Youth Marginality in Britain

Contemporary Studies of Austerity

Blackman, Shane, Rogers, Ruth

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781447330554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Tabloid headlines such as 'Anti-social Feral Youth, ' 'Vile Products of Welfare in the UK' and 'One in Four Adolescents is a Criminal' have in recent years obscured understanding of what social justice means for young people and how they experience it. Youth marginality in Britain offers a new perspective by promoting young people's voices and understanding the agency behind their actions. It explores different forms of social marginalisation within media, culture and society, focusing on how young people experience social discrimination at a personal and collective level. This collection from a wide range of expert contributors showcases contemporary research on multiple youth deprivation of personal isolation, social hardship, gender and ethnic discrimination and social stigma. With a foreword from Robert MacDonald, it explores the intersection of race, gender, class, asylum seeker status and care leavers in Britain, placing them in the broader context of austerity, poverty and inequality to highlight both change and continuity within young people's social and cultural identities. This timely contribution to debates concerning youth austerity in Britain is suitable for students across youth studies, sociology, education, criminology, youth work and social policy.

Part One:
Youth policy, pariahs and poverty

ONE

Critically theorising young adult marginality: historical and contemporary perspectives

Shane Blackman and Ruth Rogers

Introduction: ‘austerity isn’t over’

This introductory chapter will contextualise some of the key theoretical developments relating to young people’s experiences of social marginalisation in Britain. First, we examine the disparity between populist labels used by government and media to describe young people who experience marginality in the UK. Second, we develop a theory of advanced youth marginality through the work of Loic Wacquant and John Westergaard. Third, we argue that there is a commonality of argument between Thomas Malthus and Charles Murray that defines the young adult poor through the use of biological metaphors such as a ‘redundant population’. Finally, we seek to advance the debate into new areas, by considering the political relationship between youth marginality and anomie. We maintain that young adults in Britain are subject to forms of biopolitical control by governmental and media organisations.

Popular images and punitive sanctions: young adults in Britain

The British tabloid media thrives on images of youth misrepresentation, showing marginalised young adults in dangerous spaces living on edge-of-town housing estates, in urban tower blocks or under rural isolation. Youth tend to be visually projected as either hooded and threatening, or wearing skimpy outfits suggesting low sexual morality (Blackman et al, 2015, p52). Young people’s social exile is delivered through stereotypical caricatures enhanced by a narcissistic vision of young people addicted to mobile devices. These confining portrayals fail to capture the agency that young people use when they engage in social space, to gather and create bonds, to establish cultural memory and to affirm social relationships. Lisa Mckenzie (2015, p195) identifies that ‘stigma and stereotypes’ dominate how the young adult poor are represented and also denied self-conscious reflection of their situation. For young people, being in the park or on the street corner is a space of everyday action, where the hub of ‘doing nothing’ becomes active (Corrigan, 1976).

Across Britain, diverse sources suggest that young people face poverty and lack of opportunity. Watts (2014), writing for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, states: ‘Benefits sanctions are adding to bleak prospects for young people’. Natalie Gil (17 November 2014) in The Guardian states: ‘Robbed of their futures ... austerity cuts hit young people hardest’. According to poverty.org.uk (2016), ‘Young adults are much more likely to live in low-income households than older working-age adults: 31% compared to 19%. This has been the case since at least the mid 1990s.’ On 22 February 2015, Daniel Boffey from The Guardian reported ‘Youth unemployment rate is worst for 20 years, compared with overall figure’ (Boffey, 2015). Telfer (2012) assesses the general situation for young people as one where there is high unemployment, 10% of young adults are not in work or full-time education and, furthermore, that 2.1 million young adults aged 16–24 are living in low-income households. David Gordon, reporting on the findings of Poverty and Social Exclusion in Scotland and the UK, states:

Almost 18 million people cannot afford adequate housing conditions; 12 million people are too poor to engage in common social activities; one in three people cannot afford to heat their homes adequately in the winter and four million children and adults aren’t properly fed by today’s standards. (Gordon, 2014, p2)

Gordon continues, this means that ‘around 2.5 million young people live in homes that are damp and around 1.5 million young people live in households that cannot afford to heat their homes’. A key factor in many young people’s lives relates to lack of income, variable income and a low income overall, described as in-work poverty. In the 21st century, it is clear that hardship and means testing are two policies that persistently follow young people.

