche, Stanley Tucker, Ronny Flynn, Rachel Thomson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9781412900249, 9781412900232
• eBook ISBN: 9781446235911
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

?The book is a useful student text that offers a wide range of well informed perspectives on the position of young people in society today. It has built on its successful first edition and should provide a useful springboard to further study?

- Scolag Legal Journal

?This resource will be very helpful to all those already working with children and young people and essential for those who are currently learning about how to work with children and young people?- Gill Frances, Director Children?s Development National Children?s Bureau

Are the recent policy initiatives aimed at improving life chances for young people working? Have they affected those most in need? How can young people be given more of a voice in policy making?

The new edition of this bestselling text offers a comprehensive introduction to the policy developments affecting young people in today?s society, covering the areas of education and training, work, youth justice, residential care and child protection. It brings together a wide-ranging series of readings written by leading experts, to encourage those working with young people, or training to do so, to critically reflect on both the theoretical and practical dimensions of their work.

The themes and issues addressed in this book include: citizenship, participation and empowerment; social difference and social identity; images of youth; young people and the politics of service provision; and working with young people in different contexts.

This new edition has been revised in order to bring it up-to-date on contemporary policy, law and practice changes and developments. Written in a lively and engaging manner, this accessible text will be invaluable reading for students taking courses in youth and social work, social policy, youth and criminal justice and the sociology of youth.

Youth in Society is a set book for the Open University courses K201, Working With Young People and K268, Social Work with Young People.

1

The Making and Moulding of Modern Youth: a Short History

Rex Stainton Rogers

Modern times

What do we mean by ‘modern times’? As I am using the term, they began around 1770, as a result of two processes which had a profound effect upon the ways in which we now live our lives. The first of these was the introduction of humanistic forms of governance which stemmed from the writings of people like Thomas Paine on The Rights of Man from the constitutions of revolutionary France and the American ex-colonies. The second was the process set in train by industrialisation, in which technological progress (for example in engineering) was paralleled by a social regime of ‘humaneering’ (Stainton Rogers et al., 1995). Both were intended for the betterment of humankind, but they also brought about (in part in order to achieve this betterment) a regime of regulation and social control.

To regulate their peoples, the new industrial societies needed social and economic data, such as the first UK census, taken in 1801, which revealed a population of about 10 million (a sixth of the current figure). However, the proportion of young people in 1801 was markedly greater than it is in the ageing population of Britain today. Such crude data alone, of course, give us little idea of what lives were like then compared with now, but we can flesh out the picture by looking at contrasts. On the material front, 1801 was a world without railways, but where macadamised roads had begun to be built for the stage-coaches beloved of nostalgic Christmas cards. Health care was dire, infectious disease was rife, surgery proceeded without anaesthetics and death in childbirth, childhood and youth was commonplace. It was also a community without a police force or a health and social security system (as we understand them); without probation officers, youth and social workers, psychologists or counsellors.

Being young in the ‘Bleak Age’

At the beginnings of modernism, as industrialisation and urbanisation grew, so too did population. Along with a falling death rate, early (uncontracepted) marriages produced rapid population growth (to around 14 million by 1821) and big families. At this time, the legal ‘age of consent’ was 12 for young women and 14 for young men. The historians Hammond and Hammond (1947) dubbed this ‘the Bleak Age’ to convey how dire a time it was for most people. This was especially so for the young. It was a period of laissez-faire economics and social policies, in which much that marks our contemporary boundaries between child, youth and adult either did not exist or was constituted differently. For example in 1818 rather less than a third of children were at school, and consequently illiteracy was widespread (particularly amongst females).

Of course, behind those statistics lay an enormous diversity in young people’s lives. For example, while working class young men and young women laboured together in coal-mines and mills and received the same beatings for laziness or mistakes, they were subject (where they got any at all) to varying regimes of moral and formal education. Lives were also becoming ever more strongly divided by income and by class. A considerable gap was emerging between the genteel recreations of the bourgeois young people of the world of Jane Austen, and the drinking, fornicating and brawling of both working class young people and those in the public schools and universities. If Britain ever was a land of near ‘anarchic’ social life, it was so for the workers and the aristocrats of this time.

Meanwhile, back at the Queen Vic . . .

