Globalizing the Streets: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Youth, Social Control, and Empowerment [Illustrated] 0231128223, 9780231128223

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART 1. Youth, Social Control, and Surveillance
1. Youth Experiences of Surveillance: A Cross-National Analysis
2. From the Outside Looking In: Young People's Perceptions of Risk and Danger in an East London Borough
PART 2. Street Youth, Homelessness, and Displacement
3. Living Free: Nomadic Traveling Among Homeless Street Youth
4. Street Youth in New York City and Sao Paulo: Deconstructing the Striking Differences, Global Similarities, and Local Specifities
5. Searching for Home: Russian Street Youth and the Criminal Community
PART 3. Gangs and Street Cultures in the Globalized City
6. Social Control and Street Gangs in Los Angeles
7. Youth Subcultures, Resistance, and teh Street Organization in Late Modern New York
8. Children of the Land, Fruit of the Ghetto
9. Victimization, Resistance, and Violence: Exploring the Links Between Girls in Gangs
PART 4. Youth, Violence, and Subcultures of Whiteness
10. Ethnic Envy: How Teens Construct Whiteness in Globalized America
11. An Extreme Response to Globalization: The Case of Racist Skinhead Youth
12. Columbine: The School Shooting as a Postmodern Phenomenon
13. ’Cause Fightin’ Is Just Fightin’: Caucasian Youth, Violence, and Social Exclusion in a Globalized Age
PART 5. Innovative Interventions and Youth in Crises
14. Integrating Interventions: Outreach and Research Among Street Youth in the Rockies
15. Youth Force in the South Bronx
16. Motivating and Supporting Activist Youth: A View from Nonformal Settings
Appendix: Agents of Change Responding to Violence and Exclusion
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Globalizing the Streets

Michael Flynn and David C. Brotherton, editors

Globalizing the Streets

Cross- Cultural Perspectives on Youth, Social Control, and Empowerment

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2008 Columbia University Press All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Globalizing the streets : cross-cultural perspectives on youth, social control, and empowerment / Michael Flynn and David C. Brotherton, editors. p. cm. Includes index. isbn 978-0-231-12822-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-231-12823-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-231-50226-9 (ebook) 1. Street youth—Congresses. 2. Subculture—Congresses. 3. Gangs—Congresses. I. Flynn, Michael. II. Brotherton, David. HM646.G56 2008 305.235086'923091732—dc22 2007042589 Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed by Lisa Hamm References to Internet Web Sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for Web sites that may have expired or changed since the book was prepared. Title page photograph copyright © 2001 Donna DeCesare.

To my girls, Yolanda, Olivia, and Antonia and to my dad (M. F.) to Lisa, Gijs, Mia, and Aidan (D.C. B.) and to Dwight Conquergood (D.C. B. and M. F.)

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction 1

Part 1. Youth, Social Control, and Surveillance 1. Youth Experiences of Surveillance: A Cross-National Analysis

15

M A RT I N R UCK, ANI TA HAR R I S, MI CHE L L E F IN E, AN D N IC K F REU DEN BERG

2. From the Outside Looking In: Young People’s Perceptions of Risk and Danger in an East London Borough

31

S I M O N H A L L SWO RTH AND JANE T R ANSO M

Part 2. Street Youth, Homelessness, and Displacement 3. Living Free: Nomadic Traveling Among Homeless Street Youth

47

M A R N I F I NKE L STE I N, R I CHAR D CURTI S, AND BARRY SPU N T

4. Street Youth in New York City and São Paulo: Deconstructing the Striking Differences, Global Similarities, and Local Specificities

62

B E N E D I T O R O DR I G UE S DO S SANTO S

5. Searching for Home: Russian Street Youth and the Criminal Community

77

S V E T L A N A STE PHE NSO N

Part 3. Gangs and Street Cultures in the Globalized City 6. Social Control and Street Gangs in Los Angeles

95

JAMES DIEGO VIGIL

7. Youth Subcultures, Resistance, and the Street Organization in Late Modern New York D AV I D C . B R O THE RTO N

114

viii

Contents

8. Children of the Land, Fruit of the Ghetto

133

A N A D A Z A, DAV I D C. B R O THE RTO N, G I PSY ESC OBAR, AN D M IC H AEL F LYN N

9. Victimization, Resistance, and Violence: Exploring the Links Between Girls in Gangs

147

D A N A M . NUR G E AND MI CHAE L SHI V E LY

Part 4. Youth, Violence, and Subcultures of Whiteness 10. Ethnic Envy: How Teens Construct Whiteness in Globalized America

169

R A N D Y B LAZ AK

11. An Extreme Response to Globalization: The Case of Racist Skinhead Youth

185

P E T E S I MI AND B AR B AR A B R E NTS

12. Columbine: The School Shooting as a Postmodern Phenomenon

203

R A L P H W. L AR KI N

13. ’Cause Fightin’ Is Just Fightin’: Caucasian Youth, Violence, and Social Exclusion in a Globalized Age

216

M I C H A E L FLYNN

Part 5. Innovative Interventions and Youth in Crises 14. Integrating Interventions: Outreach and Research Among Street Youth in the Rockies

235

J E A N S C A NDLYN, SUZ ANNE DI SCE NZ A, AN D J AM ES VAN LEEU WEN

15. Youth Force in the South Bronx

262

B A R RY C H E CKO WAY, L I SA FI G UE R O A, AND K AT IE RIC H ARDS- SC H U ST ER

16. Motivating and Supporting Activist Youth: A View from Nonformal Settings

273

L E O N I S A AR DI Z Z O NE

Appendix: Agents of Change Responding to Violence and Exclusion D O N N A DE CE SAR E

Contributors Index 307

301

287

Acknowledgments

We would like to first thank the intelligent, patient, and supportive folks at Columbia University Press—especially the late John Michel, Lauren Dockett, and Susan Pensak. We would also would also like to thank Basil Wilson and Gerald Lynch of John Jay College of Criminal Justice who both supported and defended the conference that served as the mother of this book. We would also like to recognize Dwight Conquergood, Hector Torres, “China” Valdez, Richie Perez, and Rita Fecher, all founding members of the conference and now playing with the street angels in a globalized heaven. Finally, we would like to note the fine work of Henry Chalfant and Luis Barrios as well as the William T. Grant Foundation for their generous support of the conference.

Globalizing the Streets

Introduction

This book is the stepchild of an academic conference, and as is often the case with stepchildren it has suffered a difficult development. It is a highly questionable tactic when seeking a readership beyond a few hundred professors and graduate students to advertise a book’s indebtedness to an academic conference, but this conference was no regular conference, and this book is no run-of-the-mill youth studies book. The conference, which bore the same name as this text, was “sharply rebuked” by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (to our knowledge the only conference to earn such an honor during Giuliani’s eight-year reign), the chair of the New York City Council’s Youth Service Committee, the president of the New York Police Department’s Hispanic Society, and the president of New York City’s Board of Education. Giuliani’s spokesperson opined, “John Jay should be a college for criminal justice, not for criminal practices”; and proceeded to say that the conference “sent a message of gang legitimacy to our young people.” Meanwhile, the president of the Board of Education bemoaned our “support of street thugs” rather than “positive role models.” Such were the recriminations from the city’s moral entrepreneurs, all of which were intended to indict and inflame rather than to educate. But what was the nature of the sin that drew such reproach? We were not guilty of sponsoring a teach-in, a sit-in, or a demonstration aimed at disrupting the status quo. Rather, the aims of the conference were to assemble “researchers, educators and organizers from around the globe to share knowledge, compare characteristics, discuss causes and shed light on successful interventions regarding the growing problems” confronting street and marginalized youth. As stated in the Conference Manifesto, we wanted to address the transnational character of the newly emerging street youth cultures. The interlocking nature of the informational, technical and production revolutions that are pushing lower class youth even further into the margins and the speed and depth of the globalizing forces of cultural production and exchange that are feeding the processes of youth empowerment, youth identity and the social control of youth.

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Introduction

And we succeeded to an extraordinary degree. We gathered academics, researchers, street organizers, activists, filmmakers, photographers, attorneys, and journalists from the United States, Holland, Brazil, Columbia, Ghana, Canada, England, the Dominican Republic, Italy, Great Britain, Guatemala, and Mexico to present their work via traditional academic panels, photographic exhibits, a film series, dramatic readings, and musical performances. But this was not what attracted the attention of the moral establishment. Their main objection lay in the following conference goal: “to listen to the youth (and / or their representatives) of the subcultures who have developed grass roots organizations to cope with the problems of social, educational, political, cultural and economic disenfranchisement.” When word got out that the conference would feature a play written and performed by members of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation and lectures by former members of the Bloods and Crips and that attendance by current members of these and other “dangerous groups’’ would be welcomed, the line of transgression had been crossed. In response, the mayor and other right-thinking public officials issued their condemnations, made threatening phone calls to university administrators, and lined the streets outside the college with more than a dozen police squad cars. In retrospect we were somewhat naive and had not anticipated such a panic-stricken response. We should have realized that many public officials in this globalized city would relish the opportunity to demonstrate that they were not as toothless or as cynical as many have charged, that they had not surrendered or auctioned off all their regulatory power to market forces or corporate boards. We didn’t anticipate that a group of idealistic academics and graduate students employed at the nation’s only publicly funded institution of higher education still courageous enough to insist on an open admission policy would make the ideal target. This is not to imply that we were without an agenda. All of the principal members of the organizing committee were also engaged in research projects with marginalized or disenfranchised youth (Flynn with working-class Caucasian youth, Brotherton and Barrios with the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation and the Ñetas) and deeply concerned that despite all the rhetoric about the leveling and liberational effects of globalization, the youth we were working with seemed to be operating in a far more insecure and “colder” world than most wanted to admit (Finnegan 1999). We were certain that our experiences were not singular and longed for an exchange with others engaged in youth issues and thought that sponsoring an international conference was the most logical way to accomplish these goals. Furthermore, we were not among those who thought that the 20th century had ended on a positive note. It was clear to us that increasing numbers of working-class, poor, and minority youth were being placed in an increasingly untenable situation. Therefore, we wanted the conference to address, and begin the process of abrogating, the legacy left by the last century’s punitive criminal justice policies and practices and its penchant for continuous moral panics (pick your folk devil: suburban school shooters, single mothers, skinheads, gangbangers, homeless youth, drug dealers, superpredators) to cement the rule of neoliberalism (Harvey 2006). Thus we did not want to be guilty of sponsoring yet another “youth troubles, troubled youth” conference where well-intentioned, “right-minded” experts expounded on the psychological, cultural,

Introduction

and moral deficiencies of contemporary youth. Certainly we knew that our celebration of the critical, radical, and disobedient spirit of “organic intellectuals” and community and street activists would irritate, even unnerve, some of our colleagues and administrators (to their credit, the John Jay Administration strongly supported our efforts, even in the face of the barrage of criticism). In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, James Scott contends, The safest and most public form of political discourse is that which takes as its basis the flattering self-image of the elites. Owing to the rhetorical concessions that this selfimage contains, it offers a surprisingly large arena for political conflict that appeals to these concessions and makes use of the room for interpretation within any ideology. For example, even the ideology of white slave owners in the antebellum U.S. South incorporated certain paternalistic flourishes about the care, feeding, housing and clothing of slaves and their religious instruction. Practices, of course, were something else. (1992:37)

We recognized that for many the ascendancy of the “transnational and hypermobile nature of capital” (Sassen 1999:42) had an almost mystical power to neutralize resistance and revolt by the marginalized and oppressed, but we also believed that the public university was an ideal site for a forum for speakers intent on revealing the practices responsible for the “human consequences” of globalization (Bauman 2000) and insistent on the necessity of establishing an alternative basis (one in which any form of flattery was apprehended) for future discourse. New York seemed the ideal city to hold such a conference. The city’s cockiness, fueled largely by a mainstream narrative that flattered the political leadership’s “broken windows” approach to public order, was beyond precedent. According to this story violent crime and murder rates were at the lowest levels in decades, the tough-on-crime stance had delivered the subways and midtown avenues from the homeless, pickpockets, panhandlers, squeegiemen, and other wretches, allowing the vaunted “creative class” to hustle back into the city and occupy not only Tribeca and the Upper East Side but Washington Heights, Harlem, and Alphabet City. This invasion elevated real estate prices to a level that allowed only the select of this class to dream of setting up house. Public officials and property developers conceded that this globalized rebirth involved some social pain, that some of the indigenous population would suffer displacement. This misfortune, however, was corrected, not simply balanced, by the influx of new capital. We wanted to challenge this understanding of symbolic and spatial order. In Globalization and Its Discontents, Saskia Sassen argues that the large Western city of today concentrates diversity. Its spaces are inscribed within the dominant corporate culture but also within the multiplicity of other cultures and identities. The slippage is evident: the dominant culture can encompass only part of the city. And while corporate power inscribes these cultures and identifies them with “otherness” thereby devaluing them, they are present everywhere. (1999:54)

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Introduction

We wanted to counteract this inscription, which intended not only to devalue but also to socially exclude and to humiliate, and holding a conference at a college situated one avenue west of CBS’s worldwide headquarters, five streets south of the Lincoln Center and ABC’s headquarters, two avenues west of Columbus Circle (the Time /Warner complex was then in its embryonic stage), and opposite one of Manhattan’s major medical centers and teaching hospitals was quite fitting. So the conference itself was an act of resistance, but because we had no intention of sponsoring an academic vanity project, we invited many who would not regularly feel at home in an institution of higher education. And as interested as we were in indicting corporate and political power, we were equally concerned with countering the absence of agency narrative so prevalent in much of the globalization discourse. Some of this discourse has been aimed at establishing the lack of ontological fitness of contemporary youth and the vacuity of youth culture. But it is not all the product of bad faith. The streets have not been full of acts of moral protest, and only a small minority of youth are active in the pursuit of social and economic justice. But as Touraine argues, Although globalization is supposedly beyond our control there is a will to act, even in the most unfavorable circumstances. It exists even when there is a very high level of unemployment, even though we have always been told that people who find themselves in that situation are condemned to impotence or being manipulated by authoritarian demagogues. (2001:26)

Through our research we found a great deal of evidence to support Touraine’s argument. The resilience and resourcefulness we noted were not that surprising, but we were continually impressed by the intellectual, erotic, political, and spiritual yearnings and projects we witnessed. The majority of these young men and women were not apathetic, hedonistic, predatory casualties of the winner-take-all societal sweepstakes (Frank 1996). (This is not to deny that some of the young men and women we encountered perpetrated criminal, sometimes violent acts or to minimize the social consequences of these actions; however, this territory has received no shortage of handwringing coverage.) Most of these youth were actively engaged in the struggle to be subjects, not objects, in the historical process. Those fortunate enough to have joined politicized street organizations or community-based organizations had developed a critical consciousness that allowed them to name, and resist, some of the power structures and forms of discourse responsible for their disenfranchisement and the general destruction of the democratic social compact (Piven and Cloward 1998); many others were not so fortunate.

PPP The conference was a resounding success, and this book is our way of continuing and expanding on the project. Like all stepchildren it bears a motley pedigree. Early in the editorial process we decided to remain true to the conference’s insistence on interdisciplinarity and solicited articles from sociologists, psychologists, criminologists, educators, social workers, and anthropologists (less than half of the authors presented

Introduction

at the conference). Despite the frequent calls for border-crossing and hybridity, most academics choose to remain within their disciplinary boundaries and professional and class prerogatives. We assumed that our inclusiveness would provide the reader with a comprehensive understanding, not to mention a far more interesting reading experience. The book, we believe, proves our assumption valid, but our eager promiscuity caused us many headaches; plurality is always wonderful and worthy in principle, but university press editors and marketing personnel insist, rightly, on a certain degree of cohesion and coherence, and we often regretted our ambition and appetites. Our opting for catholicity should not be taken for a lack of discrimination. We were quite strict on questions of method and attitude. Wanting to avoid the overly theoretical abstraction or thin empiricism characterizing much of the work on globalization, we sought authors capable of providing a grounded appreciation of the lifeworlds and intentional meanings of young women and men. This resulted in seeking out researchers engaged in interview-based or ethnographic research studies. We coupled this preference for a “soft,” depth-oriented qualitative orientation over the hard quantitative approach with an insistence that the authors operate from a critical tradition. Here we required far more than an unwillingness to essentialize the “other,” a particularly common practice when “other” belongs to late modernity’s ever-expanding ranks of “difficult people and dangerous classes ” (Young 1999:59). Given the nature of the project, we knew that some of the protagonists in these articles would be afflicted with addiction, depression, and other psychological maladies and that others would be guilty of engaging in violent and other antisocial acts, and although we had no interest in presenting youth as the powerless victims or conscripts in some brutal globalization war game, we could not abide “presenting the pathology of persons [and groups] as if it were something removed from history and society” (Martin-Baro 1996:67) or social oppression. Therefore, it was important that the authors accomplish their contextualizing of these youth’s actions and consciousness in light of the political and cultural contradictions inundating their multiple lifeworlds. We also wanted researchers dedicated to making visible the invisible structures of domination and symbolic and indirect violence that oppress, exclude, and humiliate (see Bourdieu 2003; Salmi 1993). It was equally important that articles seeking to demonstrate the intentionality of youth engaged in acts of cultural, political, and economic resistance also present the transformative as well as the adaptive and subversive meanings of these acts (Brotherton in press). We open the book with two-hard-hitting chapters documenting a widespread and disturbing pattern of the betrayal of trust by public authorities and law enforcement personnel experienced by urban youth on three continents. In both chapters the authors argue that the widespread and systematic failure of public officials and law enforcement officers to engage youth, especially “youth of color,” as citizens worthy of respectful consideration and treatment results in a climate of mistrust, vulnerability, and hostility. In demonstrating that homeless and street youth regularly engage in resistant and transformative practices, the chapters in part II depart from the usual social science tradition of focusing solely on adaptive and coping strategies. Documenting the appearance of Moscow’s “displaced” street youth, a post-Soviet social problem, Svetlana Stephenson addresses the factors that lead some displaced street youth to join criminal

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Introduction

communities that have sprung up in the wake of the disintegration of Russia’s formal institutions and structures. In a chapter examining the unrecognized and understudied phenomenon of homeless youth travelers, Marni Finkelstein, Richard Curtis, and Barry Spunt argue that for many Caucasian youth living on the streets can be a rational act, a form of cultural resistance performed in the service of constructing an alternative social identity, not simply the result of individual pathology or an abusive family environment. In his comparative analysis of homeless youth in São Paulo, Brazil, and New York, Benedito Rodrigues dos Santos argues that despite superficial differences, street children of the so-called third world and homeless youth of the first world are forms of one worldwide phenomenon. It is difficult to find a more consistently demonized social group than the youth gang. In the post–Cold War period gangs were identified as the primary threat to urban civic order, and in the so-called War on Terror the specter of Islamist Jihadists and American gang members joining forces to commit an act of catastrophic terrorism has been raised by politicians and social scientists. The chapters in part III all depart from this tradition. Drawing from his ethnographic work with Almighty Latin King and Queens Nation, David Brotherton offers a strong critique of mainstream criminological and sociological gang research and demonstrates that the youth in street organizations often engage in intentionally transformative practices, including helping members with recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, illiteracy, and reentry into civil society. This theme of transformative resistance is also present in Ana Daza and co-authors’ chapter detailing the efforts of Los Muchachos, a Colombian street gang, to serve as a stabilizing and constructive force in a impoverished community. Dana Nurge and Michael Shively contend that gangs can serve as a refuge for female victims of sexual and physical abuse. These groups provide emotional and material support that that is restorative, even life saving; paradoxically, the members are exposed to situations in which violence is necessary and the means to achieving status and self-esteem. Drawing from more than a quarter-century of ethnographic work, James Diego Vigil’s chapter provides a provocative look at identity formation in youth belonging to street gangs. The chapters in part IV demonstrate that globalization’s deleterious effects are not limited to “developing nations” or “people of color.” In sensitive and probing chapter Randy Blazak addresses the growing racialized anxiety among white youth, caused by the rapid changes in economic structure and opportunity; he also argues that the continued failure of educators and other public authorities to address racial concerns and prejudice could lead many Caucasian youth to seek answers from white supremacists, racist Odinists, and pan-European neo-Nazis. Drawing from their ethnographic work with Southern California racist skinhead subcultures, Pete Simi and Barbara Brents provide a history of the development of this movement and emergence of a globalized “Aryan identity.” Ralph Larkin’s treatment of the infamous 1999 Columbine High School shootings dispenses with the easy demonization of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold by contextualizing the murderous acts in a socially oppressive environment of a “perfect” suburban town. Michael Flynn’s chapter explores young men’s accounts of their own violent behavior. We conclude the book on a hopeful note. In her chapter describing nonformal peace education programs in New York City, Leonisa Ardizzone argues for the necessity

Introduction

of addressing structural forms of violence and oppression and encouraging youth to engage in social activism. Ardizzone’s chapter nicely complements Barry Checkoway, Lisa Figueroa, and Katie Richards-Schuster’s analysis of the mobilizing efforts of Youth Force, a remarkable community-based organization in New York’s South Bronx. In a chapter providing an analysis of the effects of the globalized political economy on youth homelessness in a midsized American city and a case study of Denver’s Urban Peak, an institution providing comprehensive services to homeless youth, Jean Scandlyn and her co-authors also make a call for true participatory action research that works with clients not only within the system but also against the system. Donna DeCesare’s remarkable photo essay, the appendix to this volume, captures the humanity and resilience of socially excluded youth in their struggle to maintain a sense of dignity and self-respect.

