Youth Offending in Transition

The Search for Social Recognition

Monica Barry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134208494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Taking a new approach to youth crime, this book argues that the transition from childhood to adulthood can be an isolating and disempowering experience for young people. Children and young people are inherently vulnerable because of their age and status – they are a minority group, with the potential for being exploited, discriminated against, dominated and disrespected by adults. Youth Offending in Transition explores how their treatment by adult society may lead young people to resort to crime as a means of gaining respect from their peers.

Using concepts of capital and the narratives of young offenders themselves, this book is based on original research into the reasons why young people start and stop offending. It discusses the following topics:

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• criminal theory and the significance of youth transitions to the 'age-crime curve'
• social identity and reputation amongst young people
• social inequalities and their influence on youth transitions
• the criminalization and discrimination of young people by adults
• the importance of social recognition in reducing offending.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The desire for recognition … has no material object but seeks only a just evaluation of one’s worth on the part of another human consciousness.

(Fukuyama, 1995: 358)

I just done it to be part of everybody.

(Janet, 21)

The desire for recognition

Whilst Fukuyama may not have quite the same way with words as Janet, they are in effect saying the same thing. Janet’s recourse to offending in childhood was a pragmatic means of gaining recognition from her peers at a time when she had few other opportunities for integration and identity within the wider society. Moving through the phases of transition – from childhood, through youth to adulthood – can be an isolating and disempowering experience for young people, not least when they also lack political and economic power. Children and young people are thus inherently vulnerable because of their age and status and are, in effect, a minority group with the same potential for exploitation, discrimination, domination, disrespect and non-recognition by adults. It is little wonder, therefore, that they find solace in their peers in the transition to adulthood. This book demonstrates how important the peer group is to young people in transition. It also demonstrates how readily some young people may resort to crime as one means of gaining a valued reputation with others of similar age or status.

Whilst the discipline of criminology has recognized the importance of age in understanding offending, it has not fully grasped the significance of youth transitions to the ‘age-crime curve’.¹ Whilst there are some notable examples of a developing interest in youth transitions within criminological circles (for example, Bottoms et al., 2004; Sampson and Laub, 1993; Webster et al., 2004), none has specifically tied the phases of transition with those of offending. The study on which this book is based draws on a combination of criminological theories, youth transitions theories and concepts of capital (power), and argues that youth transitions are influenced by age-related power imbalances, as is offending behaviour. The book investigates the possible linkages between the three phases of offending – onset, maintenance and desistance; and those of youth transitions – childhood, youth and adulthood. It is argued that the phases of offending run similar courses to the phases of youth transition and that offending in the transition to adulthood is one means of gaining status or capital during that transitionary period.

This book encapsulates the experiences and views of young people in transition who have been embroiled in the criminal justice system for prolonged periods in childhood and youth. Based on their views and through the use of the concept of capital developed by Pierre Bourdieu, this book develops the notion of ‘social recognition’ – namely, the attainment of a durable and legitimate combination of capital accumulation and expenditure – which may help us to understand why young people do or do not successfully desist from crime during the transition to adulthood. This is a novel formulation although it draws on earlier thinking about reputation and identity. Bromley (1993: 33), for example, suggests that disempowered individuals and groups are likely to focus on their immediate group for the development of identity and reputation: ‘Membership of a minority group of like-minded individuals can be an effective buffer against a hostile majority’. Emler (1990) suggests that for young people with no other status or power, a bad reputation is often preferable to no reputation at all, since it at least gains one attention. He also suggests that law-abiding behaviour only offers one a reputation by default, whereas deviance has a more profound and immediate effect on one’s reputation.

Given that young people are in a transitional phase in their lives, because of their age and status, and see themselves as increasingly dependent on friends as a ‘buffer’ between leaving childhood and attaining adulthood, then it is likely that reputations with peers will be deliberately and rapidly cultivated and may often not be sustainable. As will be seen from the findings of the research discussed in this book, many young people experience just such a lack of sustainability of reputations in youth, and many consciously discard such reputations in favour of more durable reputations in adulthood. Thus, modifications to their social identities are often made following a weakening of effective reputations in childhood and early youth, exacerbated by external constraints such as the criminal justice system:

If people wish to break free from a particular social identity, they need to break free from the constraints of social circumstances, and the influence of particular people… conversely, if people want a particular sort of social identity, they need to submit to social constraints and influence.

(Bromley, 1993: 57)

I’ve still got a reputation as someone that I used to be, you know, that you remember, but people know now I’ve settled down with kids and keep my head down… Like I remember one of the boys seen me going to work dressed like this [in a suit] and they thought I was actually going to court! But that’s because of the area that we live in.