However, by the time Victoria came to the throne in 1837 there had begun a very different period. Young (1960) argues that a profound evangelical turn in British Christianity led to little short of a moral revolution. A project was set in place – in working class non-conformist communities and among the middle classes and even in the newly reformed public schools – to bring an external moral gaze to, and to foster an internal self-surveillance upon, the many faces of evil. As Young observes, family discipline was set within the new ethic: ‘becoming milder . . . it was, perhaps for the same reason, more vigilant; and moral, or social, anxiety made it for girls at least more oppressive’ (1960: 2). Victorian moral ‘double standards’ and their stigmatisation of ‘fallen women’ were crushingly real to their victims (cf. Pearsall, 1971; Fowles, 1977).

At the same time, society itself, in both private and public sectors, entered into a massive reform movement. Charities and a whole gamut of ‘philanthropic’ ventures abounded. A campaign was afoot to turn out a morally upright and educated cohort of young workers, professionals and (in that very gendered world) wives and mothers. Young people found themselves the target of a spectrum of moral entrepreneurs. As the century closed, this army of regulators came to include a new breed of doctors and academics who specialised (or at least claimed to specialise) in a new ‘science’ of youth. However, it would be as much of a mistake to see the Victorian young as living universally regulated lives as it would be to see today’s young people living a global ‘youth culture’. Improvements in living standards brought their own possibilities for independence. For example, ‘living in digs’ became commonplace for young people, while the new resorts like Blackpool and access to popular entertainment (such as the music halls) gave a subterranean world of fun beneath the stern face of Victorian morality.

Young as the century

Compared with a century before, the young people of 1900 were better educated and legally protected, more disciplined and, one suspects, vastly more prone to the regulatory emotions: guilt and shame. Yet they lived in a reality which was profoundly removed from our own. For example, in 1897 there were just 844 women in all the English universities and women doctors numbered a mere 87 (Showalter, 1992). On wages and salaries (where employed at all) of around 50% the male rate, young women were far from living in an egalitarian society. One of the profound events (for heterosexuals and gays alike) of around the turn of the century was the trial of Oscar Wilde (1895). At the time the very idea of being a ‘nancy-boy’ induced deep worries in most young men, yet the typical youth of that time was hardly a macho model of ‘manly’ muscles. Both the Boer War and social research revealed young men to be a pretty weedy bunch, many in pretty poor health. In the context of another reforming phase in society (this time the Liberal government of 1905–14), the outcomes were a school meals service and a school medical inspection scheme. Medical attention for minors became a ‘right’ in the Children Act 1908. The result was a fitter upcoming generation of young people. It is also possible to see in changes around that time the drawing of boundaries (and the drawing-out of lines of dispute) between youth and the adult world which have clear resonances with our own times. Specifically, it saw the setting up of juvenile courts and of ‘borstals’ for juvenile offenders. Young mothers (at least those that were decently married) found in Edwardian Britain charitable child welfare clinics which gained government funding in 1914, though for the ‘unmarried mother’, life was not so charitable. But, diversity is the key to grasping these times, for alongside the Grundyism of sending unmarried mothers away to ‘homes’ to have their babies in secret, others were beginning to promote contraception among young people (albeit against strong opposition).

The ‘Great War’ and its aftermath

As something which wiped out a major segment of Britain’s young men in the mud of Flanders, the impact of World War I can hardly be over-estimated. In addition to the slaughter itself, the ‘Great War’ proved fatal to Britain’s pretentions to ‘greatness’, and to the values (such as nationalism) which underpinned them. Just to put one mark upon that, World War I validated (in both legal and moral terms) conscientious objection. As well as the ‘angels’ who worked in the field hospitals, it revealed a set of less stereotypic young women. From Mata Hari to the yellow-stained workers in the munitions factories, women became not only more visible, but also visibly different from the delicate maidens of Victorian sensibilities. At the same time, the horrors and disillusionment of a four-year war brought back to Britain a surviving generation of young men who were, quite literally, transformed.

Much has been made of the ‘roaring twenties’ that followed. Dramatic in style, particularly in clothing, the period was perhaps the first since Regency days when fashion was for (and only really worked for) the young. The body politics of the 1920s were – as both statistics and personal accounts bear out – more than superficial. No doubt sexual guilt (in the Victorian sense) was on the wane, but that is only a small part of the story. At least as important were technical innovations that brought the sexes together, inventions as diverse as the typewriter, the motor car and charabanc, and the latex from which ‘rubbers’ were made.