PPP As we edited this book, our concern about the condition of youth deepened. We began soliciting articles and editing our contributors’ first drafts not long after the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and as the editing process continued we watched and protested the making of the quagmires now terrorizing both Afghanistan and Iraq. A full reckoning is still years away, and with more than five hundred thousand civilian casualties in Iraq alone, the young women and men serving in the armed services and the insurgency certainly are not the only ones ruined by these campaigns of militarized chaos. The cages, prison cells, and torture chambers in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and other “shadow prisons” are stocked not only with adult Muslim men and youth, but it will be the youth who will seek to redress or avenge the humiliation. During this time, the U.S. and British governments have been busy outlining their global agenda, insisting early on that militarism was the unequivocal method of future foreign policy and that the global diplomacy of the Clinton era, with its preference for greater U.S. power through the spread of corporate trading blocs (i.e., free trade agreements) and treaties of mutual concern, was over. Before this, of course, everything wasn’t conducive to the establishment of individual dignity and a decent society; the world was fully immersed in its highly unstable postmodern moment, with politics and culture changing at breakneck speed and with consumer capitalism creating myths and realities that made the unified self another fiction. As Burawoy (2005:22) argues, The world has become more reactionary (and more insidious and astute in normalizing its appalling deeds). To put it crudely, market tyrannies and state despotism have deepened inequalities and abrogated freedom both within and among nations—both tendencies unleashed by the fall of communism and consolidated in the aftermath of September 11. If there are fortifications for holding up the advance of these two forces, they lie broadly within civil society, the breeding ground for the defense of human rights, environmental justice, labor conditions, etc.

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For those offended by Burawoy’s ideological commitments and his call for a public, engaged practice, the muted, professionalized policy tone of a recent United Nations report on the “fate of youth” may be easier on the ear: Young people, more than any other age group have been adversely affected by developments related to globalization, the ageing of society, rapid advances in information and communication technology, the HIV / AIDS epidemic, and armed conflict. . . . Some 209 million young people, or 18 percent of all youth, live on less than US $1 per day and 515 million live on less than US $2 per day. . . . The current generation of youth is the best educated so far. However, 113 million children are not in school and 130 million young people are illiterate. . . . In spite of the progress achieved in education, global youth unemployment has increased to a record high of 88 million. . . . HIV / AIDS (with ten million infected) is the primary cause of mortality among youth, followed by violence and injuries. (United Nations 2005:iii)

For our purposes the report’s emphasis on globalization is extremely important. In the opening substantive chapter, “Youth in the Global Economy,” the authors contend, Some have clearly benefited from the increased interdependence [brought on by the economic processes of globalization]; in East Asia, for example significant economic growth has lifted over 200 million out of poverty in a single decade. However, there are many who remain outside the realm of global economic activity and are being left behind; within and between countries, the income gap is widening. About 2 billion people are not benefiting from globalization. . . . Young people have an ambiguous economic and cultural relationship with the globalizing world. They are relatively adaptable and therefore perhaps best able to make use of the new opportunities presented. . . . There are . . . still many young people, however, especially in developing countries, who lack the economic power to benefit from the opportunities globalization offers. They have been left out of the modernization process and remain on the other side of the digital divide, but are simultaneously finding their cultural identity and local traditions threatened. (United Nations 2005:iii)

The report rightly highlights the plight of those in the developing world, but the disenfranchisement, social exclusion, and immiseration of youth are also present and growing in the “developed” world. In a recent book on the state of U.S. education we read, “Nationally, only about two-thirds of all students—and only half of all blacks, Latinos and Native Americans—who enter ninth grade graduate with regular diplomas four years later” (Orfield et al. 2004:67). Economic insecurity, inadequate housing, family instability, lack of mentorship, criminal peer cultures, commodity fetishism, and educational alienation all are linked. And how could it be otherwise? In the last two decades political elites across the globe, through pure self-interest, have managed to sell the notion that public investment in civil society is misguided and that the free market is a cure-all. The result has been disastrous for all but a tiny percentage of “haves,” whereas for the majority of the “have-nots” we see more impoverishment, a dramatic increase in youth homicide rates in most third world nations, faltering health

Introduction

standards for hundreds of millions of adults and youth, and the globalization of drugs, arms, and street gangs. One would think that a youthful revolution would be in the air after such rampant indignities, and youth certainly have made their feelings known. On the streets of Argentina in the wake of the country’s near bankruptcy, the Piqueteros formed road blocks and demanded work, dignity, and social change; in London, New York, Madrid, and Rome millions of students and youth protested the participation of their respective governments in the imperial senselessness of the Iraqi occupation; in Venezuela, the masses demanded and won the return of their elected president (much to the chagrin of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency); in Nairobi, Kenyan students have demonstrated repeatedly outside World Bank headquarters as their university system is held to ransom in exchange for its unpayable national debt; and in New York tens of thousands took to the streets to protest the murder by the police of an unarmed young African American man and demanded the cessation of racist police state practices. In all these disparate parts of the world young people have militantly marched and fought for a future. But it is not the sixties. The elites with their media empires, their pseudoheroes of the poor, their prisons, their surveillance cameras, their antisocial ordinances, their zero-tolerance webs, their mind-numbing messages of accumulation, competition, and individualism, and their abilities to have us measured, made statistically irrelevant and lost in a soundbite, have been remarkably successful at suppressing, distorting, and corrupting youth voices, spreading the psychosocial disease of fatalism, and producing scapegoats. In the last couple of years Brotherton has visited young people organized in their street collectives (gangs and street organizations) in a variety of global settings, including London, Glasgow, New York City, Barcelona, and Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic). Flynn has worked with New York City high school and college youth involved in the antinuclear and peace and justice movements. After conducting numerous interviews and conversations with youth in these areas and observing their daily lives, we find it laughable that so many adults expect young people to make sense of it all and still come out ahead of the game. Moreover, the pathetic levels of compensation given to teachers, youth workers, caregivers, and community organizers who are supposed to make social, intellectual, and spiritual contact with these youth and guide them into purposive lives are equally absurd. Through these experiences it has become clear to us that the closer one comes to the most marginalized young people, the less one is paid and the less status one is accorded. In New York in 2006 the largest teachers’ union in the country recently reached a labor contract after almost three years of unnecessarily drawn-out negotiation. The mayor, a “self-made” billionaire elected on a pledge to revitalize public education, complained that the teachers’ demands were excessive (their current starting salaries are $39,000). Meanwhile, in the Dominican Republic, public school teachers are paid $180 per month, there are often no books and no chalk in the classroom, and many children lack shoes. In Britain, where there is a big emphasis on recruiting local youth workers to assist in what is called “community integration” in “troubled areas,” such key players are paid minimum wages, receive little or no training, and are accorded a notch in status above babysitters and just behind elementary school teachers.

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Introduction

This disdain for education and hence for youth is reflected in both societies’ embrace of testing and rote learning as the pedagogical counter to flagging educational standards. Root causes of young people’s negative or problematic reactions to schooling are rarely addressed because nothing can be mentioned about the magnitude of the class, gender, and race divide within and across society unless it is framed in a first-world-saves-third-world narrative. This is precisely the kind of global scenario that Galeano (2001) describes as an upside-down world, a world where young people must struggle for the right to exist, compete for a modicum of self-respect, search deep for reasons to be optimistic, and yet get blamed for the little joy and excitement they can savor from their personal relationships. This is the same world that idealizes youth as a concept, a look to own and flaunt, a subject to be exoticized, studied, and pathologized. Yes, it is in this world, this shocking, amoral, completely mixed-up, imploding world that youth are commercially targeted almost from the womb, used as disposable jockeys from the age of four (in Dubai), and sold into slavery by the tens of thousands (see Bales 2004). Be it the West or the East, the North or the South, why should youth be expected to say anything positive and hopeful about an adult society that continues to treat them as pliable consumers, defenseless workers, chattel, pitiable cases, and empty vessels, all while regarding them with suspicion, fear, disdain, and contempt? Yet despite these odds, youth do make sense of the everyday, and they do not all end up in a literal or figurative dead end. Some may adapt to their sociocultural environments by joining antisocial subcultures that shorten their lives; it is the sociopolitical and historical contexts in which this occurs that are crucially important to document, examine, and analyze. However, most youth vacillate between different cultures, with one foot in the world of “deviance” and the other in the so-called mainstream. However, with so many of our institutional resources being placed in the hands of the interlocking social control industries, such youth often are labeled and pushed down the road to diminished life chances, just as the humanist social scientists of yesteryear repeatedly warned us. And now, emerging from the intergenerational dystopias created by men and women of privileged systems, many of whom are products of elite universities, youth in so-called deviant lifeworlds are coming to understand the politics of their marginalization and the transformative possibilities of their actions both for themselves and for their communities. All of these youth, across the racial and ethnic spectrum and the gender divide and increasingly across the barriers of social class, are somehow involved in processes, performances, and experiences of resistance. It is our sincere hope that the following chapters will provide some insight into this expanding phenomenon and will aid your contributions to this most critical of contemporary issues. For in the future of youth lies the future of society, and if our present treatment of them is any indication, we are in for a highly contested epoch.

References Bales, C. 2004. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Introduction Bauman, Z. 2000. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, P. 2003. Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Marketplace. New York: New Press. Brotherton, D. In press. Beyond social reproduction: Bringing resistance back in gang theory. Theoretical Criminology. Burawoy, M. 2005. For public sociology. American Sociological Review, 70: 4–28. Galeano, E. 2001. Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking Glass World. New York: Picador. Finnegan, W. 1999. Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country. New York: Modern Library. Frank, R. 1996. The Winner-Take-All Society. New York: Penguin. Harvey, D. 2006. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Martin-Baro, I. 1996. Writings for a Liberation Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Orfield, G., P. Marin, and C. Horn. 2004. Higher Education and the Color Line: College Access, Racial Equality, and Social Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Publishing Group. Piven, F. F. and R. Cloward. 1998. The Breaking of the American Social Compact. New York: Free Press. Salmi, J. 1993. Violence and Democracy: New Approaches to Human Rights. London: Zed. Sassen, S. 1999. Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: Free Press. Scott, J. 1992. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Touraine, A. 2001. Beyond Neoliberalism. London: Polity. United Nations. 2005, Oct. United Nations World Youth Report. Geneva: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Young, J. 1999. The Exclusive Society: Social Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

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Part 1. Youth, Social Control, and Surveillance

Martin Ruck, Anita Harris, Michelle Fine, and Nick Freudenberg

1. Youth Experiences of Surveillance A Cross-National Analysis

As the long arm of late capitalism stretches globally, with a neoliberal agenda of privatization and “choice,” we witness a concomitant and not coincident proliferation of state-sponsored surveillance mechanisms, systems of criminal (in)justice that increasingly shape state relations with local communities of color through the particularly heavy scrutiny of youth. This chapter invites a global conversation about the proliferation of state-sponsored strategies of surveillance on youth, particularly youth of color and poverty, and their suspect relationship to creeping global capitalism. We report common findings of youth experiences of police surveillance across three studies in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Across contexts, we document spikes in surveillance and arrests, and we document the subterranean erosion of youth belief in and commitment to state-sponsored democratic institutions and practices. We argue that youth in general, and youth of color and in poverty in particular, today develop in contexts of heavy scrutiny, with high penalties imposed disproportionately on those most disadvantaged. The future of democracy as vision and practice is jeopardized. Developmentally, the consequences of such targeted surveillance and criminalized scrutiny, on the streets and in schools, have yet to be determined but need to be theorized. Public authorities supposed to protect and public sites supposed to educate have morphed into sites and relations suffused with suspicion, vulnerability, and betrayal. Those who presumably protect (ironically or not) place many youth at great risk; sites in which help is supposed to be available are, at best, marbled with liberatory possibilities and predatory surveillance. Young women, more than men, with their own fears on the streets, voice ambivalence about this creeping surveillance, and youth of color— even more than white youth—feel under siege. Although we as critical researchers may believe it is healthy for youth to be skeptical about the claims of a democratic and free state, particularly with respect to its police and its schools, we also worry that the current generation of young people is growing up and through a profound mistrust of the state, with causalities including a diminished belief in democracy, cynical views about a

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broad-based “common good,” and little memory of or imagination for a public sphere for the public. In their stead are seeds of betrayal and distrust; at best, we hear about local organizing for what could be meaningful communities of trust and respect. In the United States, as is increasingly true around the world, recent debates about policing in urban areas are themselves part of several national and international trends: growing reliance on criminal justice to solve social problems (the United States now has more than two million people behind bars); an increasing concern about youth violence and school shootings, even in the face of declining crime rates; an increasing privatization of public spaces and a reliance on private security forces to maintain order in many urban areas; and a continued concentration of poor and immigrant youth of color in cities, even as these cities also attract and cater to whites (for further information see Poe-Yagamata and Jones 2000; Fine et al. 2003a). As urban zip codes gentrify and elite interests and families occupy long-neglected neighborhoods, we witness an infusion not only of carpenters and real estate developers but of police and security who constitute the front-line troops ordered to clear out what is in order to reclaim what will be. Neither streets nor schools are exempt from the infusion of state power, watching and targeting youth, in the cleansing of urban America, Canada, and Australia.

On Moral Panics, Youth, and Surveillance Little of this dynamic is new, but its intensity has generational consequence for citizenship and democracy. National anxieties typically attach to youth; moral panics have long targeted youth as the source of national troubles. Today, as in the past, concerns over crime, sexuality, and education focus on the “failures” of youth. In such panics, it is not unusual for a nation to construct technologies of surveillance, embodied in machines and people, often the very people entrusted with public authority (see Ayers et al. 2001 for contemporary and historic analyses of youth as a target of national moral panics). Youth of color attract a disproportionate share of the watching, the catching, the arresting and serving time. Foucault (1979:205) argues that surveillance works “to impose a particular form of conduct on a human multiplicity.” According to Foucault, surveillance is a strategy to discipline the public. Our studies seek to reveal the consequences, from an urban youth perspective, of aggressive policing and adult surveillance of young people in many corners of public space, with particular concerns about youth alienation and disengagement from adult society in three nations. Recent research on youth in public and private spaces suggests that urban youth, especially low-income youth of color, are being squeezed out of public spaces and placed under scrutiny and threat of criminalization when they are in public sites, and even at home (Jacobson and Crockett 2000; Kerr and Stattin 2000; Li et al. 2000). Some suggest that these policies may make it more difficult for young people to turn to teachers, police, or other adults in positions of public authority for help (Freudenberg et al. 1999).

Youth Experiences of Surveillance

Several studies in the United States have compared the attitudes and sometimes the experiences of white, Hispanic, and African American adults. In general, these studies show that whites trust police more and have more positive interactions than blacks and that Hispanics fall between these two populations (Norris et al. 1992; Spitzer 1976; Wilson 1996). Norris et al. (1992) note that of all groups studied, black youth tend to have the most “negative” and “hostile” feelings toward police (see also Anderson 1992, 1994; Wilson 1990, 1996). Heightened surveillance breeds heightened suspicion. In an ethnography of fifty young urban black men in gangs, Patton (1998) reports that these men perceived police as a force of oppression, not as a force of community protection. Wilson (1996) concurs, arguing that these young men often equate street-level police officers with laws they are hired to uphold. A Quinnipiac University survey found that 64 percent of New York City blacks, 52 percent of Hispanics, and 21 percent of whites rate police brutality as a very serious problem (Quinnipiac University 2001). Wortley and Tanner (2001) examined how race and ethnicity of Canadian youth affect their likelihood of being stopped and searched by police. In a study of more than thirty-three hundred Toronto high school students, they found that black youth who were not involved with drugs or other delinquent activities were still more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white youth who admitted involvement in illegal behavior. Even black youth who do not participate in suspect behaviors suffer from police scrutiny. Studies worldwide have found that indigenous, migrant, and ethnic minority youth experience disproportionately high levels of police contact (see Blagg and Wilkie 1995). In Australia young people of indigenous, Islander, or non–Englishspeaking backgrounds are far more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, or injured in contact with police than youth who self-identify as being from “an Australian cultural background,” that is, white and Anglo (Youth Justice Coalition of NSW 1994; see also Cunneen 1995). We are well aware that the surveillance of youth of color does not stop at school doors. Minority students suffer in terms of more disciplinary problems and higher dropout rates as compared to white students. Across contexts of schooling, students of color, especially African American males, are much more likely to be suspended from school than their white counterparts (Banks and Banks 1993; Bennett and Harris 1982; Calabrese and Poe 1990; Darling-Hammond 1994; England et al. 1990; Felice 1981; Kaeser 1979; Sheets and Gay 1996). Although schools can take a variety of disciplinary actions, suspensions are one of the most severe in that they result in the removal of students from the school and thus a decrease in students’ instructional time (Williams 1989), highly correlated with dropping out. Disciplinary problems, such as suspensions, are a major factor contributing to the high incidence of early school leaving among minority students (Children’s Defense Fund 1974; Dei et al. 1997; Rumberger 1983; Williams 1989; Wu et al. 1982). Although there is some evidence that racial and ethnic minority students often believe that they will receive harsher or more public punishment for engaging in the same behavior as white students (Marcus et al. 1991), there has been little systematic research directly exploring racial and ethnic minority students’ views and beliefs pertaining to

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school disciplinary practices and the use of police at school. Recent Canadian work provides some direct evidence of racial minority high school students’ views in this area. In an ethnographic study with a group of black, predominantly male, low socioeconomic status, urban high school students, Solomon (1992) found that with regard to school disciplinary practices, these students tended to view school discipline as being administered arbitrarily by school authorities. These students perceived that they were more often suspended than white students for engaging in the same types of behaviors. Black students were more likely to report that the schools’ regular use of police at school-related events was designed primarily to control and supervise their behaviors. With heightened surveillance comes a series of spikes in arrests and ultimately incarceration rates. These patterns are grossly racialized (and classed) in the United States. Indeed, once youth are involved with the juvenile justice system, race and ethnicity dramatically influence outcomes. A recent study tracking youth through the U.S. juvenile justice system by race and ethnicity (Poe-Yagamata and Jones 2000) found that 26 percent of young people who are arrested in the United States are African American, representing rates slightly higher than their representation in the general population. At every point in the criminal justice process, being African American increased the likelihood of negative outcomes for youth. The most chilling finding of this analysis reveals that a full 58 percent of the youth who end up in state adult prisons are African American, more than doubling their original overrepresentation in the arrest rates. In Australia, a similar scenario faces Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth. Indigenous youth make up 36 percent of the total numbers in juvenile detention centers but only 2.6 percent of the ten- to seventeen-year-old Australian population. They are twenty-one times more likely to be held in legal custody than nonindigenous youth, and this figure is increasing (Australian Institute of Criminology 1997). Strikingly absent in this literature are the perspectives of young people themselves, with a thorough analysis of race, ethnicity, and gender. These are the empirical and theoretical holes that we sought to address. In this chapter we report on three studies conducted in the United States, Canada, and Australia, conducted collaboratively with youth researchers (in United States and Australia), designed to assess youth perspectives and experiences with police, security, guards, social workers, and educators—on the streets and in schools.