Little has changed in terms of neo-liberal strategies to reduce unemployment. As Tawney (1909, p363) argued at the beginning of the 1900s, people who apply for benefit are defined by the state as ‘idle and vicious’. Furthermore, he maintains that the state ‘denies point-blank that there is such a thing at all as distress due to economic causes’. Thus, Tawney states that under neo-liberalism, the policy is to make relief ‘unattractive’, to give only the ‘minimum’ except to those who are ‘absolutely destitute’, so as ‘to repel all except those on the verge of starvation’ (p364).

Today, benefit sanctions according to Crawshaw (2013) and Rogers (2013) have focused on behaviourist approaches and restrictive principles impacting on the poor and on young people, with a focus on punitive policies regulating lifestyles. On Jobseeker’s Allowance sanctions, Sanders (2016, p201) notes that young people have to cope with the ‘threat of three years without benefits for those who fail to comply with job search requirement three times’. The Office for National Statistics (2014) states: ‘There were a total of 5.84 million decisions to apply a Job Seekers Allowance sanction (i.e. an adverse sanction decision) between April 2000 and December 2013, including 1.03 million under the new sanctions regime, introduced in October 2012’. Garthwaite (2016, p9) states: ‘The estimated amount of money lost to claimants though Job Seekers Allowance sanctions imposed in 2013/14 was in the region of £328 million, with almost £5 million lost to Employment and Support Allowance claimants who have a sickness or disability’. This evidence reveals that the conditionality of sanctions applied to young people has been effective in denying them access to the benefits they are entitled to. Owen Jones states:

Benefit fraud – costing an annual £1.2 billion, or 0.7 per cent of social security spending – is treated as a despicable crime, while tax avoidance – with an estimated £25 billion a year – is even facilitated by the state, with accountancy firms that promote such tax avoidance seconded to government to draw up tax laws. (Jones, 2014, pxv)

In The Guardian on 13 April 2016, Garside reported that: ‘Figures show thousands more government inspectors are employed tackling benefits fraud than dealing with abuse of the tax system’. The article notes that Angus Robertson MP is concerned that a Conservative government is more focused on the ‘poorest in society abusing benefits than with the super-rich evading their taxes’. Owen Jones (2014, p193) argues: ‘the real scroungers are to be found not at the bottom of society, but at the top’. The austerity measures imposed by governmental and institutional sanctions curtail young people’s access to services, increasing their vulnerability and reducing their options. Using C. Wright Mills’ (1959) structural argument, it is apparent that young adults on benefits see their ‘private troubles’ transformed into negative ‘public issues’.

In the ethnographic chapters in this book by Brooks (Chapter Four), Kehily (Chapter Six), Davidson and Whittaker (Chapter Twelve), McPherson (Chapter Fifteen) and Ruddy (Chapter Sixteen), we get a personal sense of how negative labels applied at national level are experienced in a personal way, increasing young people’s feeling of anomie.

Advanced youth marginality

Under the social and cultural conditions of marginality, young adults are unable to do normal and everyday things, such as having the opportunity to contribute, participate, produce and consume. Being marginal separates young adults from being normal; that is, they are outside the mainstream. Marginality is not defined by unemployment alone; for us, marginality also encompasses low pay, underemployment and the insecurity of precarious employment (Standing, 2012). We identify youth marginality as a multilayered and multidimensional form of social and personal oppression. Marginality operates as a series of structural, cultural and emotional experiences, where social exclusion both preserves and intensifies discrimination, stereotypes and prejudice.