(Harry, 26)

This book tells young people’s stories of that journey to break free from one particular social identity and to adopt another.

The criminalization of children and young people

Young people adopt diverse pathways in the transition to adulthood but are equally constrained by external factors, notably their minimal legal status and their restricted opportunities for meaningful further education and employment. The importance of social inequalities and social institutions in determining or undermining youth transitions is becoming increasingly apparent. Many young people are excluded from higher education (through a lack of qualifications or financial support), from employment opportunities and from housing. Nevertheless, the fact is that the majority of young people who are marginalized or otherwise disadvantaged within the labour market as elsewhere do not rebel against their predicament. On the contrary:

The response of the unemployed to the aggravation of labour market disadvantage lies not in the development of some highly distinctive subculture, but in the reinforcement of more conventional working-class beliefs.

(Gallie, 1994: 756, quoted in MacDonald, 1997: 175)

Conventionality, and young people’s aspirations towards mainstream goals, are factors often ignored by both academics and policy makers in attempting to understand deviant behaviour in youth. There is also a growing body of evidence that young people are on the whole conformist and that their problems in youth are exacerbated by the pessimistic image and limited understanding that many adults have of them. Matza (1964: 27) has criticized positivist criminology for ignoring ‘mundane and commonplace childhood activity’ amongst children and young people, but there is also strong evidence from studies of offending behaviour more generally that crime is ubiquitous amongst all social classes and all ages.

Although the number of young people ‘officially’ involved in crime is minimal compared with the youth population as a whole, the political emphasis on youth crime has been exacerbated by media coverage which has highlighted the apparently spiralling ‘problem’ of children and young people. And yet when one ranks crimes in order of seriousness, one could arguably put street crime, prostitution and theft at the bottom of the hierarchy, and terrorism, business fraud and drug smuggling at the top. Indeed, offending by young people tends to be small-time and generally unsuccessful, but still gains a disproportionate level of attention from the media, the police and the criminal justice system. Whilst the number of children and young people in the population has decreased during the late twentieth century (and is not projected to rise over the following two decades at least) and whilst some 97 per cent of crimes go undetected in the UK, the criminal justice system is nevertheless costing the government over £16 billion a year, with much of that money going on ‘chasing and punishing… adolescents armed with nothing more sophisticated than the sawn-off top of a Pepsi bottle’ (Davies, 2003a: 1).

The legal status of children and young people as well as their image in the media changed from being considered victims and in need of protection in the early 1990s to unruly villains from whom the community needs to be protected in the late 1990s (Franklin, 2002). Many authors suggest that this shift was prompted by the murder of two-year-old James Bulger, whose death at the hands of two ten-year-old boys in 1993 seemed to totally undermine the concept of childhood as being a time of innocence, and of children as being ‘cute and contented’ (Franklin, 2002: 18). As Brown (1998: 2) suggests: ‘The real violence of the Bulger case is arguably the violence it did to adult notions of childhood’: social expectations are that whilst ‘young people’ may offend, ‘children’ should not. And yet the opposing notions of childhood as innocence versus childhood as deviance are not new, having appeared in literature since the time of the Enlightenment (Franklin, 2002). Nevertheless, children and young people generally are becoming the benchmark of anticipated behaviour over the whole of the life course, and as Cohen and Ainley (2000: 89) point out: ‘young people have had to carry a peculiar burden of representation; everything they do, say, think or feel is scrutinized by an army of professional commentators for signs of the times’.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, social control mechanisms in relation to crime have focused predominantly on children and young people. However, towards the end of the twentieth century, such social control mechanisms had begun to anticipate rather than react to criminal behaviour through a broadening of the definition of crime to include the potential for crime. The Anti-Social Behaviour Bill (2003) gave the police the right to disperse groups of young people on the streets and to remove into care those deemed in need of greater control than that offered by their own families. Parenting orders, anti-social behaviour orders, curfews and electronic monitoring of children and young people have equally undermined their rights and those of their parents to freedom of expression and privacy (Brown, 1998). Brown argues that there is ‘a recurring and ongoing preoccupation with the perceived threat to social stability posed by unregulated, undisciplined and disorderly youth outside adult control’ (1998: 77).