Surveilling the Globe’s Youth Study 1: New York City In order to assess youth and young adults’ perceptions and experiences of their interactions with police, security guards, and other adults in positions of authority, we designed a street survey of 911 young people found in public places in New York City (Fine et al. 2003b). In addition, we conducted open-ended structured telephone interviews with a subsample of 36 youth who reported, on their original survey, an instance of a difficult encounter with an adult in a position of public authority. A participatory action research (PAR) model was implemented for this two-part quantitative and

Youth Experiences of Surveillance

qualitative study of New York City youth and young adults. In preparation for instrument design, the senior authors met with two focus groups of youth in two New York City high schools. Out of these discussions, four primary research questions evolved: To what extent do urban youth experience adult surveillance as evidence of mistrust and harassment versus comfort and safety? To what extent do race, ethnicity, and gender differentiate youth experiences of adult surveillance, particularly by teachers, police, and security guards? Can we begin to identify the consequences of surveillance on urban youth? and To what extent does the perception of adult surveillance affect youths’ trust in adult society, civic institutions, and democratic engagement? Two dozen New York City youth and young adults, representing a racial, ethnic, and gender mix, were hired as co-researchers. Six 4- to 6-hour workshops were organized to train them on PAR methods, quantitative design, and ethics and to seek their wisdom, cautions, and language for instrument design. Over the course of these workshops, the youth and university-based researchers constructed a 112-item survey, “Young Adults and Public Spaces,” a multidimensional measure developed to document the attitudes and experiences of New York City youth and young adults with adults in positions of authority (e.g., police, teachers, parents, store personnel, and security guards). Measures of trust, alienation, harassment, and help seeking were also included in the surveys. In summer 2000, using flyers and street outreach, ethnically diverse teams of high school and college student interviewers approached and recruited respondents in public places throughout New York City: in parks; on street corners; outside schools, libraries, and community colleges; and in other public sites. We sought a range of sites and youth, seeking to maximize generalizability for type of youth and type of setting in which they would be found. Interviewing sites were selected to enable us to fill each cell in our ideal sampling framework (calculated from the 1990 census). The distribution by borough approximated the distribution by race and ethnicity of young adults (ages sixteen to twenty-one) in the five boroughs of New York City. As we achieved our desired sample size in one group (e.g., Latino males in Manhattan), interviewers selectively sought participants to fill open cells (e.g., Asian females in Queens). To gain insight into the complexity of and response to adverse interactions with police and other adults in authority, we interviewed, by telephone, a sample of young people who had reported troubling interactions with police or other adults in the street survey and volunteered to discuss the incidents further. A total of 113 accepted this offer, and we were able to reach 36 (32 percent) by telephone. This sample was 39 percent male and 61 percent female; 75 percent were African American or Latino. The sample was quite representative: 48 percent female, 23 percent white (compared with 30 percent white in the New York population under age 18), 30 percent African American (compared with 32 percent from the census), 30 percent Latino (compared with 32 percent from the census), and 10 percent Asian and Pacific Islander (compared with 7 percent from the census). It should be noted that our sample included 22 percent African Americans and 8 percent African Caribbeans. In addition, our sampling method selected for young people who spent time on the street and therefore may be at higher risk for interacting with police. The design, methods, and findings are detailed in Fine et al. (2003b), and we offer here a summary of the results. Relying on qualitative and quantitative methods, and

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gathered with the deep participation of urban youth, the data reveal a multifaceted youth perspective on aggressive public surveillance, with specific social, psychological, academic, and civic implications of aggressive policing and adult surveillance of young people. First, these data demonstrate that youth across race, ethnic, and gender lines report high levels of adverse interactions with and low trust in adults in position of public authority. More than half of the respondents disagree (or strongly disagree) that New York City “makes young people like me feel welcome,” and 47 percent indicate that they worry about being arrested very much or all of the time. When asked, “If you were in a situation that would lead to your, or a friend, getting hurt, how likely is it that you would ask for help from the following people?” 45 percent of the respondents said it was unlikely (or very unlikely) that they would ask the police for help; 48 percent reported this for teachers or counselors, 60 percent for ministers, rabbis, or priests, 64 percent for social workers, and 61 percent for security guards. The only adults from whom a majority of youth was likely to seek assistance were parents (70 percent). Turning specifically to attitudes toward the police, we find a strong and significant ethnic group differences. In response to “I feel comfortable when I see police on the street,” 58 percent of African American, 53 percent of Latinos, 33 percent of Asian and Pacific Islanders, and 33 percent of whites disagreed or disagreed strongly (χ2 = 38.744, df 18, p = .003). A similar pattern of ethnic group differences was documented for the Attitudes Toward Police Scale. In particular, African American and African Caribbean youth report the most negative attitudes toward police. Second, we found that using the lenses of ethnicity and gender can provide significant insights into differential interactions with police and adults in authority. Our quantitative findings confirm that African American and Latino males have the highest rates of adverse interactions and mistrust of the police and feel least safe in the city. Young men are far more likely than young women to report negative interactions with police, and young men of color (African American, Afro Caribbean, and Latino) are significantly more likely to be picked up in a sweep or arrested than are whites. It is noteworthy that although attitudes and interactions with police vary moderately with respect to ethnicity, African Americans are more than twice as likely to often worry about being arrested than other groups (22 percent of African American males versus 10 percent of white males). The qualitative interviews suggest that African American young men not only are most concerned about such treatment but also are most resigned to such treatment, viewing it as inevitable and unlikely to change. Their own sense of agency—a willingness to challenge the injustice—was diminished by the expectation that “no one listens to a black male complaining about the cops.” Race, ethnicity, and gender matter with respect to experiences of and judgments about police surveillance. The data on perceptions of sexual harassment probably are the first to reveal the magnitude of these policing practices and to suggest an adverse impact on young urban women. Quiet unexpectedly, almost two-fifths of the young women surveyed indicated that in the past twelve months, male police officers had flirted with, whistled at, or come on to them. By race and ethnicity within gender, 51 percent of white females, 38 percent of African Americans, 39 percent of Latinas, and

Youth Experiences of Surveillance

13 percent of Asian and Pacific Islanders report that they were “flirted with” by a police officer. For many of the young women, the experience of sexualized harassment by police was quite disturbing. As one young woman noted (African American female, age nineteen), “They say they are protecting us, but they only make me feel more at risk.” Another (white female, age twenty) elaborated, “So this is how I learned that the very people who say they are going to protect you sometimes make you the most vulnerable.” This sexualized behavior may reduce young women’s willingness to turn to the police (or challenge their behavior officially) in times of need. Third, most young people report that the cumulative impact of adverse interactions with police, security guards, teachers, and store staff makes them feel unwelcome in presumably public spaces. The open-ended interviews reveal that adverse interactions with police, security guards, or teachers can leave youth with a sense of betrayal by adults and powerlessness to challenge such behavior. Beyond fear and resignation, which were described often, the youth expressed disappointment in their relations with police. Although 80 percent of this sample reported that they were involved in some form of community service projects, 74 percent said they felt that increased police presence in New York had worsened police relations with youth, particularly with youth from communities of color and economic poverty. They youths noted, with regret, a missed opportunity for collaboration between young people and the police. The accounts of “micro-aggressions” by adults in authority, experiences far more common than police shootings or beatings, may erode youths’ sense of belonging to public institutions for the common good. Youth who experience disrespect by adults in positions of authority may indeed experience higher levels of alienation from adult society and encounter more difficulty integrating into adult life. Fourth, our study found that many youths who felt betrayed by adults in authority were surprisingly empathic toward some of the very adults by whom they felt betrayed and disappointed. Youth recognized the benefits of reduced crime, admitted that they often acted in problematic ways, and accepted that in some cases the police, guards, or educators were justified in suspecting or even taking action against them. However, they also recognized and regretted an adult unwillingness to suspend automatic (stereotypic) judgments of young people, which further contributed to their sense of alienation and distrust. Finally, on a different note, our experience suggests that young people can be important partners in research. By using a participatory model, w were able to enlist young people in framing research questions, developing instruments, finding and interviewing respondents, and interpreting the results (see Fine et al. 2003a).

Study 2: Toronto, Canada The study reported here initially was part of a series of studies examining systemic racism in the procedures, policies, and practices that make up the Ontario criminal justice system (for a full description see Report of the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System 1995). The fact that police have become a major presence in many Canadian urban high schools has raised concerns about the increased surveillance of racial minority youth and the use of police to control student behavior.

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For instance, focus groups and discussions with various racial minority stakeholders, parents, and youth on the use of police in schools revealed a common perception of discriminatory treatment of students from certain racial or ethnic minority groups, such that these students are less likely to receive the same type of treatment or degree of school-based punishment as their mainstream counterparts. However, there is little systematic research examining minority students’ views and perceptions on this aspect of school–police relations in a Canadian context. To begin to address this limitation, this study reports findings from a large-scale survey of racially and ethnically diverse Canadian high school students’ perceptions of differential treatment toward members of their racial or ethnic group in terms of how they are treated by teachers, school disciplinary actions, the use of police by school authorities, and how they are treated by police at school. PARTICIPANTS

The study consisted of 1,870 Grade 10 and 12 students from 11 high schools in a racially and ethnically heterogeneous school district in metropolitan Toronto area of Ontario, Canada. Schools were selected using a stratified random sampling procedure. The sample consisted of roughly equal numbers of males (44 percent) and females (56 percent) and was roughly equally divided by grade (54 percent Grade 10, 46 percent Grade 12) and age group (54 percent fifteen to sixteen years, 46 percent seventeen to eighteen years). In terms of racial and ethnic background, the sample was 49 percent white or European descent, 18 percent Asian descent, 14 percent black or African descent, and 8 percent South Asian descent. Students from other racial and ethnic backgrounds (e.g., Hispanic, Aboriginal, and mixed racial background) combined accounted for 11 percent of the sample. Parental occupation served as a measure of family socioeconomic status, and the sample ranged from lower to upper middle class. Students under eightee years of age were selected for participation in the study if their parent or guardian gave written consent in response to a letter of permission sent home with each student. Students eighteen years of age and older did not need parental consent and were able to sign the consent form on their own behalf. In all cases verbal assent was obtained from all students taking part in the study. Students taking part in the study were reminded of the confidential and voluntary nature of the study. The amount of time for students to complete questionnaires ranged from forty-five to sixty minutes. Participants completed detailed questionnaires including sociodemographic items, a variety of Likert-type items assessing perceptions of differential teacher treatment, school disciplinary practices, police involvement at school, and general perceptions of school climate. Open-ended questions provided additional feedback. Questionnaires were individually completed by students in class groups or supervised group settings (e.g., school auditorium). Questionnaire items were developed in consultation with school district research staff. Pilot testing with a group of racially and ethically diverse students allowed us ensure that all survey items were comprehensible and linguistically appropriate.

Youth Experiences of Surveillance SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

The findings have been reported in detail elsewhere (see Ruck 1997; Ruck and Wortley 1998, 2002), and a summary of the main findings is provided here. Overall the findings indicated that black students view themselves as being at an obvious disadvantage compared with students from other racial groups. For example, in terms of students’ perceptions of injustice with regard to how their schools make use of the police, black students (50 percent) were far more likely than students from all other racial and ethnic groups (compared with 18 percent, 12 percent, 8 percent, and 3 percent of South Asian, “Other,” Asian, and white students, respectively) to report that their school was more likely to call the police on students from their racial or ethnic group than on students from all other racial and ethnic groups. In addition, black students (52 percent) were more likely than students from all other racial groups (compared with 23 percent, 19 percent, 15 percent, and 4 percent South Asian, “Other,” Asian, and white students, respectively) to believe that when the police came to their schools they would be treated worse or much worse than students from all other racial groups. This view is illustrated in the comments of one black student, who noted, “Teachers and police are harder on black people. Some teachers even go as far as saying ‘go back from where you came from’ and police are [even] worse because they know the individual can’t do anything about it.” Furthermore, the findings also revealed that racial minority status was an important predictor of perceptions of differential or discriminatory treatment for all minority students even after controlling for relevant factors, such that black, South Asian, “Other,” and Asian students were all more likely than white students to perceive discriminatory treatment toward members of their racial group with regard to how they were treated by teachers, school suspension, likelihood that the school would call the police on them, and treatment by police at school. A South Asian student describes what she considers the discriminatory treatment and increased surveillance toward members of her racial group: “The staff never lets us stay in [the building] after school because they think we are going to cause problems when we don’t even do anything. I know for a fact that the vice principal tells the staff to listen to our conversations and so they suspect us even more. I have noticed this because sometimes the others [racial minority students] don’t get kicked out but we do.” The research also demonstrated that a number of other sociodemographic factors also mattered with regard to students’ perceptions of how members of their racial group are treated at school. For example, young men were more likely than young women to report that students from their racial or ethnic group would be suspended, have the police called on them, and be treated worse or much worse by the police at school. Students from low-income families were much more likely than their higher-income counterparts to perceive differential treatment toward students from their racial or ethnic group by police at school. Young people who were born in Canada or came to the country at a young age were more likely than students who were recent immigrants to report that students from their racial or ethnic group would be suspended, have the police called on them, and be treated worse or much worse by the police at school.

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Several school-level variables were also of consequence in terms of how students judged their treatment by school authorities and police. Students who believed in harsh punishment for various types of student infractions or misbehaviors (e.g., creating a disturbance in class, bringing alcohol to school) were less likely to report that young people from their racial or ethnic group would be treated worse by teachers, face school suspension, have the police called on them, and be treated worse by the police at school. Finally, young people who saw their school as a place where race relations were less than positive or felt that their school was a violent or unsafe place were more likely to perceive bias toward members of their racial or ethnic group in terms of interactions with teachers, school-based punishment, use of police by school authorities, and police treatment at school. Overall, the results of this study reveal that a number of important factors influence students’ perceptions of how they are treated by their schools and the police. However, the fact that a significant number of racial minority students believe that their school and the police will treat them worse than other students indicates that students of color have a profound mistrust of the institutions that should be educating and protecting them. In addition, these perceptions are especially acute for black students, for whom the authority relations that are played out in greater society are reproduced within the structure of the school. Given these initial findings, it is imperative that Canadian schools begin to address the policies and procedures that lead to increased surveillance at school and the academic and social marginalization of minority students.

Study 3: Melbourne As part of a broader analysis of young people’s experiences of the economic and social resources of their communities (see White et al. 1997 for a full report of the research project), the study in Melbourne sought to ascertain young people’s views on surveillance by adult authorities in public space. The study focussed on six municipalities in Melbourne to represent both inner-city and outer suburban areas with differing levels of infrastructure, employment, and leisure opportunities and other indicators of community viability and growth. Socioeconomic profiles of the communities were developed with the input of 50 youth and community workers in the areas who had been interviewed for this purpose. These workers helped to identify the local socioeconomic factors affecting youth livelihood and lifestyles. At the completion of this phase of the research, an interview schedule for use with youth was developed and piloted, and in-depth interviews were then conducted across the areas with 400 young people aged fourteen to seventeen and 150 young people aged eighteen to twenty-five, from a range of social and ethnic backgrounds. The sample was diverse and representative of the broader demographic makeup of young people in Melbourne. The genders were evenly represented. Most participants were either first- or second-generation migrants, and almost one-third used a language other than English at home; 2.3 percent were indigenous. As measured by parental occupation, the majority was working class. The data were collected in 1996. Young people were interviewed in family homes, the street, parks, youth centers, and schools. Efforts were made to ensure that the

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sample was as representative as possible, although this depended on young people’s willingness to participate, cooperation from family, schools, and youth service providers, and opportunities for access to young people who are not necessarily visible in the public domain. Participants and researchers discussed the nature and consequences of participation, plain language statements were distributed, and all participants signed informed consent forms. For those under eighteen, consent from guardians was also secured. All aspects of the data collection and management were designed and conducted in compliance with the University of Melbourne Ethics Committee. Interviews were conducted one to one, were tape recorded, and ranged from half an hour to two hours in length. All interviews were confidential, and data were used only in nonidentifying ways. The project as a whole investigated young people’s strategies for accessing and creating economic and social resources in circumstances of high unemployment and increasing disparity between classes. In order to investigate this issue, it became evident that we needed to understand how young people’s attempts to make a living and participate in community building take place under conditions of surveillance. The portion of the research focusing specifically on surveillance sought to understand the following: What is the nature of the relationships and experiences between young people and figures of social control (police, security guards, transit police)? How do young people understand their own social formations on the street, and how do these experiences and perceptions differ from the concerns that drive youth surveillance (e.g., about “youth gangs” or young criminality)? What are the consequences of surveillance for young people’s civic engagement and commitment to community? SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

Relationships and Experiences Between Young People and Figures of Social Control The research found that youth are most likely to spend their time indoors. However, when young people are not at home, school, or work, they tend to hang out in public places such as shopping malls, parks, the street, food outlets, amusement centers, sporting facilities, and train stations. It is in these public environments, where social activity is not necessarily structured, and youth tend to be simply meeting up and spending time with friends, that they encounter regulation and surveillance. The research found that ambivalent and problematic relationships between youth and figures of public authority were the norm. We asked young people about their experiences with the police, private security guards (e.g., those who patrol malls or manage crowds at nightclubs), and the transit police (also known as the Transit Safety Division, a police force unit that patrols public transport and attends to violations of Transport Acts and Regulations, such as fare evasion). About 70 percent of the youth had had personal, direct contact with the police, about 50 percent with security guards, and 33 percent with transit police. The street was the most frequently cited place where police contact occurred. The younger cohort generally had either negative (36 percent) or ambivalent (25 percent) feelings about their contact with police. Twenty-eight percent of the older group reported bad experiences and 22 percent ambivalent. For both groups, negative

