Youth Gangs, Violence and Social Respect

Exploring the Nature of Provocations and Punch-Ups

R. White

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137333858
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is the first book dedicated to Australian youth gangs, exploring the subtleties and nuances of street life for young men and their quest for social respect. The key focus is on group violence and the ways in which the 'gang' provides a forum for the expression of this violence.

1

Doing Gangs Research

Introduction

The concept of ‘gang’ is highly contentious and controversial. This is a mantra that will be repeated throughout this book. The ambiguities surrounding what a gang is and what gangs do are precisely why the term is both powerful and predictable in public discourses of disorder and danger. Gangs connote predatory and violent action, usually by groups of young men. The concept encapsulates notions of aggression, viciousness, chains of brotherhood forged in combat, and codes of obedience and behaviour that discipline individuals to the group’s norms and values. Yet, simultaneously, the idea of gangs has a certain appeal, based on images and portrayals that emphasise shared purpose, strong group bonds, explosions of excitement and adrenaline, and financial and social gratification in the here-and-now. Even the fictionalised accounts of gangs embody these aspects of uncertainty and complexity when it comes to their good and their bad features.

Much of the present-day concern with the gangs question stems from negative media treatment of young people, which more often than not is framed in terms of the threat posed by gangs. This is reinforced politically by populist accusations that youth gangs are a major social evil today. Branding certain young people ‘gangs’ has allowed for widespread vilification of particular groups of street-present young people and created political space for the imposition of draconian forms of social control over their behaviour and, indeed, their very presence in the public domain. Moreover, exceptional and dramatic events, such as the English riots of 2011 and the Cronulla riots of 2008, provide platforms for the exposition of a form of ‘gangs talk’ that reduces complex social problems to simple answers and solutions. Gangs are easy to blame [1].

Within the academy, division exists between two schools of thought. On the one hand, there are those who argue that ‘gangs’ are basically a social construction, mainly born out of moral panic, and that to label someone or a group in this way misconstrues their lived realities and provides only a negative picture of who they really are and what they really do. On the other hand, there are those who claim that gangs are ‘real’, that they do engage in harmful criminal activity, and that policy and policing responses need to be developed to counter street-level thuggery and criminality of this kind. As with the commonsense notions of ‘gang’, however, the answer is far more complicated than either a hardcore ‘realist’ or ‘social constructionist’ position may imply [2].

Social problems, such as those purported to be associated with the presence of youth gangs, are constructed through a combination of material and cultural factors. There are things going on in the lives of these young people that demand our attention. The study of ‘gangs’ is the study of real, existing problems. However, while the problems may be ‘real’, the definition, magnitude, impact, risk and origins of youth gangs are open to interpretation and dispute.

One task of this book is to unpack the multiple realities of youth gangs in Australia, in order to both affirm substantive problems and dilemmas experienced by many young people today, and deny the reduction of these to individual choice and specific types of youth social formation. The foundations of the book have been built on direct conversations with young people over many years, and in many different places and settings. They have also drawn upon the study and experiences of researchers on young people in places other than Australia. First-hand accounts and a broad range of analytical literature thus constitute the core materials upon which the present narrative has been constructed.

Studying youth gangs

Doing gangs research involves a number of complex ethical, conceptual, procedural and methodological issues [3]. At the very beginning of such research, for instance, there are significant problems stemming from the use of particular types of gangs research methodologies. This is illustrated in current debates in the US over the development and use of gang databases [4]. A crucial point made in the debates is that certain types of legislated data collection end up being too inclusive and stigmatising of young people. The question of research definition of gangs is thus highly politicised, especially when linked to the question of government intervention and policy.

What academics do, matters, especially from the point of view of social control. US-style gangs research, which heavily influences the methods currently being adopted as part of the Eurogang Research Network agenda, has tended to be strongly positivist in orientation, with great emphasis on quantitative criminological investigation – precisely the type of methodology that lends itself to the creation of databases (and the associated politics linked to the use of these). Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view, there has been very little quantitative investigation of the gangs phenomenon in Australia (a rare example being a survey we carried out in Perth high schools several years ago).