Depression and social therapy

What was also true of those times was that unemployment was, by pre-war standards, high (around a million), and welfare benefits were, at best, limited and haphazardly targeted. For many young people (it was true of my own mother) illness or death in the family meant the end of schooling at 13 or 14 and early entry into a world of work (if you could find a job) in which protection for the employee was minimal. As the world entered the Great Depression (1926), a pattern very typical of our own times emerged. Faced with rising outgoings and falling income, government could find little else to do beyond cutting expenditure. Even where welfare measures were promoted and passed in Parliament (such as the raising of the school leaving age to 15) they were not enacted.

Nevertheless the inter-war years did see some major changes in young people’s lives. Perhaps the most important was the growth of popular cinema that took audiences ‘out of themselves’. Along with dance halls, cinemas became places to meet other young people and to start and develop relationships. Both innovations were possible only because Britain gradually became a generally electrified country, making, for example, the lights of Piccadilly Circus into an icon of a ‘good time’. Radio (as ‘wireless’) also came into homes, although probably more important to the young was the gramophone – particularly after electric recording brought a new sound quality, often of bands spun off from the new popular (talking) movies of the time.

Salient also to lifestyle changes was a movement into suburban ‘little boxes’. Arguably it led to some recontainment of women as the controllers of new home technology (refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and the like) – though no doubt, for those few pre-war homes that had a television, the man took charge! The new television service, along with much that remained of the ‘old Britain’, was to disappear in 1939 as Britain entered World War II. The domestic politics of the 1930s had been marked for several years by the shadow of fascism and Nazism (cast most heavily upon the Jewish community). Both those extremes and the counter-pole of communism had attracted their followers among young people. With war, virtually all were mobilised (both literally and figuratively) into what was a largely consensual national venture.

Their finest hour?

As the bombs began to fall, many early teenagers (along with their younger brothers and sisters) were evacuated from their urban homes. Their experiences were often far from happy ones (Wicks, 1988). For young men of conscription age, the role of that war is generally well known. Not quite so familiar is the considerable place of young women in the forces and also their ‘conscription’ into arms factories and as ‘Land Girls’. A Britain ‘fighting for her life’ proved highly liberating for the young. Many moved to live away from their parents, and their active heterosexuality was tacitly (and sometimes quite explicitly) accepted. So too was smoking, and the new, wonder drug to combat fatigue amphetamine. At the same time the war led to a growing ‘Americanisation’ of British culture. Military personnel from the USA – ‘over-paid over-sexed and over here’ – had a variety of effects upon young people, from the cultural (such as bebop and the new experience for many of encountering black people as a coherent group) to the personal (the considerable quantity of war brides and the even greater number of war babies). And it needs to be remembered that the end of World War II was the start of the nuclear age.

Living by the ration book

Britain in World War II was permeated by propaganda making much of the peace to come, a time of social change verging on social revolution. Young voters in particular were moved by the Labour party’s immediate post-war programme, and in the election of July 1945 Attlee gained a majority of 186 seats. Despite economic times of great hardship, of food, clothes and petrol rationing, Attlee’s government, in a series of measures produced the nearest any country has come to a socialist-welfarist state. From antenatal care to funeral payments, a basic safety-net was put in place for all. Young people, on the whole fit and able either to study or to work, gained few unique benefits from many of these measures directly. What was, however, fostered for them was a belief in a future which would see them not only employed on a progressive wage but also protected from being arbitrarily undercut by illness or unemployment. This ethos was equally clear within the post-demobilisation family, where family allowances and sickness and maternity benefits helped to create stability of income.

The social reality of Attlee’s Britain was not one where ‘fun’ had much of a priority. While younger children often enjoyed what family privileges there were (for example, a banana!), little was directed at their older siblings except perhaps as a reward for passing the 11+. Relatively few new consumer goods were produced for the home market, and there was little by way of clothes, music or other resources around which a thoroughgoing youth culture could have consolidated. A considerable respect-for-cum-fear-of authority still pervaded, backed up by a legal system in which ‘approved schools’, borstals and judicial birchings awaited young offenders. Conscription continued along with its associated ‘short back and sides’ mentality.

New Elizabethans

By the 1950s, the electorate (that is, those over 21) had become disenchanted with austerity, and the October of 1951 saw the election of a Conservative government. Two visible symbols of changing times attracted young and old alike, The Festival of Britain (1951) and the Coronation of the ‘young’ Queen Elizabeth (1953), which many watched on newly acquired, nine-inch, black-and-white, one-channel televisions, where ‘interludes’ of angel-fish and potter’s wheels were used to cover camera moves! However, youth and changing times were soon to liven up social consciousness by quantum leaps.