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experiences included being hassled and threatened (37 percent), being assaulted (12 percent), and being caught committing a crime (20 percent). For example, the young people made comments such as “Around here they always stop you. They know you, they know you don’t sell drugs, but they just check you out. You don’t feel that good about it when the cops start checking you, touching you. You don’t like no one to touch you. That shits me bad. Especially if they see you’re black or Asian, they think you’ve got drugs on you.” The older group reported more positive experiences (42 percent) than the younger (29 percent). Some reasons for this disparity could include the different modes of policing operationalized with these two age groups and the older youths having developed strategies and knowledge to enable them to handle encounters with police with the least trauma possible as a consequence of their experiences when younger. Importantly, however, the nature of the reported “good experiences” demonstrates the ambivalence with which many youth engage with authority figures. The majority of those who could name a good experience with police, security guards, or transit officers described an incident of being “hassled,” or stopped and asked questions, but categorized this as “good” because the authority figure was deemed to have been sufficiently respectful while performing this routine surveillance duty. For example, people as young as fourteen made comments such as, “I haven’t been in any trouble whatsoever. I’ve just been picked up every now and then, asked for name and address,” or “With friends at night, the police drive up and ask us what we’re doing, then just drive off.” Being treated decently when apprehended constituted the main way in which an encounter with the police was considered “good” (37 percent). The broader context of regular police surveillance of youth often is taken for granted by young people, who must simply incorporate this public regulation into their everyday lives. For example, one youth said, “They’re out there just to see if there’s troublemakers to stop them, you know. A lot of police go around and like if they see a group of kids they stop, just to see what’s going on, this and that, just to make sure that the streets are good. There’s no disagreements with the police, they seem alright, they’re just helping us out.” The other main experience with the police that was nominated as “good” was being helped when a victim of crime (35 percent). The juxtaposition of these “good” experiences attests to the extent to which young people are treated as potential criminals while experiencing a high rate of victimization. Social Formations on the Street The socioeconomic and political context of police, security, and transit surveillance of youth in Melbourne is one of high youth unemployment, few work and leisure opportunities, criminalization of young people without jobs, and a moral panic about so-called ethnic youth gangs. Consequently, young people’s social formations are treated with suspicion and attract monitoring and regulation by authorities. Young people themselves perceive their associations, social activities, and friendship groups quite differently, however. Although some youth claimed affiliation to a gang, the majority engaged in conventional social and economic behavior that connected them with other youth via shared interests. The media, community attitudes, and politicians are all sources of narratives about youth that demonstrate

Youth Experiences of Surveillance

an inability to differentiate between ethnic youth gangs and groups of young people of a range of cultural heritages engaged in regular, noncriminal social activities. The persistence of the construction of young people in social groups in public as a potentially criminal problem not only does a disservice to youth but also conceals the deeper challenges facing them in accessing and creating social and economic resources. Lack of employment, money, facilities, activities, and cheap entertainment are the prominent issues for young people coping in a new economic order that has radically reduced their work opportunities and yet engages them principally as consumers. For example, one young person said about surveillance in shopping centers, “They tell us to go away sometimes ’cause we stay there with no money, just stay all day when we’re bored, and they just tell us to go. We’re used to it, but we don’t like it.” The often racist surveillance of youth, based on unsubstantiated assumptions about ethnic gangs, prevents many of them from enjoying basic leisure opportunities. For example, one young woman said, “There’s about thirty of us, mostly Koories [Aborigines]. When we hang out in Playzone [amusement parlor], they told me we can’t hang out there at night any more because people are too scared to walk in there. He [security guard] said the police are going to come down and stop us hanging around. But it’s their business they’re losing. We spend about thirty dollars each in there when we’ve got money.” THE CONSEQUENCES OF SURVEILLANCE FOR CIVIC ENGAGEMENT AND COMMUNITY

The surveillance of young people by police, security guards, and transit officers has enduring effects on their capacity for civic engagement and commitment to community. Young people’s ability to freely enjoy the physical spaces of their communities is compromised when they are treated primarily with suspicion. Some youth in our study avoided leaving their homes because it simply was not worth the hassle of negotiating the inevitable encounters with authorities. The privatization of surveillance and the commercialization of young people’s leisure and recreational spaces add another dimension to the civic implications of regulation of youth. Not only do young people learn that they are what the “community” is being protected against, and therefore do not have membership of this community, but citizenship rights are conferred and regulated by the private sector. Public recreational spaces have become commercialized, the streets are heavily policed, and there seem to be no places for young people who do not have money to spend. Furthermore, in the absence of the social bindings provided by work and security in livelihood, young people are increasingly vulnerable to civic disengagement. At a time when they need social and economic resources to enable them to connect positively with community, they have become convenient “folk devils” for manipulated social concerns about criminality, public disorder, and gangs. The response of authority figures to young people’s activities and presence in the public sphere is fundamentally one of surveillance. Their marginalization from civic life constitutes one of the most significant ways in which contemporary urban communities compromise the futures of young people and, in turn, the futures of the communities themselves.

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Implications of Privatization, Surveillance, and Betrayal: Questions of Development and Democracy Findings across these three studies point to a stunning and terrifying development: The long arm of surveillance—by police and criminal justice authorities—has reached across oceans and continents, targeting youth in general and most specifically youth in communities of color, on their streets, in their communities, and in their schools. The obvious consequences include swollen prisons, diminished cultural capital in poor communities, families and communities torn apart, and undermined relations of trust and commitment. Furthermore, we have data suggesting that globally a generation of youth develops with a fundamental sense of betrayal and mistrust in adults and the state, little commitment to national or global well-being, a perverse retreat from collective bonds, and an acute, reality-induced paranoia that the public sphere may capture but does not serve. Anthony Elliott writes on the psychological and developmental consequences of privatization: the shrinkage of a public sphere, hijacked for corporate interests, leaving young people to shop through an ideological sea of individualism, “choice” and “freedom” loitering where images and practices for the common good once stood. As youth witness and embody the shrinkage and privatization of the public sphere, or more aptly the swelling of the prison–industrial complex as their generation’s fully funded public sphere, the costs to the social, the collective, and the humanly possible may be devastating. In a painful postmodern turn, what was once public has been privatized, colonized by a heightened sense of surveillance and targeting, while seemingly private or individual behaviors (hanging out, going to parks, walking down streets, laughing aloud with friends) have moved into a zone for public scrutiny. As the Internet is increasingly surveilled, schools adopt perverse “zero tolerance” policies that regulate and exile, and stores, parks, malls, and streets are monitored and cleansed of youth, particularly youth of color. Spaces for imagination, democracy engagement, and leisure are swept clean. The “public” has morphed into a gated community. Youth read these messages with clarity and a generational sense of betrayal.

References Anderson, E. 1992. Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 1994. The code of the streets. The Atlantic Monthly, 273(5): 80–92. Australian Institute of Criminology. 1997. Detaining Aboriginal Juveniles as a Last Resort: Variations from a Theme. Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice paper. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. Ayers, R, W. Ayers, B. Dohrn, and J. Jackson, eds. 2001. Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment. New York: New Press. Banks, J. A. and C. A. M. Banks, eds. 1993. Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives, 2nd ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Bennett, C. and J. J. III Harris. 1982. Suspensions and expulsions of male and black students: A study of the causes of disproportionality. Urban Education, 16(4): 399–423.

Youth Experiences of Surveillance Blagg, H. and M. Wilkie. 1995. Young People and Police Powers. Sydney: The Australian Youth Foundation. Calabrese, R. L. and J. Poe. 1990. Alienation: An explanation of high dropout rates among African American and Latino students. Educational Research Quarterly, 14(4): 22–26. Children’s Defense Fund. 1974. Children out of School in America. Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund. Cunneen, C. 1995. Ethnic minority youth and juvenile justice. In C. Guerra and R. White (eds.), Ethnic Minority Youth in Australia, 162–181. Hobart, Australia: National Clearinghouse for Youth Studies. Darling-Hammond, L. D., ed. 1994. Review of Research in Education. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Dei, G., J. Mazzuca, E. McIsaac, and J. Zine. 1997. Reconstructing ‘Drop-Out’: A Critical Ethnography of the Dynamics of Black Students’ Disengagement from School. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. England, R. E., J. Stewart, and K. J. Meier. 1990. Excellence in education: Second generation discrimination as a barrier. Equity & Excellence, 24(4): 35–40. Felice, L. 1981. African American student dropout behavior: Disengagement from school rejection and racial discrimination. The Journal of Negro Education, 50: 415–424. Fine, M., K. Boudin, I. Bowen, J. Clark, D. Hylton, M. Martinez, Missy, M. Rivera, R. Roberts, P. Smart, M. E. Torre, and D. Upegui. 2003a. Participatory action research: Behind bars and under surveillance. In P. Camic and J. Rhodes, eds., Qualitative Methods in Psychology, 173–198. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Fine, M., N. Freudenberg, Y. A. Payne, T. Perkins, K. Smith, and K. Wanzer. 2003. “Anything can happen with police around”: Urban youth evaluate strategies of surveillance in public places. Journal of Social Issues, 59(1): 141–158. Foucault, M. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Freudenberg, N. L., L. B. Roberts, B. E. Richie, R. T. Taylor, K. McGillicuddy, and M. B. Greene. 1999. Coming up in the Boogie Down: Youth perceptions of violence in the South Bronx. Health Education and Behavior, 26(7): 788–805. Jacobson, K. C. and L. J. Crockett. 2000. Parental monitoring and adolescent adjustment: An ecological perspective. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 10(1): 65–97. Kaeser, S. J. 1979. Suspension in school discipline. Education and Urban Society, 11(4): 465–484. Kerr, M. and H. Stattin. 2000. What parents know, how they know it, and several forms of adolescent adjustment: Further evidence for a reinterpretation of monitoring. Developmental Psychology, 36: 366–380. Li, X., B. Stanton, and S. Feigelman. 2000. Impact of perceived parental monitoring on adolescent risk behavior over 4 years. Journal of Adolescent Health, 27(1): 49–56. Marcus, G., S. Gross, and C. Seefeldt. 1991. African American and Caucasian students’ perceptions of teacher treatment. The Journal of Educational Research, 84: 363–367. Norris, C., N. Fielding, C. Kemp, and J. Fielding. 1992. Black and blue: An analysis of the influence of race on being stopped by the police. The British Journal of Sociology, 42(2): 207–224. Patton, P. 1998. The gangstas in our midst. The Urban Review, 30(1): 49–76. Poe-Yagamata, E. and S. Jones. 2000, April. And Justice for Some. Washington, DC: Youth Law Center, Building Blocks for Youth Report. Quinnipiac University. 2001, Feb. 1. New York City surveys. Hamden, CT: Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. Report of the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System. 1995. Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System. Toronto: Queen’s Printer.

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Martin Ruck, Anita Harris, Michelle Fine, and Nick Freudenberg Ruck, M. D. 1997, April. Minority Students’ Views of the Relationship Between Race / Ethnicity and School Disciplinary Practices: A Canadian Perspective. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Washington, DC. —— and S. Wortley. 1998, Feb. Ethnically and Racially Diverse Canadian High School Students’ Perceptions of School Disciplinary Practices and School Atmosphere. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence, San Diego, CA. —— and ——. 2002. Racial and ethnic minority high school students’ perceptions of school disciplinary practices: A look at some Canadian findings. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 31(3): 185–195. Rumberger, R. W. 1983. Dropping out of high school: The influence of race, sex, and family background. American Educational Research Journal, 20(2): 199–220. Sheets, R. H. and G. Gay. 1996, May. Student perceptions of disciplinary conflict in ethnically diverse classrooms. NASSP Bulletin, 84–94. Solomon, P. 1992. Black Resistance in High School: Forging a Separatist Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. Spitzer, S. 1976. Conflict and consensus in the law enforcement process: Urban minorities and the police. Criminology: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14(2): 189–212. White, R., M. Aumair, A. Harris, and L. McDonnell. 1997. Any Which Way You Can: Youth Livelihoods, Community Resources and Crime. Sydney: The Australian Youth Foundation. Williams, J. 1989. Reducing the disproportionately high frequency of disciplinary actions against minority students: An assessment-based policy approach. Equity & Excellence, 24(2): 31–37. Wilson, A. 1990. Black on Black Violence: The Psychodynamics of Black Self-Annihilation in the Service of White Domination. New York: Afrikan World Infosystems. Wilson, W. J. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Vintage. Wortley, S. and J. Tanner. 2001, April. The Good, the Bad and the Profiled: Race, Deviant Activity, and Police Stop and Search Practices. Paper presented at the Biannual Conference on Crime and Criminal Justice in the Caribbean, Kingston, Jamaica. Wu, S., W. Pink, R. Cairn, and O. Moles. 1982. Students’ suspension: A critical reappraisal. The Urban Review, 14(4): 245–336. Youth Justice Coalition of NSW. 1994. Nobody Listens: The Experience of Contact Between Young People and Police. Sydney: Youth Justice Coalition of NSW, Western Sydney Juvenile Justice Interest Group and the Youth Action and Policy Association, NSW.

Simon Hallsworth and Janet Ransom

2. From the Outside Looking In Young People’s Perceptions of Risk and Danger in an East London Borough

This chapter is written with the aim of revealing something of the day-to-day lives of poor working class males who live in one of London’s poorest areas, particularly as revealed to us in a series of focus groups we conducted with them. Although our aim is to describe the lives of these young men, we will not use perspectives already at play in academia and dominant policy agendas to help redescribe their lives. Instead, we use their testimonies to contest the essentializing assumptions inherent in many of these discourses. More specifically, by listening to what these young men have to say, we aim to show how far the complexity of their lives subverts the assumptions inherent in many of the policy discourses the adult world produces to make sense of young people’s lives. Against prominent discourses of underclass thinking and risk management that conceive of poor people as a dangerous outside, we reveal a world where the pleasures of delinquency run hand in hand with a respect for family, religion, and the desire for a good job. In a world that continue to position young people as a threat that needs managing, we will also show how young people perceive such control an ongoing source of threat in their lives. Finally, against the liberal visions of multiculturalism that present different ethnic groups as if they were essentially different, we draw attention to the hybridity of culture and identity in a fragmenting postmodern world. We begin here with some brief observations on the methods we applied to gain access to the lives of the young men we spoke to and go on to explore their testimony. We then seek to contextualize these perceptions by indicating how profoundly they interrupt and subvert the essentializing closures endemic in much policy discourse.

Methods The young people we interviewed for the purpose of this research all lived in Tower Hamlets, one of London’s poorest inner-city areas. Tower Hamlets was selected for a

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number of reasons. First, like many other inner-city areas it has more than its fair share of urban problems. In aggregate terms it has far higher than average rates of deprivation, poverty, and social exclusion. Its crime rate is also far higher than that of London as a whole but average for its inner-city areas. As in many other areas of London, its working-class population lives principally in a series of high-density estates, unrelentingly drab and uninspired in their design. For a project interested in examining the views of working-class youth, the area was ready made for the research we were interested in pursuing. Given that it housed one of the most ethnically diverse populations in the United Kingdom, the borough also provided us with an excellent opportunity to examine the perceptions not only of young working-class men in general but those of young people from different ethnic groups within this population. For the purpose of this project we sought to elicit the testimonies of young men from different ethnic groups and among different age groups within these ethnic categories. We selected a focus group method. Discussion within the groups was loosely structured around particular pre-identified themes, specifically young people’s perceptions of authority and their experiences and perceptions of risk and danger. These themes, narrow as they might appear to be, were selected on the basis that they would allow us to see just how far the world of these working-class young men equated with the way in which their worlds were evoked in policy and political discourse, particularly the familiar refrains of law-and-order politicians who routinely (and with active backing of a tabloid press) positioned young people as a principle source of risk and danger to the good society and saw the imposition of coercive control as an unproblematic solution. We used a focus group approach precisely because we felt that such a method was more likely—than, for example, individual interviews—to yield insights into the texture of young people’s lives. Young people, and young men in particular, live collective lives based on shared (peer group) identities, and it is often in the context of these shared public presences that their day-to-day lives unfold. Individual interviews would not have given us such unmediated access to group solidarity or collective experience. As Barbour and Kitzinger (1999) argue, a major feature of focus groups is that interaction itself yields material for interpretation. There are problems, however, because interaction takes multiple forms; it is not just through speech but through body language, eye contact, and the shared silences that collective histories spawn, that solidarity and tension are expressed. We did encounter some difficulties in transcription, and some of what we have to say at the end of the day stands or falls on its plausibility and cannot be illustrated by quotation. Men and women do not share the same relationship to language and speech, and many of the young men who took part in our study were extremely economical with words. If this presents what looks like insurmountable hurdles for any researcher to negotiate, it must also be emphasized here that what is taken away from a focus group is not simply a typed transcript. As our experience suggested, as important were the silences, the furtive nods, the laughter, the frisson of an admitted transgression. Where possible, we reflect this in the accounts that follow. Four focus groups were conducted in different parts of the borough among people who were also known to each other. All the young people were aged between fourteen and eighteen. Focus group divisions reflected ethnicity and gender, and ethnic

From the Outside Looking In

groupings replicated those evident in the borough. More groups were undertaken with young men because they are overrepresented in the offending population and because they typically provoke what Pearson (1983) identifies as the “history of respectable fears” adults use to justify the regulation they impose on young people’s lives more generally. We used youth clubs and schools as the environment for the interviews because we thought this would facilitate a freer discussion than a more formal context (such as an unfamiliar university) could provide. Such environments were by their nature familiar to the young people we interviewed and provided a context where friendship groups already met. The young men we interviewed were all involved in the tortuous process of negotiating their way through a lifeworld common to most working-class young people. All were at school in the borough, and most viewed this with various degrees of pragmatic acquiesce. The young men we interviewed typically spent a large part of their leisure time on the streets, and most enjoyed as well as feared the risks street life provoked. This was our sample, young men who were selected not because they were noticeably different from others around them. They were selected not because of their exoticness or uniqueness—the usual focus of subcultural theory. Their world was one most young men of their generation and in poor areas would experience as normal, and this is why we were interested in interviewing them. For the same reason, their testimony bears hearing.

Unruly and Dangerous Lives We asked the young men to tell us whether they engaged in any behavior they thought of as risky or dangerous. In response the young men in all groups identified “just hanging around the streets” as risky, both because this invites targeting by the police and because street presence could also bring them into proximity with a number of gangs also present in the area where they lived. Because issues about collective violence and violence in general appeared as significant issues in their lives, we asked them to tell us more about the kind of violence in which they engaged and their attitude toward it. The young men had a pragmatic attitude toward violence. Theirs is a dangerous world, and violence is never far away. It could also take a number of forms. At its most minor it could involve confrontations between individuals. However, group conflicts were also a common feature of their lives. Although territorial demarcations worked to some degree to contain gang violence, the possibility of the aggressive intrusion of one group into the area of another was always something they all had to be wary of and ready for. Although groups of young men were clearly demarcated along ethnic lines, and although violence both within and between ethnic groups was common, the motives informing conflict could by no means be reduced to issues of racism in the sense of a predatory racist white majority persecuting one or more ethnic minorities. The young men’s testimonies indicated a reality that was far more complex. Although the Bangladeshi and Somali groups could cite examples of white institutional racism (as in the case of the police), associations of young Bangladeshi males could also take on both Somalis and groups of white males and could do so in an offensive

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capacity. Indeed, the biggest threat in their lives (as the young Somalis conceived it) was posed by Bangladeshi males, whom they also accused of racism. The demographic dominance of Bangladeshis in a number of the estates in the area also created the basis for strange alliances. For example, relations between Somali and white men interviewed often were conceived as generally positive and characterized by relations of friendship and occasionally mutual support. Although ethnicity constituted the dominant referent around which identity was constructed in these young men’s lives, it could also be overdetermined by connections to specific spaces such as particular areas, streets, estates, or schools. These allegiances to turf and by implication to those who dwelt in an associated territory could also form the basis for group-based conflicts within distinct ethnic groups. As the testimonies of the young men indicated, conflict in the borough was as much intraethnic as interethnic. During a meeting convened with a group of Bangladeshi males from the same school by a conflict mediation group (related to another aspect of the research), the event fell to pieces on the basis of mutual distrust and antagonism between the young men present. The point of separation and source of conflict between them was that these young men lived on different but adjacent estates. When violence threatened, and there was never a sense that it could reliably be kept at bay, real dangers were experienced: ym1: There was seven of us chased by about fifteen of them. . . . Someone had a gun. Someone—not one of us like—had his fingers chopped off with a machete. (Bangladeshi group)

This young man speaks from a group that won’t go to Brick Lane, Hackney, Brixton, or Plaistow (other areas in London). He says he doesn’t worry much, “not around this area,” but qualifies this because the Plaistow boys are known for transgressing the boundaries: “They always come down here and start trouble.” “Trouble” is met through the mobilization of friends, displays of solidarity, the mobilization into groups that on occasion could number many people. From the testimony of these young men two other factors about group conflict in the area also bear consideration. First was the tendency of many conflicts to escalate— and quickly. Second was the use of weapons in many of these conflicts. Violence between two people, for example, could quickly lead to a situation that could involve a number of people: jr: It sounds like fighting’s a bit of a problem. How often does fighting happen outside the school? ym1: . . . groups . . . ym2: Yeah, ’round here it’s quite often, like you get on down near the shop. . . . ym3: One person gets into a fight— ym2: . . . Like they get loads and loads of people to fight one person, so it ends up like two big groups that are fighting each other, and the police try to get involved. jr: And are these groups from inside the school or— ym1: ’Cos they can be everywhere because like—

From the Outside Looking In

ym2: . . . train station near and then most people . . . after school . . . meet down the train station . . . big fight, blocked off the entire street. (White group, school)

The fighting groups could be from outside the school; they could also include relatives and friends, and friends of friends: ym1: Outside the school, yeah, it’s quite bad ’cos although they’ve banned mobile phones, if there’s a fight in the school between an Asian kid and a white kid or a black kid or something like that— ym2: By the time you get out of school there’s like loads of people in cars with machetes in cases, just waiting for their kid to come out. ym1: Snooker cue cases. ym2: Whatever. (White group, school)

The use of weapons also appeared to be a recurrent feature of group conflict in the area. Some of the young men claimed to be armed (normally with knives) or to have seen weapons deployed in violent situations. When asked to elaborate, they gave examples of belt buckles, machetes, baseball bats, chains, and even guns. Although male bravado may have enhanced some of the claims, the use of knives as an accessory of dayto-day inner-city life was confirmed by youth workers in the borough. As this chapter was being written, a serious incident also occurred involving an armed incursion by a group of Bangladeshi males into a local college, which resulted in one young man being critically injured as a consequence of having been assaulted with a baseball bat. All the young men knew where they could obtain drugs if they wanted, but all, apart from a couple of the young white men who admitted to minor experimentation with some soft drugs, insisted they did not take drugs. This is somewhat at odds with data that suggest the increasing prevalence of drug taking, especially of heroin, in the borough.¹ The young Bangladeshi men distinguished themselves from others in their ethnic group located in another specified area of the borough where drug activity did take place, but they were adamant that they themselves would never take any sort of drugs, including alcohol. Religious practice in this group was an ongoing referent for conduct. Beyond this, however, a range of socially problematic behaviors were identified across the groups, including the illegal activities of street robbery and joyriding. The two young men who admitted to street robbery did so via a slight nod while looking down furtively, indicating, we thought, either shame or, more probably, that this was an area that we should leave alone. In contrast, when the young men talked of joyriding, the atmosphere in the room became one of exuberance, and we realized we had hit on something very interesting indeed. There was no guilt or shame here; this was celebrated as a major pleasurable activity for one whole group of young men. Most of what is recorded on the tape is not speech but collective noise that indicates exhilaration, danger, and the transcendence associated with speed. There is a shared history here (“Do you remember that G-reg BMW?” followed by exuberant noise) of an enormous transgressive pleasure. If violence was something these young men could do, it was also a real source of anxiety in their lives, a point confirmed in discussions with youth workers. It could

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certainly be considered “fun” on occasion, and clearly there was a sense of exhilaration and pleasure attached to the rituals that surrounded it. As one white young man observed, ym1: Fights can be sometimes like invigorating because when you’re out—when you’re—something—you know, when we’re somewhere like where we are now, we’re all normal, we’re alright—but when you have a fight, it’s like adrenalin and when you see someone bleeding on the floor like and you’ve just battered the crap out of them— ym2: you wanna do even more—(general laughter). (White group, school)

At the same time, however, there was a clear sense that on occasions it could go too far, particularly if weapons were involved or if people were observed to be badly hurt. As one young white male replied in answer to a question on what things might worry them, his biggest source of fear was finding himself confronted by a prostrate enemy who didn’t move after he had been kicked. Finally, and this was expressed in some of the older young men, there was a sense in which violence intruded negatively in the round of everyday life. It was perceived by some as an inevitable feature of life, simply as something that had to be accommodated and navigated. Enjoyment in this sense appeared far away. The boundaries on these young men’s worlds, then, are both geographic and existential; their descriptions typically mapped out a kind of geography of fear. Some places were safe but not always. Others were always dangerous, and they knew they faced the risk of being seriously hurt if they transgressed into someone else’s space. This geography is internal to their world: The boundaries and demarcations within it, the sense of when a line has been crossed and one is trespassing into a dangerous area, is not something that could be derived from the experience of an ordinary adult moving through these spaces. For these young men, however, knowing where these fluid borders lay was a key to living a safe life.

A Dangerous Outside? These young men are not innocent populations, and it is not our intention to represent them as such. They do engage in what the adult world would code, with justification, as criminal behavior, and clearly the adult world does have a vested interest in addressing the problematic situations in which these young men often found themselves. Whether the means are appropriate is something we will turn to later in this chapter. Although they could and did engage in a range of delinquent behaviors, this did not prove, as the rhetoric often used to demonize them suggests, that we were dealing with a population somehow devoid of the virtues the good society believed itself to possess. What our interviews brought to light were a range of perceptions expressed by these young men that dominant discourses about youth involvement in crime rarely explored or even recognized, particularly the extent to which these young men also bought into and accepted many of the values that were actively celebrated by mainstream society.

From the Outside Looking In

In a stark reversal of the images of the demonic youthful predator in the mass media, what we found was a world where young men respected their families and where many also considered their parents as role models (incidentally, no other role models were mentioned). For all their involvement in gang-related violence, the young Bangladeshi men saw themselves as committed Muslims. Indeed, their religion was fundamental to their self-identify, and it remained a constant point of reference against which conduct was assessed. As the testimonies of all these young men brought home, they could tell right from wrong. They also wanted to live in a world where people were honest, although many felt society fell far short as it was currently constructed. Significantly, what these young people worried about most commonly was exams. To a large extent they had internalized widely held societal values, if not in the form of a work ethic, rather at a level of pragmatic accommodation. They did not want to become part of what has come to be called the underclass, and they did not identify themselves in those terms. They saw a link between working hard now and having choices later, and they wanted good jobs in the legitimate economy. Against versions of underclass thinking that constitutes populations such as those from which our young men were selected as a homogenous and alienated mass, the “outside” of moral or respectable society, our research suggests that the inside and the outside are not that clear. Where underclass thinking affirms the absolute opacity of worlds, our analysis shows that young men who engage in joyriding and street robbery have not necessarily renounced all the values of liberal culture or of their own traditions. And although their engagement in acts such as joyriding and gang fights might bring to mind that phenomenon that Bea Campbell (1993) calls “lawless masculinity,” this characterization also needs to be tempered. Although it was evident that their culture was forged around a celebration of traditional macho values, particularly being seen to be men of respect in a world where respect was everything, this was not a vision of masculinity that had resolved itself into a lethal counterculture that defined itself in fundamental opposition to the dominant society. These were not violent street kids. And although they aspired in their street life to obtain respect by, as Katz (1988) puts it, “walking the ways of the badass,” this did not imply that they repudiated society by becoming complete outsiders in the manner suggested by much subcultural theory (see Willis 1977). What did come across in these interviews was just how far these young men had bought into a self-help agenda new right entrepreneurs might well commend. Unanimously, they wanted more and better youth clubs and activities for the purposes of entertainment and self-education. In the case of the young men we interviewed in youth clubs, it was also clear that they understood the financial circumstances the youth clubs faced. These were uniformly bleak. What also came across in the interviews was that the young men were aware that the more antisocial aspects of their behavior would be curbed if they had more, and more interesting, things to do. The problem they faced, which frustrated them, was that they did not have the resources they believed they needed to accomplish this. They wanted their resourcefulness to be facilitated within a social and collective context, and they felt angry that the adult world would not help provide for this.

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The Adult World as Threat and Danger What the adult world had managed to provide for these young men was very little that could be classified as positive, “solutions” that in many respects were negative and highly coercive. The young men were provided with a patchy array of youth clubs across the borough, most of which were in a grim state of repair, where the facilities provided fell far short of anything that could remotely be connected with the words adequate or appropriate. In these bleak warehouses, the young men often were left with little beyond the seemingly ubiquitous pool table, a few chairs, and a deck of cards. In one youth club we visited (which was due to be closed down at the end of the month) a heroic youth worker itemized the problems she faced. Local budgets had been relentlessly cut, and the limited budgets available for young people had been switched into education. Youth work had been casualized and full-time positions ruthlessly cut. It was not a lone refrain. The same story was retold elsewhere and was confirmed by the young men, most of whom expressed a high degree of respect for the youth workers. Lack of social provision and lack of the kind of provision young men might like can be regarded as a major determinant of young men’s presence on the street. Street life therefore is not simply something self-authored; on the contrary, it is a direct consequence of neglect and failures at the political level. However, neglect was not the only problem the young people we spoke to faced as a consequence of the actions of the adult world. Another was addressing what remained the primary means the adult world devised to regulate their street presence: stop-and-search exercises conducted by the local police. Indeed, it is difficult to express in writing the level of resentment and hostility these young men expressed toward the police. When we probed them about their hostility, what came across were perceptions forged out of a history of regular and typically hostile contact. All had experienced being stopped and questioned or stopped and searched, almost all more than once, and most saw it as a routine and unpleasant feature of their street life. Although individuals qualified their distrust of the police with the observation that “some of them are alright,” the consensus was that most are not, and there was no general sense that police conduct was fair. We asked the young people to elaborate on this unfairness: How does it happen in practice? Three related themes emerged, elaborated both through generalized statements and through the telling of detailed stories about particular events and occasions. It was in “doing nothing” contexts that interaction between the young men and the police typically occurred. These encounters were chaotic and confusing and were expressed with a real sense of narrative but also—a point that can’t be appreciated in hard copy—with an underlying fatalism. jr: When they searched you, how did they go about it? ym1: In such and such road—’Cos there was a robbery they just—about six—all come running round the corner—“get up against the wall, get up at the wall.” . . . ym2: They was shouting at us— ym3: Put your hands in the air, all like that, and we didn’t know what was—what—and they goes—

From the Outside Looking In

ym1: They said someone got beaten up yeah? And about half an hour before that we was getting chased by a man. And then they said someone got beaten up and they made us wait an hour while they bunged the man back in the van. jr: Why did they make you wait an hour? ym3: They said they was going to identify us. They said they was going to arrest us if they said it was us. They was gonna go by their word. And we said in the van—it was the man that chased us. And he told the police it weren’t us. We was nothing to do with it. (White group, youth club)

What runs through this is a clear sense of injustice, even if the particular details are somewhat clouded. These young men, the white group interviewed in their youth club, and the Somali and Bangladeshi young men expressed a clear perception that when they were stopped and searched it was because they were there rather than because they had done anything to justify it. None objected to the right of the police to stop and search per se, but all said or concurred with the view that the police stop them for no reason. Certainly, according to these young men’s testimony, reasons typically were not offered. The first characteristic, then, is that the whole experience was fundamentally arbitrary from the young men’s point of view. Second, the young men were clear that this arbitrariness was the mode in which police expressed their own pleasure in power. sh: So how do they treat you when they stop and search you? ym1: Oh depends. . . . sh: What sort of explanation do they give you? ym1: Say they’ll arrest you. sh: So is that a threat? ym1: It’s ’cos they’ve got the policeman’s badge on they think they can talk to you like it. If they weren’t in uniform they wouldn’t talk to you like it. They drive up and down, they just keep . . . they circle round. . . . ym2: Like the other day. They nicked one of our friends . . . chucked him on the floor. (White group, youth club)

All of the groups we spoke to resolved this into a lack of respect, the third thematic point. When the young white men were invited to talk about what changes they wanted to see in police behavior, they said they should be given “training in listening”; they should “change the way they speak to you” and “change the way they deal with you as well.” They should “explain why they wanna search you, not just do it to you.” “They don’t give you a chance. They should take you seriously.” Responses in a later white group interviewed in a school were more mixed but articulated a distinction between the bad police (“The worst ones are the ones that jump to conclusions and don’t give you time to say what you want to say to them”) and the good police: ym1: They listen to you. They take your opinion. Like if there’s a fight and you’re like the last person . . . they take your opinions, whereas just saying to you—’cos they seen you. (White group, school)

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The focus on respect is sharpened when we consider the relationship between the Somali and the Bangladeshi young men and the police. Although the British police have made recent and significant attempts to offset a longstanding assumption that they are institutionally discriminatory in the way they exercise their powers to stop, all of the groups perceived the police as racist in that they specifically targeted young black men or that their conduct was insufficiently sensitive to ethnic or cultural difference, a point we take up later. The perception of the police as racist also came from the testimony of young white men, who spoke at some length about the increased intensity of police attention they had experienced when they were hanging out in a mixed-race group. The young men themselves initiated the discussion; we did not ask them whether they thought the police were racist. For example, ym1: Whenever you’re with black boys the police go to them first and leave us. Even if you did do it, they ask a black boy first. ym2: If you were with a black boy they would . . . if there’s white boys with black boys, they just ask the black boys. (White group)²

The articulation of the problems of police behavior in terms of respect was clearest in the Bangladeshi and Somali groups. One young Somali man spoke of being made to stand for around half an hour while the policeman who had stopped him engaged in an ongoing conversation with a colleague that bore no relation to any offense in which the young man was alleged to be implicated. Anyway, he said he hadn’t done anything. In many interventions in street life, intrusion on and wasting of time is the form in which power is exercised, at least in these young men’s perception, and it is a major way, according to their accounts, through which they feel themselves to be insulted, degraded, or humiliated. It is in part through a lack of respect for their time that a message is conveyed to these young men that they are objects of police practice, not subjects or citizens to whom public service is owed. The young men who spoke to us generally accepted that there would be situations in which the police could legitimately intercept their behavior and call them to account. However, they unanimously agreed that problems with police conduct had to do with the character of the relationship. They asserted that police behavior was often aggressive, in some cases physically aggressive. Being pushed around by the police appeared a common occurrence, and one young man complained that an officer had twisted his arm behind his back. A lack of sensitivity to context was a major source of resentment expressed by all the young men. Young men in both the Bangladeshi and the Somali groups complained of police stopping and searching them when they were going to prayer. One young Bangladeshi man, insisting that “They don’t respect you, they just don’t respect you,” went on to illustrate with the story of such an encounter in some detail. He and his friends were going to pray, and they explained this to the police, but the police persisted with the search without offering any explanation. Laughing, they demanded that the young men remove their caps, the wearing of which is part of religious practice, so that they could see whether they had any drugs underneath. It is hard here to convey the sense of outrage that this young man expressed, and it was a feeling shared by the group. The

From the Outside Looking In

young men are clear in their perception of a link between power, humiliation, “taking the mickey,” and ethnic insensitivity. They experience this as a ritual humiliation of themselves and their culture; indeed, their objection is that in this sort of situation they are not merely themselves as individuals but are in important ways representatives of their culture as Muslims, witnesses to their religion. It is in this context that they demand respect. Although the Bangladeshi young men pointed out that the majority of the police they came into contact with were white, they did not specify this as an issue of race in itself, at least, not as a function of police whiteness. These young men in this area are confident of their collective cultural identity and their territory in relation to other groups; they constitute the largest ethnic group in the area. They do not feel marginal to a wider society. The point had rather to do with the character of the relationship as that is constituted at the intersection of cultures and masculinities. There is a pleasure in power, but it should not get out of control and become an exercise in cultural humiliation. Here, respect was not experienced as embodied in the quality of interaction; rather, “they do it because they can.” In contrast, the young Somali men who spoke with us had a far more prevalent sense that their treatment was connected specifically with the fact that they were black, and they argued that the police deal with different ethnic minorities in different ways. When questioned about the reasons the police gave to justify their actions, the young people were clear in their claim that reasons typically were not given, or those given were judged to be fabricated excuses. If an explanation was offered, it was often to suggest that they were suspects for some offense that had been committed in the vicinity. They all viewed such “reasons” as excuses and viewed them with a high degree of cynicism.

Addressing Complexity in a Monolithic World These young men’s identities are profoundly contradictory. They are caught between different value systems; they do not live in a world that is utterly incommensurable with mainstream liberal culture. Rather, to use Young’s (1999) striking metaphor they inhabit a “bulimic” society that simultaneously includes them while structurally excluding them. Like most law-abiding people, these young men are able to distance themselves from their experience in order to reflect on it; they do moral reasoning. They have a sense of justice as a consistent set of rules and as having to do with fair and equal treatment. They accept police intervention as legitimate in their lives, in appropriate circumstances. At the same time they can also break rules and engage in what the law-abiding society would consider acts of social disorder they would like to see curbed. These different currents within identity are an issue for policymakers. Government and social policy must be oriented to enforcing positive behaviors rather than recharging the forces that propel young people into antisocial behavior. The problem is that this sophistication remains tangibly absent from a government discourse that prefers to position young people in a more traditional framework of law and order. Here there

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can be no worries about straddled or contradictory identities precisely because in the criminology of essentialized difference that typically characterize this agenda,³ young people are simply confined to the ranks of the predatory outside that can be contained only through coercive regulation. Although positioning young people in this way certainly effects a neat closure by confirming their social identify as potential offenders, such a position is self-defeating and dangerous in the solutions it sanctions. As we have seen, the lives of these young men unfolded in a profoundly contradictory existential space, the space of an identity straddled between the exhilaration of joyriding, commitment to religion and respect for family, the everyday reality of ethnic tension and the threat of gang warfare, and an overall commitment to a whole range of dominant values. Just as this complexity poses problems for those who aspire to manage the risks young people are held to pose, it also poses problems for seemingly more liberal discourses such as multiculturalism. As Lister (1997:50) argues, it also operates in terms of essentialized identities that work by “freezing cultural differences and . . . treating cultural groups as homogeneous and closed.” Although the young people with whom we spoke were selected as representatives of particular ethnic groups in the borough, their accounts of themselves call for a much more complex grasp of identity than an essentializing multiculturalism can provide. The sense in which these identities are contradictory cannot be grasped simply by polarizing a dominant or majority culture with an essentialized sense of ethnic minority cultures, nor does it yield to a framework that would see these contradictions simply in terms of a tension within any given individual identity between forces of ethnic cultural tradition and the pull to assimilation. These identities are hybrid in more complex ways (Back 1996). They are partly rooted in a generalized value system, which acknowledges that the police are in some circumstances justified in intervening in their behavior and which accommodates pragmatically and recognizes as legitimate the value of working hard for exams in order to secure a stable future. This value system is not a simple expression of “dominant white culture”: Many of these values are shared by majority white culture and ethnic minority cultures. They emanate not just from a history of liberal culture but also from particular cultural and religious traditions and a sense of the importance of the stability of and loyalty to community. At the same time, these young men’s sense of self partakes of a hedonistic youth culture that expresses a very contemporary sort of masculinity and is in tension both with mainstream liberal culture and with many of their own traditions. These pleasures are not fundamentally about resistance or protest (which, as Campbell [1993] puts it, is predicated on a negotiation with the world; this is a thrill, a sort of social activity that carries with it no “critique of oppression in the present or a fantasy about the future”). Joyriding here is, simply, fun. It is a discharge of energy that resonates with a culture with no conscious alternative to itself (Bauman 1992). By drawing on the testimonies of young men, this chapter has not sought to solve the problems of youth as youth continues to be imagined as a problem by the adult world. Rather, our intention has been to use the experiences and perceptions of the young men we interviewed to problematize the way the adult world continues to impose its reified definitions on the lives of young people. As we have sought to demonstrate, there remains a terrible disjunction in the way in the way the adult world

From the Outside Looking In

often likes to imagine and respond to young people and by so doing mark them out as objects of highly coercive forms of social control. If we are to have a social policy for young people that will exceed its narrow law-and-order foundations as these continue to prevail, then clearly there is a need to rethink policy in line with the world young people live in. Despite their claims to take social justice seriously, New Labour and its followers have yet to learn this lesson. Notes 1. Evidence of high rates of illicit drug use in the area were listed in the area’s local Crime and Disorder Audit and Youth Justice Audit, which also drew attention to the high rate of heroin use among young Bangladeshi males. 2. A different opinion was expressed by a particular individual in one of the groups interviewed in school. The young white man thought that the police in general favored black people: “They’re afraid to arrest black people because black people claim it’s a racist thing so they’re afraid to actually do something when it does come down to black people.” The young man also expressed a range of disturbing opinions, mostly citing his father, concerning the preferential treatment he thought black people received in this country. His particular sense of group identity, one forged in opposition to “the other,” potentially complexifies our discussion of respect in this chapter because for him to experience being respected would invoke the terms of an explicitly racist discourse; that is, he experiences his identity as something that cannot be affirmed in the absence of disavowal of the dignity of others. However, his was not a typical worldview among the young white men we interviewed, although he tended to try to dominate conversation in the group. 3. A criminology of essentialized difference is also what Garland (1996) calls the criminology of the other.