This increasing scapegoating of children and young people as ‘disorderly’ masks the fact that over a third of children in the UK live in poverty (Franklin, 2002). In the 1980s and 1990s, social inequalities and class polarization became increasingly apparent and absolute poverty increased within a climate of reduced welfare provision and economic instability (Callinicos, 1999). According to some sociologists, this has resulted in increasing insecurity and risk, not least for children and young people in the transition to adulthood (Beck, 1992; Coles, 1995). It is suggested in the following chapters of this book that whilst longer-term opportunities for capital may be lacking for some young people in transition, offending can be used as a strategy, however temporary or misguided, to give them a valuable source of identity, status and recognition in an otherwise potentially marginalizing period in their lives. In this respect, the temporary nature of youth transitions and the lack of legitimate, longer-term capital during that transitional period are important factors in better understanding how, when and why offending and desistance occur.

Social recognition: a new perspective on youth transitions

Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social practice (1986), and in particular his concepts of social, economic, cultural and symbolic capital, are helpful in examining the imbalances in opportunities and status for young people in transition. His conceptual framework, described further in Chapter 3, was chosen specifically because it is a dynamic model that gives prominence and credence to the structural influences of time, space, status and class. Looking at the evidence from young people through the lens of Bourdieu’s concept of capital, it seems that the desire for capital through integration and status is an important factor both in the transition to adulthood and in the process of offending and desistance. The concept of capital cuts across the boundaries between childhood, youth and adulthood, but the lack of sustainability and legitimacy of such capital in transition makes recourse to offending more likely. Because of their transitional situation, many young people lack the status and opportunities for full citizenship. They thus have limited capacity for what I term ‘social recognition’: the attainment of a combination of accumulation and expenditure of capital that is both durable and legitimate. The concept of ‘social recognition’ is used to better explain the sequence of events and thinking surrounding young people’s offending over time and to combine both agency and structure in the transition to adulthood and desistance.

In linking the phases of offending with the phases of transition, it is possible to engage with the temporary nature of youth offending and to draw comparisons between changes in offending over time and the contrasting levels of capital accumulated in the transition to adulthood. There is a seeming convergence of the two pathways of offending and youth transitions, and the accounts by young people of their offending over time strongly suggest that such behaviour is a personal means (capital accumulation) to a social end (capital expenditure). The pathways of offending and youth transitions suggest both movement in time and individual agency and, as such, support the argument in this book that offending is a transient occupation, its duration dependent not only on external structural factors but also on individual self-determination. Because of their relative powerlessness in youth, certain young people lack the opportunities to spend as well as accumulate legitimate and durable capital. Whilst offending enables the accumulation of capital in the short term, it does not enable the accumulation or expenditure of capital in the longer term. It is suggested that desistance comes not with age per se in the transition to adulthood but with increased opportunities for social recognition through, for example, generativity² and responsibility taking. This central argument of the book is explored in greater detail in Chapter 7.

The young people in this book

The narratives reported in this book are from a study of young people that I undertook in Scotland in 2000–1, which set out to explore their perceptions of why they start offending, continue offending over a period of time and stop offending, whether there were gender differences emerging from this analysis, and whether there was a common thread between their reasons for starting, continuing and stopping offending (for a broader discussion of the methodology, see Appendix A). The 40 respondents – 20 young men and 20 young women – all came from socio-economic backgrounds that restricted their opportunities for stable employment, adequate housing and social identity. The sample is unusual in that it comprises 40 young people who had been heavily involved in offending in the past but also includes a combination of persisters and desisters as well as an equal gender mix. Compared to many other studies of offending and desistance, this sample consisted entirely of young people who had been high-tariff, serious offenders for a substantial part of their offending lives. Four-fifths of the young people started offending as ‘children’ (i.e. at the age of 15 or under), their reasons being mainly because of a lack of attention or love, to seek encouragement or recognition, to earn money or as a (latent) reaction to (past) traumas in their lives. Many came from families marred by death, illness, separation and transience, and many felt unloved or uncared for as a result. Indeed, the school setting may have offered these young people respite from marginalization or familial neglect or abuse and gave them an opportunity to create a social identity for themselves. This book gives this group of young people an opportunity to describe and explain how and why they became involved in crime, and will hopefully go some way towards developing a greater understanding of youth offending more generally. Throughout the book, quotations by the young people in the sample which are used to illustrate points made in the text are referenced by a pseudonym followed by the age of the respondent at in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Offending and desistance in theory
• Chapter 3: Power and powerlessness in transition
• Chapter 4: Starting offending
• Chapter 5: Coming to terms with offending
• Chapter 6: Desistance: breaking free
• Chapter 7: In search of social recognition
• Chapter 8: Conclusions
• Appendixes
• Notes
• References