NCJ Number
177534
Date Published
1998
Length
158 pages
Annotation
Research on juvenile delinquency in Great Britain is examined, with emphasis on the origins of current perceptions of childhood and youth as a problem, the reasons why young people are increasingly regarded as offenders, and the need to reframe the understanding of youth and crime by listening to youth and including them in the social enterprise.
Abstract
The analysis focuses on central ways in which the issue of youth and crime has been constructed in the popular, policy, and academic areas. The discussion notes that criminology has focused overwhelmingly on youth and crime due to longstanding perceptions about childhood as dependency and youth as troublesome. The author argues that the 1990s has seen not just a series of moral panics in Great Britain, but a total panic about youth crime, increased by the nature of media coverage of the issue. The result has been increasingly punitive and exclusionary responses by Conservative and Labour governments alike. The analysis concludes that changing the way the issue of youth and crime is considered requires either a dissolution of youth as a special object of knowledge and policy or an inclusion of young people in the social enterprise through listening to their voices and recognizing their potential for citizenship. Glossary, index, and approximately 200 references (Publisher summary modified)