References Back, L. 1996. New Ethnicities and Urban Cultures: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives. London: UCL Press. Barbour, R. and J. Kitzinger. 1999. Developing Focus Group Research: Politics, Theory and Practice. London: Sage. Bauman, Z. 1992. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Campbell, B. 1993. Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places. London: Virago. Garland, D. 1996. The limits of the sovereign state: Strategies of crime control in contemporary society. British Journal of Criminology, 36(4): 445–471. Katz, J. 1988. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books. Lister, R. 1997. Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives. London: Macmillan. Pearson, G. 1983. Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears. Basingstoke: MacMillan. Willis, P. 1977. Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs. Westwood, UK: Saxon House. Young, J. 1999. The Exclusive Society. London: Sage.

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Part 2. Street Youth, Homelessness, and Displacement

Marni Finkelstein, Richard Curtis, and Barry Spunt

3. Living Free Nomadic Traveling Among Homeless Street Youth

I left Montreal and went to Toronto for like a month. Then I came here to New York. I stayed here for a month. Then I went to Philadelphia, and then Pittsburgh. We hitchhiked to Vancouver and stayed there for a month and a half. Then I came back to New York. Then I went to New Orleans, San Antonio, El Paso, Los Angeles, Tucson, San Francisco, and Portland. Then I went back to Montreal for a few months and just got back to New York. —C AROLYN , N IN ET EEN YEARS OLD

Although studies of homeless populations have filled volumes of academic journals in recent years, the unique problems that confront homeless children and teens remain comparatively unexplored (Clark and Robertson 1996; Downing-Orr 1996; Greenblatt and Robertson 1993; Lundy 1993; McCarthy and Hagen 1992; Miner 1991; Pfeffer 1997; Research Triangle Institute 1995; Ringwalt et al. 1998; Robertson and Toro 1998; Ruddick 1996;). In the course of a year, an estimated 500,000 to 1.5 million youth in the United States run away from or are kicked out of their homes (Research Triangle Institute 1995; Ringwalt et al. 1998). Runaways from functional families often return home (Kennedy et al. 1990; Price 1989), but those from deeply troubled families may run away repeatedly or may never return home at all (Saltonstall 1984). Some kids may be able to become self-sufficient within their community, but others often find themselves homeless and adrift. Separated from their families, schools, and other support systems, some of these kids stay continuously on the move and generally try to avoid contact with mainstream institutions (Caton 1986; Deisher and Farrow 1986; Kennedy et al. 1990; Wilkinson 1987). There is a nationwide network of homeless youth who travel continuously throughout the United States, often circling the country in a single year, but they have been largely unrecognized and understudied. One reason why nomadic kids have been overlooked in the literature is that studies show that most homeless youth in North America remain close to home (McCarthy and Hagen 1992; New York State Council

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on Children and Families 1984; Robertson 1988; Rothman and David 1985; van Houten and Golembiewski 1978). Our research suggests that another reason is that the lifestyles of these nomadic youths present insurmountable problems to the majority of academic researchers who typically recruit their more sedentary study respondents from social programs, such as youth shelters, and gather their data in clinical or office settings. This mobility is celebrated by the kids and forms part of the core of their collective identity. Indeed, rather than calling themselves “street kids” or “homeless youth,” many of these kids self-identify as travelers, setting themselves apart from other homeless adolescents. There are a lot of people that enjoy traveling, and that is what I am in it for: to see the country and meet a lot of different people. When I left home I really wanted to travel. That is the reason I left. (Kara)

This chapter adds to the small body of literature on this largely unexplored but growing segment of homeless youth. Where much previous research has focused on family and individual pathology in their search for causal factors of youth homelessness, our research does not seek to assign blame. In this chapter, the nomadic lifestyles of homeless youth are described as rational actions that are embedded in and legitimize their social identity. The narratives that represent and construct their lifestyles are seen as responsive to the forces of globalization that valorize travel, deemphasize borders and boundaries, and erode the traditional definitions of community and identity.

Methods Over the summers of 1998 and 1999, we interviewed and observed fifty homeless youth in the East Village neighborhood of New York City. Twenty-six of the kids were male and twenty-four were female. All of them were white. Key informants were used to identify and recruit prospective research subjects and to help us establish a safe, viable presence among the street kids. Additional subjects were recruited through systematic observations in the area. For example, youth who appeared to fit the study’s age range and were homeless—as judged by their appearance, by their carrying sleeping bags or large backpacks or participating in common street activities, such as panhandling— were selected as potential subjects. Those who were identified as street kids under the age of twenty-one (but over the age of eighteen) (table 3.1) who had been away from home and living on the streets for a continuous period of at least three months were deemed eligible for the study. Audiotaped interviews were then conducted. Each subject was interviewed individually for one to two hours. A small stipend was given at the conclusion of the interview. The fact that all the participants in the present study are white—indeed, no minority kids were even observed during the research period—is highly significant. There are certainly homeless kids who are minorities, and some of them may be nomadic, but we did not observe any, and our research subjects agreed with this observation. Why this

Living Free TA B L E 3.1

Age of Subjects (N=50)

AGE

NUMBER

%

17 17 16

34% 34% 32%

18 19 20

might be the case is an important question for researchers to address. Without having a comparison sample of minority kids, we can only assume that there is something unique about them or the kids in our study. It is tempting to explain the absence of minority kids as an outcome of racism, that is, that discrimination makes it too difficult for minority kids to participate in this lifestyle. Hitchhiking, for example, is likely to be substantially more challenging for minority kids than for white kids. Although we think there is substance to this argument and hope that future research will cast some light on this disparity, we suspect that their story—why nomadic homeless kids live and depict their lives in the fashion described here—is much more complex than simply a case of white privilege gone awry. In many ways, the appearance of nomadic homeless kids is a paradox. Although the race or ethnicity factor cannot sufficiently explain why the universe of nomadic homeless kids appears to be white, explanations of their homelessness that stress family trauma or psychological distress in the formation of this population seem equally problematic.

Overview of the Literature The literature on homeless adolescents generally treats homeless youth as a homogeneous population. For example, most studies blame the family, suggesting that street kids are likely to have run away from or been kicked out of severely dysfunctional homes (Adams et al. 1985; Dadds et al. 1993; Downing-Orr 1996; Garbarino et al. 1986; Kurtz et al. 1991; Research Triangle Institute 1995; Shaffner 1998; Yates et al. 1988). Some of these studies document the presence of family conflicts involving physical, emotional, or sexual abuse (Farber et al. 1984; Janus et al. 1987; Saltonstall 1984; Whitbeck et al. 1997). Others discuss parental divorce and remarriage (Dadds et al. 1993; Downing-Orr 1996; Nye 1980; Research Triangle Institute 1995; Whitbeck et al. 1997). Substance abuse by parents has also been cited as disrupting family life (Greene and Ringwalt 1996; Price 1989; Saltonstall 1984). Early studies, coming largely from clinical psychology, viewed runaways as sick or suffering from some type of disorder. This was a dominant theme in the literature from the 1930s to the 1950s and has continued to be represented in recent work where emotional problems and poor self-esteem are thought to be a major factor in runaway

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behavior (Brennan et al. 1978; Feitel et al. 1992; Miner 1991; Yoder et al. 1998). Here, runaways are thought to manifest maladaptive behaviors, poor social skills, low achievement in school, and high levels of drug use. We do not deny that many kids who run away experience serious problems in their homes. In fact, in our study sample, 40 percent of the kids described examples of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse that they said were directly or partially responsible for their leaving home. Paradoxically, however, 60 percent of the kids said that they did not experience these types of problems or minimized the extent of the problems, emphasizing the element of choice in adopting their nomadic lifestyle. Emily, for example, is eighteen years old and grew up in Olympia, Washington. She has been traveling since she was fifteen with the full support of her parents. She told us that her “parents are the best people I’ve ever met in my life. I love my folks. They love me and it’s a really good relationship.” When asked why she left home at such an early age to live on the streets, she replied, “Well, if you live in a country, you might as well see it. I have so much fun . . . there is always something to do . . . lots of people to meet.” Sandra, who is from Amherst, Massachusetts, and has been traveling for four years, told us, “My childhood was excellent. My family is excellent. Everything has been completely wonderful. It’s just that I have had such a dream about traveling and seeing the country and stuff, that I took off.” Even Tory, who had what she described as a “fucked-up, abusive relationship” with her father, did not cite that as the cause for her traveling. Rather, she indicated that she left home because “I wanted to see things. I wanted to learn. I wanted to experience. I didn’t feel satisfied.” Although we could not verify self-reports regarding their former home lives, the fact that a significant number of the kids resisted the depiction of themselves as victims suggests that additional factors are at work in the construction of this lifestyle.

Nomadism in the Age of Globalization In seeking to break from the tradition of psychologizing that characterizes much of the research on youth homelessness, we looked to studies of nomadism for an alternative perspective on our study sample (Clifford 1992; McVeigh 1997; Salzman and Galaty 1990). Nomadism often is portrayed as a romantic lifestyle, and it is a theme that had a particular resonance with the kids in our study. For example, the idea that nomadism is a more natural way of life than sedentarism was popular among the kids. In the literature, nomadism often is portrayed as involving a journey, “a seasonal journey of the king around the castles of his barons; of bishops round their dioceses; of nomadic shepherds and herds around their pastures; and of pilgrims around a sequence of shrines” (Chatwin 1987:219). The denigration and often exotic portrayals of modern nomads—Gypsies—in Western societies are particularly fertile ground for comparison with these homeless kids (Kenrick 1999; Sibley 1981; Sway 1988). For the kids in this study, nomadic lifestyles were depicted as a form of cultural resistance, and many cited the Beats, as portrayed by Jack Kerouac in On the Road (1957), as an example of this kind of resistance to the dominant institutions of modern American culture. By embracing a lifestyle of mobility, the Beats rejected the normative

Living Free

expectations of living a stable and settled nuclear family existence. The road became a “symbol of purity and freedom,” and a path of cultural enrichment “structured around the metaphoric figure of the urbane traveler” (Thompson and Tambyah 1999:214; see also Boyle et al. 1998). Jimmy, one of the homeless youth in the study believed that the reality and the myth are intertwined. They really are. I never read On the Road until two years after I had been on the road. But after I read it I was excited to be out here. Jack Kerouac had it right. The people he met, the conversations he had. It is all right on.

However, in the postmodern, globalized world nomadism takes on yet another meaning. For example, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue that precapitalist society was static, a condition where every action was governed by rules and boundaries that were clearly marked. In their view, capitalism radically alters and decodes social life, valorizing the individual while undermining communal, ritualistic, or traditional ways of life. Capitalism, which might have led to “absolute nomadic freedom,” instead vacillates between “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization,” and the state continuously mutates to accommodate these fluctuations. Therefore, they believe that the only way to truly exist in this system is to become nomadic, a free and autonomous subject who exists momentarily in an ever-changing array of possibilities. Other theorists argue that nomadism is a powerful symbol and metaphor of movement and independence from the state (Clark and Dearling 1999) or that nomadic wandering may be a symptom of rebellion against the increasing homogenization of life (Maffesoli 1997). In a postmodern, globalized world, they argue, there is a trade-off between the good life and submission. Market specialization tends to hinder movement, whereas nomadism represents opposition to the global nation-state. Technological advancements, such as cyberspace, give the appearance of increasing mobility, but they are actually antithetical to true travel and more representative of connectedness to a globalized web of social and economic ties. Indeed, with technological advances, the world may be entering a phase in which travel, even outside the household, is no longer necessary. People are ready to become perfect, full-time consumers whose desires, tastes, and daily routines can be electronically manipulated from any point around the globe via a nonstop bombardment of images. As the omnipolis—a single, worldwide city (Crang 2000)—expands through ever-expanding networks of information and advances in communication technologies, some observers see cities as places where embedded cultures are being steadily eroded by “delocalized flows” (Castells 1996). Although people are told “it’s a small world” and “we’re all connected,” in fact they are becoming increasingly isolated, “cut loose from the sociality of urban life, separated from the world by the pixelated screen” (Crang 2000:304). In this new universe, traditions are routinely undermined so that “originary ethological territories—body, clan, village, cult, corporation—are no longer fixed to a precise point of earth but essentially incrust themselves in incorporeal universes. Subjectivity has entered the realm of generalized nomadism” (Guattari 1992:123). Although technology is meant to speed up global communication and promote more effective production, it also leaves a greater impression of distance and disconnection, lacking a sense of belonging, community, and fellowship.

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One way of adapting to the dehumanizing, accelerated pace of globalization is through “cosmopolitanism” (Thompson and Tambyah 1999), that is, organizing one’s decontextualized cultural capital (such as professional skills) as a way to enter into other territorialized cultures and to “make contact with the meanings of other rounds of life and gradually incorporate this experience into their own personal perspective” (Hannerz 1990:245). Although the nomadism of homeless youth may seem to be the furthest image from that of a cosmopolitan traveler, street kids often cite the same reasons for traveling. For example, a prominent feature of this orientation is the association of travel with self-awareness and the attainment of a sophisticated, worldly outlook. To accomplish this, street kids use skills—such as panhandling, drug dealing, and other forms of street hustling—that they learn from and impart to the ever-growing network of other homeless youth who join them in their travels. The kids we interviewed often see cosmopolitanism as a state of freedom and independence based on nomadic traveling that does not follow mainstream paths. As Jake explained, When you are riding on a train in the middle of the night looking up at the beautiful sky, all you see are stars. You are in the middle of the desert. You just think that everybody else is watching TV, but you are out there really fucking doing something. You are out seeing the world. That is what I love doing.

In a very concrete sense, their notion of traveling “is . . . one that enjoins not only autonomy but also the assiduous avoidance of the confinements and commitments of home through a strategy of unencumbered mobility” (Thompson and Tambyah 1999:222). Where travel signifies action, adventure, and growth, “home,” by contrast, often is portrayed as vacuous, dull, and stultifying, associated with feelings of detachment, alienation, and boredom (Hannerz 1990). Joyce, for example, expressed dismay at the thought of living a mainstream life: I like living free this way. I wouldn’t be happy any other way. I wouldn’t be happy living like that. I couldn’t live that life. I can’t do that. I always knew I would live this life anyway. Even when I was a kid, I knew I wouldn’t be a lawyer or a doctor or go to college or even high school.

Many kids accentuated the positive aspects of their nomadic existence, but the blurring boundaries and changing definitions of space and time have further weakened their tenuous bonds to traditional communities and deeply affected their sense of belongingness and security—an outcome that is, perhaps, a harbinger of life in a globalized world. This absence of connectedness may be experienced as a loss, a void, or a sense of helplessness, which can and often does bring about feelings of isolation, loneliness, and rootlessness. Ironically, it is through travel that these kids feel more rooted than when they are sedentary. I came from a middle-class background. I don’t really think I got what I needed. I never really felt like I had a home anywhere. . . . I thought it would be great to be traveling,

Living Free TA B L E 3.2

Hometown Regions of Subjects (N = 50)

HOMETOWN REGION

New York and New Jersey Northeast (excluding New York and New Jersey) Southeast Midwest South Southwest Rocky Mountain West Coast Northwest Canada

NUMBER

%

5 6 5 4 4 5 2 8 6 5

10% 12% 10% 8% 8% 10% 4% 16% 12% 10%

and it would be interesting to learn all these new things and meet all these new people. (Isaac)

In a very real sense, the kids’ participation in this shared nomadic lifestyle has resulted in the construction of more than the “imagined communities” that some observers think are a feature of the modern era (Anderson 1983). Whereas the global community is imagined in the sense that it is connected via messages sent over networks of cables and satellites, and other communities are imagined as an outcome of shared interests, the community of nomadic street kids is connected by face-to-face social networks and a network of highways on which they hitchhike and railroad tracks on which they hop freight trains. Their networks are quite extensive. As evidence of this point, this study was conducted in New York City, but very few of the street kids in the study were from the New York area (table 3.2). Furthermore, most of the kids travel continuously throughout the year. For example, Danny said that in one year, “I have been from the Bay Area to Eugene, Oregon, and Portland, to Seattle. Then we went through all the northern states through Chicago, and then to New York. I usually hit all the major cities.” Some kids stay predominantly in one region. Andy, for instance, notes, “I got caught up in Austin for a while. I usually hit about eight or nine cities a year. I usually don’t even come up to the East. I stay down in the South and West like Texas, Florida, New Orleans, New Mexico, Las Vegas, places like that.” Regina told us that she “never went to the West Coast or anything. I stayed in Chicago, Detroit, and New York and little cities. I don’t travel across the country. Just around the Midwest and East Coast.” Other kids travel more extensively. Mike said that he hits twenty or thirty cities per year. Rocket said that he “started out in Florida because I was down there for the winter. I have done the whole East Coast already in two weeks,” then “from San Francisco to Minneapolis and back to New York.” He said,

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Marni Finkelstein, Richard Curtis, and Barry Spunt TA B L E 3.3

Number of Years on the Streets (N = 50)

YEARS ON THE STREETS

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

NUMBER

%

7 8 10 11 5 4 5

14% 16% 20% 22% 10% 8% 10%

“We were on the road for a long time, and it was a hell of a lot of fun.” Jewel tries to circle the country every year: “I come to New York to see my friends. I go to New Orleans to see my brothers. My mother is in California. So I get to hit every coast.” Nomadism among these youth appears to be organized according to season: summer on the East Coast, winter in the South or West. This movement causes a constant remolding of the social landscape as the kids separate and meet up again in other locations. Like the Gypsies, nomadic street kids learn the skill of “invisibility and fluidity that enable them to slip into the legislative, economic, geographical and other nooks and crannies that sedentary societies leave vacant” (Williams 1994:23). Nomadic street kids speak about the need to learn to negotiate the ever-changing social and physical landscapes by seeking out other, more experienced street kids who offer them support and the tools they need to survive in various cities throughout the country. Learning to live on the streets is a process in itself. For example, to obtain money, most kids realize very quickly that legitimate employment is not an option because long-term employment restricts travel. Therefore, they must become proficient in other means of survival, such as panhandling, sex work, drug dealing, or stealing. Through frequent travel, they widen their pool of prospective supporters and gain legitimacy as they help build this unique community through their participation in fluid social networks. Table 3.3 illustrates that all these kids have been traveling far longer than the three-month minimum required to participate in this study; the average time these kids have been on the streets is 3.7 years.

