University of Tasmania, Australia

This paper is ostensibly about youth gangs in Australia. It draws upon extensive empirical research into the life worlds of street frequenting young people over the course of almost 20 years. The paper argues that when it comes to youth gangs, we tend to find what we look for, 'youth gangs' and 'violent young men', as if these somehow exist outside of or isolated from other aspects of young people's lives.  As part of a general mulling over of these issues, the paper provides a series of critical reflections on the doing of youth gangs research and interpretations of what it is that we find when doing so. The main attention is on matters pertaining to violence – as seen through the prisms of class, gender and cultural diversity. Not everything is as it seems, in part because of how we look at them in the first place. In a similar vein, socio-cultural explanations of violence and criminal activity should not equate to acceptance or a condoning of such behaviour or blind us to their detrimental effects within the complex social fabric of contemporary poly-ethic and multicultural societies. The paper raises doubts about whether or not 'youth gangs' are really the central problem anyway, and questions what it is that we do when purporting to undertake 'gangs' research.

Speaker

Rob White is Professor of Criminology in the School of Social Sciences. He is the author of Juvenile Justice: Youth and Crime in Australia (with Chris Cunneen), Youth and Society (with Johanna Wyn), and editor of Youth Subcultures: Theory, History and the Australian Experience, and the three-volume Doing Youth Work in Australia Series (Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies).