Youth in Crisis?

'Gangs', Territoriality and Violence

Barry Goldson, Barry Goldson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136833281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

Few issues attract greater concern and censure than those that surround youth 'gangs'. Paradoxically, youth researchers have conventionally been reluctant to even use the term 'gang' but, more recently, such reluctance has receded. Indeed, it is increasingly claimed that – in particular urban 'territories' – youth gangs are commonplace, some young people are deeply immersed in violence and the carrying and use of weapons (particularly knives and firearms) is routine.

Comprizing a series of essays from leading national and international researchers, this book subjects such claims to rigorous critical scrutiny. It provides a challenging and authoritative account of complex questions pertaining to urban youth identities, crime and social order.

This book:

• locates the question of 'gangs' in both historical and contemporary contexts
• engages a spectrum of theoretical perspectives and analytical positions
• presents and analyzes cutting-edge empirical research
• addresses a range of previously neglected questions, including those pertaining to girls, young women and 'gangs'.

Youth in Crisis? provides a vital resource for researchers, educators, policy-makers and practitioners with an interest in key questions facing criminology, sociology and social policy.

Chapter 1

Perpetual novelty

Youth, modernity and historical amnesia

Geoffrey Pearson

The analysis of generational conflicts in Britain is bedevilled by a peculiar kind of difficulty in that it is widely regarded as a problem without a history. Street crime and violence, ‘gangs’ and stabbings, are unhesitatingly seen as entirely new and unprecedented, involving some kind of radical discontinuity with the past, which is fondly ‘remembered’ as a time of peace and tranquillity. Against this, I will argue in this chapter that youth crime and disorder are better understood as persistent, if somewhat intermittent, features of the social landscape, and that in this respect we suffer from a profound historical amnesia.

It may be remembered that long before the notion of the so-called ‘broken society’ was foisted on us by David Cameron in the wake of the shooting of 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool (Daily Telegraph, 24 August 2007), Prime Minister John Major in 1993 had launched his ‘back to basics’ moral crusade at the Conservative Party conference in October. Earlier that year, in April, Major had characterized England in the following way in a speech to the Conservative Group for Europe: ‘The country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers’. It is deeply evocative of the English culture to characterize the nation as the countryside rather than the town, rural rather than urban (Weiner, 1981). And in his ‘back to basics’ speech, Major was equally evocative. ‘Let me tell you what I believe’, he said, ‘for two generations too many people have been belittling things that made this country: it is time to return to core values, time to get back to basics, to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for others, to accepting responsibility for yourself and for your family’ (Guardian, 9 October 1993).

The time-scale is generational – ‘thirty or forty years’ – although that would take us back not to ‘Old England’ and warm beer, but to ‘mixed-up teenagers’ and to allegations of lawlessness, indiscipline and faltering family values. It was in the late 1950s that the British Medical Association had decided to inaugurate a discussion amongst its membership on a ‘Subject of the Year’. It had chosen the adolescent:

The society in which today’s adolescents find themselves is one of bewildering change … the whole face of society has changed in the last 20 years … a decrease in moral safeguards, and the advent of the welfare state has provided a national cushion against responsibility and adversity … Looked at in his worst light the adolescent can take on an alarming aspect: he has learned no definite moral standards from his parents, is contemptuous of the law, easily bored … vulnerable to the influence of TV programmes of a deplorably low standard … Reading matter for teenagers was roundly condemned as ‘full of sex and violence’.

(British Medical Association, 1961: 5–6)

We can only hope, given the disparaging tone of this review of the nation’s youth, that these good doctors were talking about someone else’s children. As indeed they were. Nor were they talking about ‘adolescents’; they were talking about ‘Teddy Boys’. Young working-class boys and men, dressed to the nines in their velvet-collar jackets, drainpipe trousers, ‘duck’s arse’ haircuts and blue suede ‘brothel creeper’ shoes.

The ‘Teds’ might be thought of as the first rush of blood to the head among Britain’s post-war youth. And they certainly caused a rush of blood in the British press. Following disturbances at cinemas showing the Bill Haley film Rock Around the Clock, in a front-page editorial, ‘Rock ‘n Roll Babies’, the Daily Mail (5 September 1956) described the new music as ‘a communicable disease’ and ‘the music of delinquents’. Issuing a hollow prophecy on the future of rock-and-roll – ‘It will pass’ – it went on to condemn ‘this sudden “musical” phenomenon which has led to outbreaks of rowdyism’. Stoutly defending compulsory national service, ‘to knock the rock ‘n roll out of these babies, and to knock a bit of sense into them’, it then revealed the awful unblemished ‘truth’ about the musical force that was rocking the nation. Having already said in the previous day’s edition that ‘rock, roll and riot is sexy music. It can make the blood race. It has something of the African tomtom and voodoo dance’, the front-page editorial continued in this vein: ‘It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows rag-time, blues, Dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro’s revenge’.