Mobility and Fictive Kin In many ways, kids come well equipped to life in a globalized world: Fluidity between networks of adolescents and young adults is expected as part of the normal course of development. As children pass from the supervised environments of childhood into the increased independence of adolescence, their networks become more complex and often change entirely (Furman and Buhrmester 1992; Harris 1998). Street kids who leave home at an early age and begin a life of constant travel often find their

Living Free

ties to familiar social groups, and most adult support, cut off. This, in turn, hastens the developmental process of turning to peers for support. Indeed, for nomadic street kids, their entire social networks are formed in the traveling process. You meet one person that knows a person, that knows a person, that knows a person. I mean we just all know each other eventually. You meet one person and you bring them in and everyone meets each other. We see each other all over the country. (Sandra)

Many of the kids in this study knew each other from other cities, even if they were not specifically traveling partners. For example, Celia said that “right now there are four or five kids that I saw in Portland last month. Most of the time if I see them, I will hang out with them.” Dex pointed to some kids and said, “I know that group from Albuquerque. I know him from Denver. I know that guy from Oregon. I know another friend of his from Oregon. There are a couple of kids sitting over there that I know from different cities.” Tommy said, “Everywhere I go I see people. Two weeks from now I will see someone that I saw here on the other side of the country. I will see them and we will hang out.” Additionally, once kids have been traveling for a while, their social networks tend to widen. Once you meet people, it’s a small circle. You get to know almost everyone. From one town you will see the same person again. You get to know them more and more. . . . This year we met up with a bunch of kids we knew were here. Now we are running into kids we saw last year when we were here. (Jewel) By the time you travel for a few years, you know a lot of people. I can’t go across the country without hearing my name called. . . . There are certainly similar travel patterns, but you mostly meet up by chance. Some people you do plan to meet, but it is such a small world that you know the people that travel. (Jimmy)

As kids become more exposed to the street environment, they share travel stories with others in a way that allows them to gain a sense of how they are received in the street environment and simultaneously contribute to building their identity and community. Their orientations toward life and the bonds they develop through traveling enable these kids to do more than simply survive. For example, Danny describes how quickly and comfortably he became integrated into a new group: There are at least six people here I have never met before, but I am cool with them. We met. We talked. You go there and make friends with them. You hang out, get drunk, have some good times. And then you usually see them in another city. You hang out again. Most people are really cool. You get into a new town, and even if you don’t know anyone, they’ll just be like, “hey.” And you’ll hang out and whatnot. (Emma)

In this context, experienced kids serve as a source of knowledge about situational uncertainties and survival strategies, and they often invite newcomers to travel with

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them (Visano 1990). Here, several kids talk about the importance of these ties and the ethic that facilitates their growth. People are really helpful. Sometimes if someone comes to town and they don’t know where to sleep, I’m like, you can sleep with us. I try to make them feel comfortable. (Carrie) You grow up pretty fast. It only takes a few months to learn a lot. People who have been out here will help new people. Everyone is friendly. Like, I have never been to New York. You just pick it up fast. Everyone will teach you the ropes. The first day you get here you learn where it is cool to panhandle, where you can get leftovers, where you can look in the trash for food. People are really cool. No competition between us. (Mara) If you need help, they’ll help you out. It is mellow. People become your friends. You don’t have to fit into a category or anything. Everybody is just hanging out looking out for each other. They make sure no one gets arrested. Like sitting around drinking a beer in the park. They will make sure you don’t get arrested. (Mia)

Daily observations of the kids also buttressed their claims about reciprocity. For example, after an interview Tommy asked for a slice of pizza because he hadn’t eaten that day. When he got the slice, he walked across the street and gave half of it to a young girl panhandling on the corner. He then walked away without even talking to her. When asked whether she was a friend of his, he said that he didn’t really know her but had seen her during his travels. He “just wanted to help her out.” Although he hadn’t eaten all day and did not know when he would eat next, he gave half his food to a stranger whom he recognized from the road as belonging to his community. The search for an alternative community is not new; history is replete with countercultures seeking to construct a different lifestyle. The street kids in this study clearly imagine themselves as a community. They feel an affinity with each other that goes beyond whom they know, and they exhibit strong communal bonds inside and outside both physical boundaries and the boundaries of their interpersonal relationships. The feelings of connectedness and sense of attachment with others throughout the country provide a modicum of stability for these kids. For example, Cassie notes, We take care of each other’s basic needs and just the fact that we are not acceptable in so many ways that just inherently we relate. There is a community of us across the nation. It has to do with a tribal community. It is kind of like telepathy to a certain degree. There is a lot of shared ideals that don’t need to be spoken. People communicating out here just by existing. It is definitely a society. A lot of kids are here because society forces them out and everything. . . . We definitely click. We hold on to each other. We stick up for each other. (Tory) We are a tribe. We are the rats. We are the cockroaches of society. That is our bond. (Dex)

Living Free

Even going beyond the notion of community, many kids take their streets relationships a step further and describe themselves as a family, even though they are biologically unrelated. Fictive kin, a phenomenon well documented in social science literature, are defined as a family-like relationship based not on biology or marriage but rather on religion or close friendship ties, which often constitutes a form of social capital and often replicates the rights and obligations usually associated with the family (Chatters et al. 1994; Ebaugh and Curry 2000; Foster 1953; Gutman 1976; Ishino 1953; McAdoo 1996; Mintz and Wolf 1950; Sarker 1980; Stack 1974). Most studies of fictive kin in the United States have been conducted in the African American community (McAdoo 1996; Stack 1974), and observers have interpreted these kinlike networks as essential to survival in stressful inner-city environments. The literature suggests that the construction of fictive kin is much less prevalent among whites than among African Americans (Chatters et al. 1994). The kids in our study, who are all white, are not blood related, but to them family is not defined by blood or contract; rather, it means people who watch out for others and who provide help and support when needed. As Joyce notes, It is one big family. A lot of people are getting the family they never got. If something really bad happens we rely on each other to get us through. Oh yeah. We are family. All of us who travel the country. We stand behind each other. Comfort each other. Hang out with each other. Just being with each other. (Cindy) Oh, this is my family because I know that no matter where I am, I’m okay. They are there for me, and like I am in fucking New York, and if something fucked-up happens to me, the kids on the West Coast will know in a very short amount of time. (Jewel)

Other kids also expressed feeling that their street family was their only family. Joey, for example, used the kinship terminology of brother to indicate the close ties he shared with his traveling partner and friend Stewart. I travel with my brother Stewart. He’s not my real brother, but he’s my brother. Oh man, these guys are more my family than anybody else. People that got your back. . . . This is the only family I got. They are better than my family at home. They are like the family I never had. They are more loving. Really, they are. It makes me feel special. Even though I am sleeping on the street, just knowing that I got somebody there for me that is gonna hold me and gonna talk to me during my rough times, makes me feel good. (Debbie)

PPP Nomadic street kids are a small but growing and important subset of the larger population of homeless youth. This chapter has examined aspects of the daily lives of nomadic white youths and the narratives they construct to describe and explain their lifestyle. Comparatively little is known about these youths, but when researchers have

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looked at them, they have usually used ideas about pathology and childhood trauma as explanatory devices. We do not dispute the importance of these factors for some of the kids, but in documenting the extent and manner of their frequent travel, this chapter has focused on nomadism as a possible consequence of globalization. The narratives about their lifestyle that devalue traditional definitions of community and identity while stressing a deterritorialized, border-crossing identity are what make these kids unique. Although nomadic street kids do not espouse a fully articulated (or even partially articulated) worldview of globalization—that is, they are not globalization writ small— the construction of this lifestyle by homeless youth is the direct and indirect outcome of the forces of globalization that make it possible. Historically, displaced populations have often longed for a return to “home,” and elaborate myths often are constructed about that place. For homeless kids, home is often meant in the most literal sense of the word. By contrast, nomadic street kids do not express this longing in conversation. Indeed, in a very real sense they are representative of a new generation of displaced people—those who take a leap of faith by living in the present, divested from a mythologized past—that are part and parcel of a globalized world. To have some wealthy prick that doesn’t even know me, come up to me and just talk shit, sometimes I am at the point where I am like, fuck you. Most of the time I feel sorry for people like that. People without a brain that live their lives blindfolded. They are so brainwashed to the system, they don’t try to see or meet new people. They spend their lives as wage slaves. And working for what? So they can retire when they are fifty and go rent a Winnebago, drive through the Grand Canyon, and die. That is not what life is about. What I am doing is what life is about. I don’t care what they say. (Jewel)

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Living Free Clark, R. and M. J. Robertson. 1996. Surviving for the Moment: A Report on Homeless Youth in San Francisco. Berkeley: Alcohol Research Group. Clifford, J. 1992. Traveling cultures. In L. Grossberg, ed., Cultural Studies, 96–116. New York: Routledge. Crang, M. 2000. Public space, urban space and electronic space: Would the real city please stand up? Urban Studies, 37(2): 301–317. Dadds, M. R., D. Braddock, S. Cuers, A. Elliott, and A. Kelly. 1993. Personal and family distress in homeless adolescents. Community and Mental Health Journal, 29(5): 413–422. Deisher, R. and J. Farrow. 1986. Recognizing and dealing with alienated youth in clinical practice. Pediatric Annals, 15: 759–764. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Downing-Orr, K. 1996. Alienation and Social Support: A Social Psychological Study of Homeless Young People in London and Sydney. Aldershot, England: Avebury. Ebaugh, H. R. and M. Curry. 2000. Fictive kin as social capital in new immigrant communities. Sociological Perspectives, 43(2): 189–209. Farber, E., C. Kinast, W. D. McCoard, and D. Falkner. 1984. Violence in families of adolescent runaways. Child Abuse & Neglect, 8: 295–299. Feitel, B., N. Margetson, J. Chamas, and C. Lipman. 1992. Psychosocial background and behavioral and emotional disorders of homeless and runaway youth. Hospital and Community Psychiatry, 43(2): 155–159. Foster, G. M. 1953. Cofradia and compadrazgo in Spain and Spanish America. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 9: 1–28. Furman, W. and D. Buhrmester. 1992. Age and sex differences in perceptions of networks of personal relationships. Child Development, 63: 103–115. Garbarino, J., J. Wilson, and A. C. Garbarino. 1986. The adolescent runaway. In J. Garbarino, C. J. Schellenbach, and J. M. Sebes, eds., Troubled Youth, Troubled Families: Understanding Families at Risk for Adolescent Maltreatment, 41–54. New York: Aldine. Greenblatt, M. and M. J. Robertson. 1993. Life-styles, adaptive strategies, and sexual behaviors of homeless adolescents. Hospital and Community Psychiatry, 44(12): 1177–1180. Greene, J. M. and C. Ringwalt. 1996. Youth and familial substance use’s association with suicide attempts among runaway and homeless youth. Substance Use and Misuse, 31(8): 1041–1058. Guattari, F. 1992. Space and corporeity: Nomads, city drawings. In H. Zeitlin, ed., Semiotexte / Architecture, 118–125. New York: Semiotexte. Gutman, H. G. 1976. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925. New York: Random House. Hannerz, U. 1990. Cosmopolitans and locals in a world culture. Theory, Culture and Society, 7: 237–251. Harris, J. R. 1998. The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. New York: The Free Press. Ishino, I. 1953. The Oyabun-Kobun: A Japanese ritual kinship institution. American Anthropologist, 695–707. Janus, M. D., A. W. Burgess, and A. McCormack. 1987. Histories of sexual abuse in adolescent male runaways. Adolescence, 22(86): 405–417. Kennedy, J., J. Petrone, R. Deisher, J. Emerson, P. Heslop, D. Bastible, and M. Arkovitz. 1990. Health care for familyless, runaway, street kids. In J. Brickner, ed., Under the Safety Net: The Health and Social Welfare of the Homeless in the United States, 82–117. New York: W.W. Norton.

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Marni Finkelstein, Richard Curtis, and Barry Spunt Kenrick, D. 1999. Moving On: The Gypsies and Travellers of Britain. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. Kerouac, J. 1957. On the Road. New York: Viking. Kurtz, P. D., G. L. Kurtz, and S. V. Jarvis. 1991. Problems of maltreated runaway youth. Adolescence, 26(103): 543–555. Lundy, K. C. 1993. On the edge: A naturalistic study of a small group of street kids. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, New York University, New York. Maffesoli, M. 1997. The impulse of wandering. Societies, 56: 5–13. McAdoo, H. P. 1996. Black Families, 3rd ed. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. McCarthy, B. and J. Hagen. 1992. Surviving on the street: The experiences of homeless youth. Journal of Adolescent Research, 7(4): 412–430. McVeigh, R. 1997. Theorising sedentarism: The roots of anti-nomadism. In T. Acton, ed., Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity. Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press. Miner, M. H. 1991. The self-concept of homeless adolescents. Journal of Social Issues, 14: 5–19. Mintz, S. W. and E. R. Wolf. 1950. An analysis of ritual co-parenthood (compadrazgo). Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 6: 341–365. New York State Council on Children and Families. 1984. Meeting the Needs of Homeless Youth. Albany: New York State Council on Children and Families. Nye, F. I. 1980. A theoretical perspective on running away. Journal of Family Issues, 1(2): 274–299. Pfeffer, R. 1997. Surviving the Street: Girls Living on Their Own. New York: Garland. Price, V. 1989. Characteristics and needs of Boston street youth: One agency’s response. Children and Youth Services Review, 11: 75–90. Research Triangle Institute. 1995. Youth with Runaway, Throwaway, and Homeless Experiences: Prevalence, Drug Use, and Other At-Risk Behaviors. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Service; Administration for Children and Families; Administration on Children, Youth and Families. Ringwalt, C. L., J. M. Greene, M. Robertson, and M. McPheeters. 1998. The prevalence of homeless among adolescents in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 88(9): 1325–1329. Robertson, J. 1988. Homeless adolescents: A hidden crisis. Hospital and Community Psychiatry, 39: 475. Robertson, M. J. and P. A. Toro. 1998. Homeless youth: Research, intervention, and policy. The 1998 National Symposium on Homeless Research. Available at www.aspe.os.dhhs.gov. Rothman, J. and T. David. 1985. Status Offenders in Los Angeles County: Focus on Runaway and Homeless Youth. Los Angeles: Bush Program in Child and Family Policy. Ruddick, S. 1996. Young and Homeless in Hollywood: Mapping Social Identities. New York: Routledge. Saltonstall, M. 1984. Street Youth and Runaways on the Streets of Boston: One Agency’s Response. Boston: The Bridge. Salzman, P. C. and J. G. Galaty, eds. 1990. Nomads in a Changing World. Naples: Instituto Universitario Orientale. Sarker, P. C. 1980. Dharma-Atmyo: Fictive kin relationship in rural Bangladesh. Eastern Anthropologist, 33: 55–61. Shaffner, L. 1998. Searching for connection: A new look at teenaged runaways. Adolescence, 33(1): 619–627. Sibley, D. 1981. Outsiders in Urban Society. Oxford: Blackwell.

Living Free Stack, C. B. 1974. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper & Row. Sway, M. 1988. Familiar Strangers: Gypsy Life in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Thompson, C. J. and S. K. Tambyah. 1999. Trying to be cosmopolitan. Journal of Consumer Research, 26(3): 214–254. van Houten, T. and G. Golembiewski. 1978. Life Stress as a Predictor of Alcohol Abuse and / or Runaway Behavior. Washington, DC: American Youth Work Center. Visano, L. 1990. The socialization of street children: The development and transformation of identities. Sociological Studies of Child Development, 3: 139–161. Whitbeck, L. B., D. R. Hoyt, and K. A. Ackley. 1997. Abusive family backgrounds and later victimization among runaway and homeless adolescents. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 7(4): 375–392. Wilkinson, A. 1987. Born to rebel: An ethnography of street kids. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. Williams, P. 1994, Nov. On the road: The European odyssey of the Gypsies. UNESCO Courier, pp. 21–24. Yates, G. L., R. MacKenzie, J. Pennbridge, and E. Cohen. 1988. A risk profile comparison of runaway and non-runaway youths. American Journal of Public Health, 78(37): 820–821. Yoder, K. A., D. R. Hoyt, and L. B. Whitbeck. 1998. Suicidal behavior among homeless and runaway adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 27(6): 753–771.

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4. Street Youth in New York City and São Paulo Deconstructing the Striking Differences, Global Similarities, and Local Specificities

Young children with scruffy, soiled clothing and dirty faces are routinely seen perambulando (roaming around) among working adults and youth, asking for money, sniffing glue, and sleeping on sidewalks around Praça da Sé in São Paulo City, a landmark of the foundation of the city and the stage for memorable social mobilizations and political demonstrations. They have become the image of street children most publicized both inside and outside Brazil. Immortalized by such depictions as Hector Babenco’s film Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco (Pixote: The Law of the Weakest), these images have become a visual representation of street children in the international social imagination. These children on the street have been generically designated street children by scholars, service providers, and advocates. The children simply call themselves meninos e meninas (boys and girls). Less visible than street children in São Paulo are the numerous black and Latino teenagers seen around the Manhattan’s Times Square area who spend hours hanging out on the streets, using or trading drugs, and engaging in the sex trade. Most of these teenagers have run away from home and dwell in a part of the city that has held a fascination for people all over the world. They are generically called runaways and homeless youths by researchers and service providers, and their physical appearance, the ghetto or hip-hop look portrayed in American movies and TV series, does not set them apart from mainstream youth culture. In another landmark area of New York City, Tompkins Square Park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a location associated with political and cultural resistance, numerous teenagers and young adults hang out with their peers who have traveled to the area from various regions of the United States to squat, panhandle, and use and sell drugs. In contrast to the Times Square crowd, this population is composed predominantly of white youths favoring a punk style of clothing. They are a particular subset of the homeless youth population referred to by researchers and service providers as homeless travelers, a categorization they themselves refuse to recognize, preferring to call themselves punks or new nomads.