Meanwhile, few social scientists (and one can surmise that this includes many of those debating the database) seem to actually engage in close-up first-hand observation of young people, to discern what they actually do with their time and to understand and value the meanings they bring to this. The ‘social problem’ of gangs is structurally generated, but analysis tends to see it in terms of population attributes (e.g., being poor) rather than stemming from dynamic social processes that also implicate the powers that be (e.g., police brutality or neoliberal economics). Those who do get close to the action are considered rogue sociologists; similarly, those who critique conventional understandings and conventional criminal justice interventions are viewed with suspicion if not outright hostility by those with a stake in maintaining the (academic as well as political) status quo [5].

The doing of gangs research is thus fraught with a number of ethical as well as methodological and conceptual issues. For present purposes I want to briefly illustrate a couple of issues that one has to be sensitive to in undertaking such research. To do this I will initially draw upon our experiences in interviewing young people in Melbourne in the mid- 1990s, my first foray into the complex world of youth gangs research [6].

For this particular research we decided to interview young people from diverse ethnic backgrounds, including Vietnamese, Turkish, Pacific Islander, Somalian, Latin American and Anglo-Australian. The research consisted of interviews with 20 people each from five different areas of Melbourne (a total of 100 people) which reportedly had a high incidence of ‘ethnic youth gang’ activity, and interviews with 20 young people with an Anglo-Australian background in order to make comparisons with the ethnic-minority interviewees.

Specific local areas were the initial focus of the research, based on the assumption that certain ethnic-minority groups tended to reside or hang around in these locales (e.g., Vietnamese Australian youth in Footscray). However, we discovered early on in the research that a more sophisticated and complex pattern of movement often took place. Indeed, it was often the case that there were certain corridors within the metropolitan area within which young people moved. While these corridors were not suburb specific, they did range in specific territorial directions (e.g., fanning out from the city centre toward the western suburbs for one group; mainly concentrated along the coastal beaches for another). In addition, many of the young people did not in fact live in the place where they spent most of their time.

There was considerable variation in how the samples of young people were selected, and in the nature of the interviewer–young person relationship. As much as anything this had to do with the contingencies of social research of this kind: the diverse communities and the sensitivity of the subject matter were bound to complicate the sample selection and the interview process in varying ways.

The social connections and research opportunities of each community- based interviewer influenced the specific sample group for each defined ethnic youth population as follows:

• The Anglo-Australian young people were selected at random. They were drawn from local schools and from the local shopping centre.

• The Vietnamese sample was based upon prior contacts established by the interviewer, who had had extensive experience in working with and within the community.

• The Somalian sample comprised individuals chosen at random on the street, and recruitment of primarily female respondents was done through friendship and family networks. This form of sample selection was influenced by the nature of gender relations within the community, especially as this relates to street-frequenting activity.

• The Pacific Islander sample was shaped by the fact that two separate interviewers were involved, each of whom tapped into different groups of young people. In one case the young people who were interviewed tended to be involved in church-related networks and activities, which skewed the sample towards a particular demographic. In the other, the sample was mainly drawn from young people who were severely disadvantaged economically and who had experienced major family difficulties.

• Two interviewers were also involved with the Latin American young people. Each had difficulties in obtaining random samples due to the reluctance of individuals and agencies to participate in the project. Accordingly, the sample was constructed mainly via family members and friends who assisted in the process of making contact with potential subjects.

• The Turkish sample likewise involved two interviewers, reflecting the cultural mores of having a man interview the young men and a woman interview the young women. Again, family and friends were used extensively in the recruitment of interview subjects.

The composition of the sample and the dynamics of the interview process were thus bound to be quite different depending upon the group in question. So too were the social experiences and social position of the particular group.

For example, in cases where the interviewer was not known to a particular migrant family, the young people (and their parents) tended to be suspicious about what was going on, suspecting that perhaps the interviewer was a government employee sent by child-protection services to determine the fitness of the family to raise children (which, in turn, stifled frank discussion). In another instance, there was longstanding antagonism between the particular ethnic-minority young people and Anglo-Australians. Given that one of the interviewers was Anglo- Australian, and given the high degree of intervention into their lives by social welfare agencies of various kinds, some of the young people may have been very suspicious of the questions being asked. There were also instances where young people may have been reluctant to speak about certain matters. This was most apparent in the case of some refugees who were deeply suspicious regarding questions about authority figures, such as the police. In a similar vein, ‘gangs’ meant something quite specific for many respondents from war-torn countries. In their experience, ‘gang’ referred to men brandishing weapons who roam the streets robbing people, pilfering, raping and engaging in all manner of serious offences, including murder. Such ‘gangs’ clearly do not exist in Australia.