Since the war: which war was that?

In an essay on ‘The Teddy Boy’, Paul Rock and Stanley Cohen (1970: 289) later described how, ‘We have had our Beats, Mods and Rockers, and Hippies – all in their turn inevitably labelled problems. The first and greatest of this sequence was the Ted’. And the thing about the ‘Ted’ was, he was indisputably ‘new’. He dressed in outlandish clothes, and through his attachment to rock-and-roll he was ‘Americanized’, where ‘Americanization’ acts as a signifier for modernity and a portent for the dreadful future. In Richard Hoggart’s (1958: 248) characterization in The Uses of Literacy, the ‘juke box boys’ were ‘boys between fifteen and twenty, with drape-suits, picture ties, and an American slouch’. The Teddy Boy was picture perfect for the post-war lament that began to organize itself around the youth question, describing how everything in Britain was going to the dogs ‘since the war’, or in John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ speech in ‘two generations’.

The lament had perhaps first been fully rehearsed in the post-war years by the Conservative Party publication, Crime Knows No Boundaries in the mid-1960s:

We live in times of unprecedented change – change which often produces stress and social breakdown. Indeed the growth in the crime rate may be attributed in part to the breakdown of certain spontaneous agencies of social control which worked in the past. These controls operated through the family, the Church, through personal and local loyalties, and through a stable life in a stable society.

(Conservative Party, 1966: 11)

We know this sorry post-war blues well enough. It runs in the veins of the British people, it is part of our DNA. Here it is again:

That’s the way we’re going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere … radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over … There’s something that’s gone out of us in these twenty years since the war.

And again:

The passing of parental authority, defiance of pre-war conventions, the absence of restraint, the wildness of extremes, the confusion of unrelated liberties, the wholesale drift away from churches, are but a few characteristics of after-war conditions.

And yet the immediate, complicating difficulty is that these last two complaints about what has gone wrong ‘since the war’ were both written before the war. The first is from George Orwell’s pre-war novel Coming Up for Air as the main character, grumpy old George Bowling, searches around for signs of his lost childhood (Orwell, 1939: 27, 168). The second is from Christian youth worker James Butterworth’s Clubland (1932: 22) reflecting on his experiences in the boys’ club movement in the Elephant and Castle area of working-class London.

This ‘postwar’ malaise was a general current of feeling in the 1920s and 1930s. One active focus of discontent was F.R. Leavis’s ‘Scrutiny’ group at Cambridge, repeatedly thundering against ‘this vast and terrifying disintegration’ of social life (Leavis and Thompson, 1933: 87). Cheap literature, popular music, cinema-going, the newly acquired habit of listening to the radio, advertising gimmicks, educational bankruptcy and ‘Americanization’ were all targeted as symptoms of decline. Because it was not only literary and artistic values that were alleged to be threatened, but also personal identity, family life and community. ‘Change has been so catastrophic’, wrote Leavis in 1930, that:

[it] has, in a few years, radically affected religion, broken up the family, and revolutionized social custom. Change has been so catastrophic that the generations find it hard to adjust themselves to each other, and parents are helpless to deal with their children … It is a breach of continuity that threatens … It is a commonplace that we are being Americanised.

(Leavis, 1930: 6–7)

T.S. Eliot’s writings were drenched in the same anxieties. ‘We have arrived’, he thought, ‘at a stage of civilisation at which the family is irresponsible, or incompetent, or helpless; at which parents cannot be expected to train their children properly … the moral restraints so weak … the institution of the family is no longer respected’ (Eliot, 1948: 104).

Then as now, these sentiments were linked directly to problems of crime and criminal justice, particularly the question of juvenile crime. In addition to common allegations that the family, community and authority were in disrepair, a key cause of crime was seen as American movies that had a disorienting effect and offered encouragements towards immorality among the young. As early as 1913 in a commentary on ‘Cinematography and the Child’, The Times had spotted the first flickering danger signs from the silent movies:

Before these children’s greedy eyes with heartless discrimination horrors unimaginable are … presented night after night … Terrific massacres, horrible catastrophes, motor-car smashes, public hangings, lynchings … All who care for the moral well-being and education of the child will set their faces like flint against this new form of excitement.

(The Times, 12 April 1913)

The silent movies, and then later the ‘talkies’, also invited the more specific charge that they encouraged imitative ‘copy cat’ crime among the young – The Times had alleged that many children ‘actually begin their downward course of crime by reason of the burglary and pickpocket scenes they have witnessed’ – a complaint we usually think of as belonging to the television age and the era of ‘video nasties’, but which had been scrutinized with great thoroughness in the monumental report of the National Council of Public Morals on The Cinema as early as 1917. More generally, however, the Hollywood cinema was understood to have had an unbalancing effect on the morals of the younger generation. As described by A.E. Morgan in his King George’s Jubilee Trust report on The Needs of Youth in 1939, here on the silver screen was:

A Never-never land of material values expressed in terms of gorgeous living, a plethora of high-powered cars and revolvers, and unlimited control of power … of unbridled desire, of love crudely sentimental or fleshly, of vast possessions, of ruthless acquisition, of reckless violence … It is an utterly selfish world … It is a school of false values and its scholars cannot go unscathed.