One way in which this is achieved is through language as a discourse of contemporary memory, biography and history. Two theorists, Loic Wacquant and JohnWestergaard, have influenced our approach. From the outset, we define the social exclusion of young adult people as an advanced form of social marginality, as theorised by Wacquant (2008, p25) in terms of the social structuring of poverty based on unemployment, the precarity of jobs, decaying neighbourhoods and heightened stigmatisation. For Wacquant, advanced youth marginality is a curse of dispossession with the removal of ‘social dignity’ (p30). Under structural processes of social fragmentation and demoralisation, young adults suffer the hardship of media accusations pouring the ‘the weight of public scorn’ (p29) on them, with the result that ‘youths in devastated neighbourhood(s) ... assessed their success and failures almost exclusively in personal terms’ (p180).

We take Wacquant’s approach to young adult marginality at a structural level and see it as also relevant at the micro-individual level to understanding young people’s actions. In the chapters in this book by Brooks (Chapter Four), Kehily (Chapter Six), Batchelor et al (Chapter Seven), Davidson and Whittaker (Chapter Twelve) and Ruddy (Chapter Sixteen), young people speak about their social and personal aspirations at an individual level, demonstrating the ordinariness of their hopes and how their values are common throughout society, but also demonstrating Wacquant’s theory that their experience is deemed personal rather than shared.

We apply Westergaard’s (1992, p575) idea of the ‘fashion in social speculation’. His aim for sociology was to cut through the temporality of fashions in social policy to explore how faddish notions require critical investigation. For MacDonald (1997, p6), negative labels that describe youth marginality are ‘an ideological red herring which diverts attention from the real causes of poverty and the real problems faced by the poor’. For example, a range of terms that have been used to describe young people under hardship are: marginal, ‘underclass’, precariate, yobs, hooligans, disconnected, dispossessed, socially excluded, outcasts, feckless, new rabble, scum, zonards, outsiders, lumpen proletariat, disadvantaged, vulnerable. The proliferation of these labels, according to Wacquant (2008, p245), ‘speaks volumes on the state of symbolic derangement afflicting the fringes and fissures of the recomposed social and urban structure’. For Westergaard (1992, p581), these labels are ‘powerful myths, which social science then has a responsibility to explode’. However, at the same time, one feature of the UK debate on youth marginality has been the concern to critique or overturn stereotypes that MacDonald et al (2014, p1) argue have been promoted ‘by politicians, think tanks and the media’. We maintain that due to the heightened moral and political context of young people’s marginality, it has been found that authors who produce studies on poverty and inequality among young adults have to disprove stereotypes or inaccurate information before they can legitimately advance their main findings.

Thus Westergaard’s (1992, p581) key strategy is to identify ‘ideological fashions’, to reveal bias and inaccuracy. To do this, Westergaard elaborates that sociology ‘needs its agents provocateurs who flaunt new fashions’ (p581). For example, Imogen Tyler (2013, p4) applies Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject to critically analyse how government policy and media representation construct and define young people as marginalised through terms including ‘“chavs”, rioters and scroungers’. For Tyler, the lived process of social abjection promotes an ideology of young people who are upheld, according to her, as a series of ‘revolting subjects’. For example, the tabloid media often combine stigma with fertility – see the Mail Online headlines ‘Vile product of Welfare UK’ (3 April 2013) and ‘Benefit broods’ (31 December 2012). The evocative images and moral discourse summoned up by such headlines return the analysis to the notion of a ‘redundant population’ and Social Darwinism, described by Hansen et al (2014, p76) as ‘pathologising poverty’, where the biological and the medical are fused to shape cultural and social debates.

Young adults – a ‘redundant population’: from Malthus to Murray

‘Strivers versus shirkers’ was the Chancellor George Osborne’s clarion call at the 2012 Conservative party conference (Jowit, 2013). For Hughes et al (2014, p3) this was evocative of the ‘underclass thesis from the 1980s and the Poor Laws of the 1880s, where people were positioned in the binary of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor’. Contemporary political comment confirms this position, as advanced by Hellen (2014) – ‘Rise of the new underclass c...