While there was considerable variation in the sampling and interview contexts, the research findings indicated strong lines of commonality across the diverse groups. In other words, regardless of specific methodological variations, the information conveyed through the interviews proved to be remarkably similar and consistent across the sample groups. This continued to be a feature of subsequent work as part of a national study that involved interviews with up to 50 young people in each capital city of Australia, including Canberra.

Over time, for both the national research and a Perth-based school survey, we found that gang identification was a useful indictor of youth behaviour. Accordingly, for the purposes of the research, young people were asked two interrelated questions in order to identify their gang status:

• Do you consider your special group of friends to be a gang?

• Are you a member of a gang?

These questions are related to what Klein refers to as the ‘funnelling technique’, as a means to operationalise the distinction between gangs and other kinds of non-gang youth-group formations [7]. The main aim of this kind of analysis was to provide insights into the nature and prevalence of gangs and gang membership, as well as to develop a picture of gang behaviour and those factors contributing towards its prevalence. That is, the purpose of the study was to investigate the background, behaviours and attitudes that contribute to gang membership and/or identification.

As the research proceeded, we learned to be more precise in targeting specific people and specific issues. For instance, in later work the interviewees included:

• core members of the group

• peripheral members of the group

• ex-members of the group

Discussions with individuals also helped to clarify the processes whereby one was deemed to be a core, peripheral or former member, and the social factors (e.g., age, being at school, gender) that influenced entry to and exit from the group.

Central themes

As indicated, this book is the culmination of years of scholarship and research on youth gangs in Australia. Over the course of the last three decades I have been engaged in various studies of young people. These have included their engagement in the criminal economy through to diverse street-present youth-group formations. In the specific case of ‘youth gangs’, the interest has translated into discrete studies in Melbourne, Perth and across the nation. From Darwin to Canberra, Hobart to Adelaide and Brisbane to Sydney, young people have been interviewed and surveyed about their street activities, their friendship networks, and the meaning they attach to everyday events and interactions.

This flurry of academic activity has led me to several key conclusions – and propositions – about the nature of youth gangs in Australia.

First and foremost, I am convinced that the main problem here is not gangs per se but youth violence. Groups of young people, predominantly young men, are regularly engaged in harmful and, at times, lethal street violence. Frequently this is stirred by alcohol and illicit drug use, within the cauldron of intense rivalries and group oppositions at the local community level. Violence has become a method of relating to others in its own right, and a preferred means of resolving conflicts in the first instance. Violence is one of the key hallmarks of youth today (and, indeed, of yesteryear), most especially for young men. Hence the subtitle of this book: ‘Exploring the nature of provocations and punch-ups’. Whether this is a particularly new phenomenon is difficult to ascertain, but certainly the historical evidence suggests that it is not. A social problem with a history nonetheless remains a social problem.

Second, youth gangs and youth groups are so highly variable and changeable in nature that they become elusive to both define and pin down concretely for any length of time. It is for this reason that for the most part I have avoided the use of specific gang names here. The social landscape within which gangs are inscribed is so constantly shifting that groups come and go rapidly, along with their monikers and tag signatures. It is not the continuity of any specific group that stands out but rather its emergence and disappearance within a short time span. As such, reference to specific groups and specific gang members as if they have persisted, or will persist, for any meaningful length of time is fruitless.

Yet ‘gangs’ in some form or another do exist. While the human content of the gang may vary as new kids join up and old ones leave (a typical pattern), or this particular gang forms in this neighbourhood while the one down the road dissolves (again a typical pattern), the gang nonetheless exists regardless of how transient its membership or its formation. But gangs always exist in relation to something else – a community, a locality, a cohort of students, an ethnic identification, class and gender dynamics, drugs availability, criminal organisations, bikie gangs and so on. Gangs always stem from, and are part of, larger collectivities and communities of people.

Typically, gangs comprise mainly, if not exclusively, male members. Likewise, they tend to form in working-class neighbourhoods where economically life is tough and opportunities ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figure and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Doing Gangs Research
• 2. Gangs and Identity
• 3. Groups and Networks
• 4. Fluidity and Continuity
• 5. Gangs and the Transnational
• 6. Indigenous Gangs and Family
• 7. Provocations and Punch-Ups
• 8. The Body and Violence
• 9. Gang Interventions
• 10. Beyond Gangs
• Notes
• Index