(Morgan, 1939: 242)

Accompanying these fears of a newly demoralizing form of popular entertainment, other accusations were thrown against the nation’s youth in the 1930s that were understood to be associated with a galloping ‘crime wave’. Morgan, once again, recited a catalogue of complaint that is uncannily familiar:

Relaxation of parental control, decay of religious influence, and the transplantation of masses of young persons to housing estates where there is little scope for recreation and plenty for mischief … a growing contempt by the young person for the procedure of juvenile courts … The problem is a serious challenge, the difficulty of which is intensified by the extension of freedom which, for better or worse, has been given to youth in the last generation.

(Morgan, 1939: 166, 191)

There had indeed been a sharp increase in recorded juvenile crime in the 1930s that in some quarters was blamed on the ‘namby pamby methods’ of ‘our drawing room courts’ (cited by Elkin, 1938: 288) resulting from the legislative reforms of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, which had moved the juvenile courts towards a welfare model of justice, allegedly weakening their influence. Indeed, a correspondent in The Times could sum up the mood of the nation concerning mounting crime and dwindling authority in the following terms:

There has been a tendency of late to paint a rather alarming picture of the depravity of the youth of the nation … Headlines scream the menace of ‘boy gangsters’. Elderly magistrates deplore the abandonment of their panacea, the birch … by gloomy forebodings in the Press of the inevitably disastrous results of the leniency and weakness of the present day.

(The Times, 4 January 1937)

Queen Victoria’s ‘Hooligans’: gangs and territoriality in late nineteenth-century London

In so many ways these inter-war complaints seem like a carbon copy of our own, and those who voiced them were often to be found looking back to happier times ‘before the war’. Indeed, even today the late Victorian and Edwardian years are often regarded as the gold standard of moral worth, remembered as a time of unrivalled domestic harmony. The cosy fug of the music hall. The rattle of clogs on cobbled streets. The unhurried pace of a horse-drawn civilization. Here, perhaps, is the true home of ‘Old England’ and unfettered tradition. This was not, however, a picture of itself that late Victorian and Edwardian England would always have found recognizable.

There were already gloomy rumblings in the editorial pages of The Times (6 February 1899; 16 August 1899; 17 August 1898) about ‘the break-up or weakening of family life’, no less than ‘the break-up or impairment of the old ideas of discipline or order’ in the cities, where there was ‘something like organized terrorism in the streets’. Nor would we find much reassurance from Robert Baden-Powell as he boomed off in the first edition of Scouting for Boys against football as a ‘vicious game when it draws crowds of lads away from playing themselves to be mere onlookers at a few paid performers’:

Thousands of boys and young men, pale, narrow-chested, hunched up, miserable specimens, smoking endless cigarettes, numbers of them betting, all of them learning to be hysterical as they groan or cheer in panic unison with their neighbours – the worst sound of all being the hysterical scream of laughter that greets any little trip or fall of a player. One wonders whether this can be the same nation which had gained for itself the reputation of a stolid, pipe-sucking manhood, unmoved by panic or excitement, and reliable in the tightest of places.

(Baden-Powell, 1908: 338)

It is once again perceived as a generational shift. This was picked up elsewhere, as when Mr. C.G. Heathcote, the Stipendiary Magistrate for Brighton, noted in 1898 the disorienting effects of ‘modernity’, although that is not a word that he would have recognized. ‘The tendencies of modern life’, he wrote, ‘incline more and more to ignore or disparage social distinctions, which formerly did much to encourage respect for others and habits of obedience and discipline.’ Submitting evidence to the Howard Association on the subject of juvenile offenders, Mr Heathcote was in no doubt that ‘the manners of children are deteriorating’ and that ‘the child of today is coarser, more vulgar, less refined than his parents were’ (Howard Association, 1898: 22).

The most au...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Youth in crisis?
• 1. Perpetual novelty: youth, modernity and historical amnesia
• 2. Youth gangs and late Victorian society
• 3. ‘It’s just an area – everybody represents it’: exploring young people’s territorial behaviour in British cities
• 4. Collateral damage: territory and policing in an English gang city
• 5. Place, territory and young people’s identity in the ‘new’ Northern Ireland
• 6. Beyond dichotomy: towards an explanation of young women’s involvement in violent street gangs
• 7. In search of the ‘shemale’ gangster
• 8. Young people and ‘weaponisation’
• 9. Mercenary territory: are youth gangs really a problem?
• 10. Gangland Britain? Realities, fantasies and industry
• 11. Gangs and transnationalisation
• Index