Movies and music are crucial to narrating the next part of our story, which is (I think unavoidably) androcentric. In 1954, a balding former country and western singer called Bill Haley cut a track called ‘Rock around the Clock’. It proved a ‘sleeper’. What woke it up was its use as the title music to a ‘youth angst’ film The Blackboard Jungle (1955). Popular music for the young (that which was hated by their elders) had arrived. To contextualise this in terms of international events which left a mark upon the young, 1956 was the year of the Suez invasion (reactions to which often exposed a ‘generation gap’ within families) and of the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising. When Haley’s own film Rock around the Clock was released (1956), in the words of the NME Book of Rock, ‘cinema seats were ripped up from San Francisco to Scunthorpe’ (Logan, 1975: 163). A new image of the young, moulded and refined in the USA (by professors of sociology as much as by Hollywood), had arrived. As a role model, Haley was a joke; that site was much more easily filled by the likes of Elvis Presley. The quintessential ‘youth angst’ movie of this time, Rebel without a Cause (1955), starring the powerfully scowling James Dean, contains images that still haunt advertising, MTV videos (and, I would argue, care-givers) to this day.

It was neat irony that the announcement in 1957 (by Macmillan’s Conservative government) of the abolition of National Service should have coincided with the emergence of the seat rippers and screen shockers. What had arrived, in a reflexive relationship between the young and the rest of society, was youth (including, to be more accurate, its often older representatives and representations) as ‘folk devil’. No one on the music scene fitted that image better than Jerry Lee Lewis (‘Great Balls of Fire’) whose 1958 UK tour collapsed when it was found out that his wife was 13 when they married! Much of the rest of this story, from Teddy boys, through Mods and Rockers, via Punk and into the raves and XTC shockers of recent times, is covered by Daren Garratt in Chapter 15. However, as a story which has run for nearly 40 years now, it is worth asking what deeper veins in the social collective unconscious it feeds from and feeds into.

One important point that needs to be noted from the start is that music became linked to clear segmentations in ‘youth culture’. Within several segments, political events were beginning to be responded to by an increasingly, and diversely, ‘ideological’ young. Key in this – particularly for those with extended education – was CND (founded in 1958) and the first Aldermaston March. Importantly, this was a national and international movement, with the first US nuclear submarine arriving in Holy Loch in 1961 and the Polaris missile deal of 1963. Socially, liberalisation was ‘in the air’ and 1963 also saw the raising of the minimum age for imprisonment to 17. The following year the UK elected a Labour government under Harold Wilson, a populist who was later to court figures such as the Beatles. It was around this point that much of the UK woke up to being a ‘multicultural society’: the issues of ‘race’ and ‘immigration’ were an important factor in the by-election defeat of Foreign Secretary P...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• 1 The Making and Moulding of Modern Youth: a Short History
• 2 Representations of the Young
• 3 Worlds Apart: Young People’s Aspirations in a Changing Europe
• 4 ‘Pale Shadows’: Racisms, Masculinity and Multiculture
• 5 Children’s Rights: Participation and Dialogue
• 6 Citizens or What?
• 7 Racial Formations of Youth in Late Twentieth-Century England
• 8 Young People and Political Participation
• 9 Youth Working: Professional Identities Given, Received or Contested?
• 10 Welfare Services for Young People: Better Connections?
• 11 Education and Training Provision for Young People: A New Era?
• 12 Beyond Bricks and Mortar
• 13 In and Out of Work? The Changing Fortunes of Young People in Contemporary Labour Markets
• 14 Youth Justice: Responsibilisation and Rights
• 15 Youth Cultures and Sub-Cultures
• 16 Black Adolescent Identity and the Inadequacies of Western Psychology
• 17 Technologies of the Self
• 18 Sexuality
• 19 Constructing a Way of Life
• 20 Friends and Lovers
• 21 Young People and Family Life: Apocalypse Now or Business as Usual?
• 22 Young Disabled People
• 23 The Mistreatment of Young People
• 24 The Dilemmas of Intervention
• 25 You’re the Last Person I’d Talk To
• 26 Working with Young People in Residential Settings
• 27 The Management of Growing Up: Youth Work in Community Settings
• Index