Street Youth in New York City and São Paulo

Deconstructing Striking Differences These are composite portraits of young people on the street whom I met during my fieldwork in New York City and São Paulo in 1999 and 2002. They are part of a worldwide phenomenon. Since the late 1960s, numerous studies have documented an increase in youths dwelling or spending long periods of time on the streets of many countries of the world.¹ In developing countries (e.g., Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines, Kenya, India) these populations usually are called street children; in developed countries (e.g., England, France, Canada, and the United States) they are called runaways or homeless youths. Recently, large populations of street youth have also been reported in many formerly communist countries (e.g., Russia, Albania, and Romania) (Aptekar 1994; Lalor 1990; Palenski and Launer 1987:84; Ploeg and Scholte 1997). For several decades multilateral agencies and grassroots movements gave the phenomenon of street children in developing countries international visibility but failed to connect this phenomenon to developed countries. Yet the historical increase in the numbers of youth on the street in countries with varied economic, social, and health development patterns should at least prompt the question of whether these are comparable phenomena. After surveying the literature on street youth and runaways, any researcher would be more likely to think that these two phenomena are qualitatively different. Academic studies on street children have been published since the turn of the twentieth century and have become increasingly prevalent. By the first half of the 1990s, a few studies compared trends and indicators affecting working and street children in developing countries (Aptekar 1994; Lalor 1990; Pilotti and Rizzini 1994). In the second half of the decade, other studies began to compare the phenomena in both developed and developing countries. These works presented mainly country-specific case studies, with comparative analyses of such trends and indicators as urbanization, family structure, work, schooling, and street life (Blanc 1994a; Mickelson 2000; Ploeg and Scholte 1997; Raffaelli and Larson 1999). The striking differences between street youth in developed and developing regions pertain to the children’s ages and the causes that led them to a life on the street (Blanc 1994b; Mickelson 2000; Ploeg and Scholte 1997; Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman 1998). Recent studies comparing the phenomena between developing and industrialized countries have also noted similarities. For example, Glauser places Paraguayan street children in a heterogeneous category and equates the Paraguayan phenomenon with that found in Western industrial countries (1997:150).² In his comparison of street children in developed countries with Colombian street children, Felsman demonstrates “striking” similarities in regard to gender, life group, and survival strategies (1989:57–58). In order to address the comparability of the two phenomena, I spent one year doing ethnographic research in New York City and São Paulo, Brazil. The study consisted of participant observation in locations where street children hang out, volunteer work in drop-in centers and shelters serving street youth, and in-depth interviews with 110 former runaways, homeless youth, and street children. I compiled data on the reasons

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prompting youth to leave home for the streets, their lives on the street, and their reverse journey—their passage from the street to reconstituting a home. I will open by presenting a brief social geography and an ethnosociology of urban street youth in both cities. Although there is no shortage of data on the general state of children in New York City, the same is not true for the street youth population. Researchers from the National Development and Research Institute in New York noted that “there is limited empirical information available about the nature of this complex and ‘hidden’ population” (Clatts and Davis 1999:109). Although both New York and São Paulo have been central study sites for much of the “professional knowledge” produced about street youth in the United States and Brazil, the quantitative studies are based mainly on samples of the population using the service provider agencies. There are few qualitative studies, so in designing my comparative study, I decided to use a bricolage technique, combining the scarce demographic information with ethnographic research data. In this chapter I briefly discuss the varying causes prompting youths to leave home in both countries. I also compare the street youth population by gender, age bracket, and street economy. My research concludes that empirically, despite local nuances, “street children” of the so-called third world and “homeless youth” of the first world are forms of one worldwide phenomenon. Although the phenomena produce strikingly different images of street youth in New York and São Paulo, I show that the youth are far more similar than different.

Causes: A Reframing of Paradigmatic Explanations Poverty is a defining issue for most of the families of both New York and São Paulo runaways. In Brazil most street children were raised in families living in absolute poverty, whereas in the United States approximately 50 percent were raised in families enrolled in government assistance programs (the rest were from working- and middle-class families). Both these types of families are considered poor by their respective national standards (Schaffner 1999; Sena and Dos Santos 1996). Most of my interviewees were raised in recombined families (with stepparents, stepbrothers, and stepsisters) or families headed by single mothers afflicted with such problems as drugs and alcohol abuse and prostitution, some of them having boyfriends or partners whose supervisory and disciplining roles conflicted with the child’s perspective (table 4.1). Those raised in traditional two-parent families often reported that their parents were too authoritarian or had drug and alcohol problems. Additionally, most street youth in both cities had been victims of emotional, psychological, verbal, physical, and sexual violence at home: And my father, he used to be very, very violent. So, you know, there was the beatings, and then there were the beatings. I used to get scared for my life so much that I used to run away. The first time I didn’t run away, my father actually kicked me out. I forgot what over. I lied about something. Something minor, like the funny papers. The Sunday funny papers or something. (Slim, twenty-four, former runaway, New York City)

Street Youth in New York City and São Paulo

Former Runaway and Street Youth and the Type of Household They Were Living in When They Started Running

TA B L E 4.1

TYPE OF HOUSEHOLD

SÃO PAULO CITY

NEW YORK CITY

Two parent (biological) Recombined Single parent Extended family Adoptive family Youth system

5 (11%) 15 (33%) 10 (22%) 3 (6%) 7 (15%) 6 (13%) 46 (100%)

7 (23%) 15 (50%) 3 (10%) 2 (7%) 1 (3%) 2 (7%) 30 (100%)

So, everything started with violence at home. My stepfather became head of the family. He got married to my mother. E ele tinha certa bronca de nós [He didn’t like us]. He didn’t accept us as her kids and only wanted her to accept the children she had with him. He wanted her to make us leave for the street. Always, when he had any opportunity he was violently aggressive with us. He used to beat me with a steel cord and wooden sticks. He punished me over beans. That made me rebellious. So, we complained about it to my mother, but she didn’t hear us. She preferred him to us. Willing or not to stay at home, I just couldn’t be there. . . . So I adapted by running away and living my life by myself on the streets. (Calixto, twenty-one, former runaway, São Paulo)

Neither the economic background nor the type of family is sufficient to explain why children ran away from home or were deliberately discarded. I found that the quality of relationships between the family members more than the type of family (divorced, single-parent family, recombined family) was a major factor affecting street children’s decision to leave home in both New York and São Paulo. The expulsive dynamics depend largely on the quality of the youth’s relationship with the family members and the economic situation, combined with other cultural factors. Institutions serving street youth base their services on the mainstream family model, and this practice does not provide the proper services or resources and symbolic material to help nontraditional families cope with the problems they face, nor are they designed to help the children who are not willing to go back home. The notion that poverty is relative is not a mere cliché; emotional and economic factors have different weights for different subpopulations. The American interviewees, particularly those living in transitional living care, expressed stronger feelings of deprivation and exclusion, and with much more pain and anger, than did the Brazilian interviewees. Because a variety of motives prompt children to run away from home, I realized that it would be inadequate to focus on one motive or an inventory of several single episodes as a means of explaining the practice of leaving home. Consequently, I asked the youth to identify whether the decision to leave their home was due to personal, familial, or

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Comparative Loci of Motives

LOCI OF MOTIVES

SÃO PAULO

NEW YORK

Conflict at home with emotional, psychological, verbal, physical, and sexual violence: Emotional, psychological, verbal, and physical violence Conflict at home and occurrence or attempt of sexual abuse Conflict at home with previous engagement in the street economy Conflict with institutional rules Accident or problems with a third party

38 (83%)

27 (90%)

16 (42%) 7 (18%) 15 (40%)

17 (63%) 8 (30%) 2 (7%)a

6 (13%) 2 (4%) 46 (100%)

3 (10%) 0 (0%) 30 (100%)

Note: Although my universe of interviewees was  ( in New York and  in São Paulo), I sampled only  cases. a There were three more cases that were included in two other categories, “conflict at home and sexual abuse” and “conflict with institutional rules.”

societal factors. For youths whose locus of motives was the family environment, I asked them whether they thought their problems stemmed from their family’s structure, their family’s material or financial condition, or conflictual relationships between family members. For those who identified their locus of motives as the relationship between the family members, I identified the parties involved in the conflict, its nature, and the youths’ perspective on the conflict. I clustered the loci of motives as verbal, emotional, psychological, physical, and sexual violence at home; an accident or problems with a third party; and conflict with institutional rules for those who grew up in the social welfare system. I analyzed the loci of motives in two broader clusters that I am calling loci of causes: the socioeconomic and domestic. The first set of motives are part of the domestic locus, and the accidents and problems with a third party (i.e., the justice system) are placed under the socioeconomic locus. Table 4.2 indicates that most street youth from both São Paulo and New York place the motives for leaving home in the domestic locus, very few of my interviewees placed the motives for leaving home at the socioeconomic locus. Two emphases emerged among the domestic-oriented reasons for youths leaving home. One was the household emotional life, in which 60 percent of the Paulistan cases and 93 percent of the New York cases were included. The other was household economic life, which encompassed 40 percent of the Paulistan cases and 7 percent of the New York cases. These data demonstrate that street youth in both cities identified problems in the home environment as prime motives for leaving. Also, in both cities the interviewees identified problems associated with the quality of their emotional life as the major reason for running away from home. In São Paulo, however, a higher proportion of youth identified both emotional and economic factors as reasons for leaving. It is important to stress that a great number of the conflicts between parents and children are economically related.

Street Youth in New York City and São Paulo

Profile Street children or children of the streets reside on the street full-time (working, eating, and sleeping on the streets). Some have no idea where their family is and others have been abandoned or orphaned. Most are runways. Over two-thirds have been physically abused. Just a small fraction of them attend school. Most of them make a living illegally. The overwhelming majority of street children regularly use illegal drugs and have been institutionalized. (Summary of the typology of Rio de Janeiro’s street children, Lusk and Mason 1994:42) [Street youth] are often long-term runaway, homeless, or throwaway youth who literally live day-to-day on the streets. Some sleep in parks, others in abandoned buildings, or in some other type of makeshift shelter. (The National Network for Youth 1988’s definition for street youth in the United States)

The city of São Paulo does not know how many children live on its streets. One on-the-spot survey counted different numbers according to the time of the day: 4,520 during the day (from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.) and 895 at night (from 2:00 to 5:00 a.m.). This survey was criticized for its failure to count those living in abandoned buildings and street shacks, it also failed to include the 468 youth who were sleeping in shelters that night (Clatts 1999). New York City suffers from a similar lack of reliable, accurate, and descriptive data. A Columbia University study estimated that there are 10,000 runaway and homeless youth in New York, much lower than the previous estimate of 20,000 (Shaffer and Caton 1984). These estimates were based on the use of welfare services and shelters, which do not distinguish between runaways, homeless children, and street youth. Although it may seem as though the street youth population consists of the same people through the years, it is in fact a very transitional group. Just as photons make light seem continuous, the street youth population is composed of both constant newcomers and a small group who develop a long-term street life trajectory. Street youth come from poor areas and reterritorialize in the downtown areas, and they are a mobile population in two senses: every day new children reach the streets and others leave, and those who stay on the street transition between different locations in the city and use a variety of institutions.³ Homeless youth choose to live either a shelter-centered or a street-centered life trajectory. Because the majority of youth in both cities often alternate between the two ways of living, these trajectories are not permanent or durable, and regardless of where they sleep, these youth spend most of their time hanging out on the street. In São Paulo a higher proportion of children choose to sleep on the street than in shelters; some sleep out in the open, literally on curbsides, and others try to find more protected environments such as abandoned or empty buildings, mocós (shacks under the bridges), or metro ventilation areas.⁴ In New York those preferring to sleep on the streets do so in underground spaces adjacent to subway and train routes, in Central Park with groups of homeless adults, in empty buildings, and, posing as patients, in hospital waiting rooms. It is also important to note that youth sleeping on the streets may not have

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chosen a street-centered trajectory; they may have missed a shelter’s curfew or been discharged from a shelter, blocked from entry into a squat, kicked out of a drug dealer’s apartment, kicked off a subway car, or unable to afford a cheap hotel room. Among New York inner-city youth, the split between those who choose a shelter trajectory and those who choose a street trajectory is close to fifty-fifty. However, most Tompkins Square Park street traveler youth choose to live a street-centered trajectory. They rarely use the shelter services or the drop-in centers in midtown Manhattan. The only services they use with frequency are the needle exchange program and the mobile health service. They are more likely to struggle to find a place to sleep in the few abandoned buildings in Alphabet City (Avenues A, B, and C), on the Lower East Side, or in the East River’s margin under the bridge. Some of them even sleep in old cars parked in some more deserted areas, or they keep traveling from one city to another.

Street Dynamics: Age, Gender, and Race In both cities females constitute approximately 25 percent of the street youth population (Clatts 1999; Kennedy et al. 1994). The gender distribution differs according to area of the city and time of day; in São Paulo 80 percent of children and adolescents on the streets during the day were male and at night this decreased by 10 percent. Young females are more likely to be seen on the streets in central areas of the cities and nearby in entertainment areas.⁵ One can hypothesize that the slightly higher percentage of females present on the streets at night may be attributed to a greater demand for sexual services from women. Because shelter policies and services in both cities generally prioritize women and children, females make up a higher percentage of the shelter population. A 1996 study conducted by the Government of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, documented that female street youth are more afraid than males of becoming victims of violence committed by other groups of children and “marginal” adults, and this may be another reason more women than men seek out shelters (Governo do Rio Grande do Sul n.d.)

Most Paulistan Street Children Are Early Teenagers Outsiders, especially Europeans and Americans, often comment on the youngness of São Paulo’s street youth. The term menino-de-rua evokes the period of childhood, and one-third of street youth in São Paulo are children the age of eleven. But appearances can be misleading; most of those inhabiting the streets are not children but adolescents (Brazilian legal codes define adolescence as the period between twelve and eighteen years of age). Because most street youth fall between the ages of twelve and fourteen (the second largest age bracket is between the ages of fifteen and seventeen), the population favors those in early and mid-adolescence. The New York City street youth population is much older then São Paulo’s. The street youth in the National Development and Research Institute study ranged in age from twelve to twenty-three years, with approximately 50 percent between the ages of sixteen and nineteen and 47 percent between twenty and twenty-three years of age (Clatts and Davis 1999). In 2001, of the 5,358 young people sheltered at Covenant House, New York’s major crisis shelter

Street Youth in New York City and São Paulo

serving runaways and homeless children under twenty-one, 4 percent were between thirteen and fifteen years old, 16 percent were sixteen to seventeen years old, 66 percent were eighteen to twenty-one years old, and 13 percent were themselves children of teen mothers (infants up to six years old) (Clatts and Davis 1999). The brief age comparison prompts the question, Why are the street children in Brazil younger than the New York population? Children in New York City face the same problems at home as their Brazilian counterparts, although the degree, frequency, and intensity vary. I argue that the combination of less cultural tolerance for the presence of small kids on the street and varying legal systems and resources in New York accounts for the difference. In 1999 the New York City Office of Child Welfare received 79,150 reports of child abuse and neglect (Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York 2000:126). According to one influential study, 80 percent of runaway youth had their first runaway episode before age sixteen, many between the ages of ten and twelve, and approximately 40 percent had run away five or more times. The study’s conclusion recommended early identification and intervention: “Probably the best location for early identification is the system; contact should be made starting with elementary schools, since many children begin running away before they are 12” (Shaffer and Caton 1984). In 1997, there were 27,534 juvenile arrests of young people less than sixteen years old; 11.7 percent of them were ten to twelve years old, 15.7 percent were thirteen years old, 28.1 percent were fourteen years old, and 44.3 percent were fifteen years old. Young people from age thirteen to fifteen represented 77 percent of youth placed in detention in New York City.⁶ The Runaway and Homeless Act of 1974 makes it a crime to leave home before the age of sixteen without one’s parents’ permission, a crime that could possibly lead to the parents’ punishment. In São Paulo the parents are also responsible for children until the legal age, but the law does not criminalize children leaving home before a certain age. Additionally, in order to avoid cleansing operations and illegal arrests of poor street children, children’s rights activists drafted and lobbied for the Statute of the Child and Adolescent Act, which ensures children and youth on the street “the right of freedom,” allowing the “going, coming and remaining in public places and community spaces, except as determined by legal restrictions.” New York has an older and more established system of law enforcement mechanisms to detect domestic violations of children’s rights than São Paulo. It also has a bigger and better-financed foster care system (responsible for forty thousand children) than São Paulo. The system has been criticized for its multiple failures, yet it is effective in keeping youth off the streets. If the foster care system is regarded as a safety net, one that truly safeguards children’s lives and rights, then children in New York are, arguably, more protected” by society than their Brazilian counterparts, and the Brazilian system does not meet needed standards and demands. However, if the system is understood as a mechanism of social control, it would follow that young people in New York are more “criminalized” and “institutionalized” than their Brazilian counterparts.

Racial Segregation on the Streets In terms of race and class, São Paulo’s street youth population is far more homogeneous than New York’s, but the percentage of black youth (and, in São Paulo, parda,

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or mulatto, youth) is highly significant in both cities. Although national figures for runaways, throwaways, and street youth in the United States indicate a predominance of white youth (about 51 percent), in New York City the percentage of African Americans and Latinos among street youth is higher than in most other American cities. In the Columbia University study (Caton and Shaffer 1984), 93 percent of street youth surveyed were African American or Latino. However, because this study was limited to the youth housed in shelter, it suffers from profound methodological weaknesses; white street youth in the Lower East Village rarely use shelter services. Although a small group compared with the black and Latino groups, the proportion of white youth kids among the street youth population in New York City is certainly higher than in São Paulo. The street youth in New York are not free from the racial tensions marking mainstream American society. Whoopie, an African American street youth, reported that she never felt comfortable hanging out in areas populated by white street youth; “That was not my scene,” she says. Daniel, a white teenager I met in the Tompkins Square area, spent time with some young black people when he arrived in New York City and recalled experiencing racial tension. There is little integration between the midtown black and Latino kids and the white kids on the Lower East Side. One rarely sees a white homeless kid hanging out or even attending the drop-in centers in midtown Manhattan; although blacks and Latinos are seen on the Lower West Side, they avoid the Tompkins Square Park area on the Lower East Side. Racial tensions are not limited to the relations between black and white street youth; they also existed between black and Latino populations, who often share similar locations and engage in similar survival strategies.

Street Economy In both cities street youth engage in similar economic activities, similar multiplehustling strategies, in order to survive. Although selling drugs is the most common form of earning an income, street youth also engage in panhandling, hustling or sex trading, mugging, and selling stolen property (Clatts 1999; Kennedy et al. 1994). In New York drug dealing, hustling or prostituting, and panhandling (for spare change) are the most common practices (Kennedy et al. 1994). The homeless travelers prefer panhandling and selling drugs, whereas the inner-city street youth are more likely to be involved in prostitution and drug dealing. Because they are older than their Paulistan counterparts and have a shelter infrastructure that provides the hygienic facilities (showers, laundry facilities) necessary for successful operation in the sex trade, New York homeless youth, both male and female, are more likely to engage in prostitution. Involvement in sex trade among Paulistan street children is not common and is performed more often by teenage females than males. The New York City gay population seems to prefer Latino teenagers, whereas heterosexual clients seem to prefer black females. Cohen (1980) confirms that the percentage of white male and female prostitutes is much smaller than that of blacks and Latinos in all age groups. With the institution of “zero tolerance” policies in the 1990s, police in New York have cracked down hard on homeless youth and have instituted policies aimed at

Street Youth in New York City and São Paulo

moving the homeless youth population away from the Times Square area. This has made it far more difficult for youth to pickpocket or mug unsuspecting tourists and visitors (some youth continue to shoplift from stores). In São Paulo, however, mugging and “rolling” remain one of street youths’ prime economic activities, especially for adolescent males. Other common economic pursuits include panhandling (favored by girls and the younger children) and small services such as cleaning windshields and washing cars (Rosemberg 1993:9).

Common Features in Both Cities They [the foster system] didn’t want me, so when I went back with my mom I started to go to school. I had just started high school, I was goin’ to high school, I was like 16. I was goin’ to school. I was tryin’ to do the right thing, but it didn’t work out, you know? I started messin’ up in school, I started dealing marijuana, hanging out, cutting class. I didn’t want to go to class, I wanted to be hanging out. I started to do drugs, and that’s when it really got—you know, from fifteen to twenty-five, that was my whole life—drug-dealing, drug using, living in the street, not caring, robbing, stealing from my mother and my grandmother, you know, in and out of jail, and stuff like that. (Jose, twenty-nine, former runaway, NYC)

Most of the experiences of street youth are characterized by a liminal structuring stage (Turner 1996), the viração or “multiple hustles” (Gregori 2000; Vogel and Mello 1991), and the accumulation of social events called “social problems.” They are neither children nor adults; they live on the threshold. Although they are still chronologically children, they engage in experiences and embody responsibilities that are usually restricted to adults. They raise themselves up among their peers and finance the costs of their own social reproduction. Their lives are out of place; home, where society thinks they should be, is a place that they do not want to be or to which they cannot go back (Douglas 1970; Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman 1998). Consequently, they spend a lot of time in environments that are perceived as very dangerous for them (e.g., the streets), among all kinds of businesses and hustles—the social actors that produce them. With life on the street often safer than at home, street youth invert the public–private order. Caught between institutions, they are out of place not only because they are on the streets but because they are in many places at the same time but do not seem to belong to any of them. They circulate through time from home, friends’ places, the street, and institutions, often not staying anywhere long. Having left home, they have not disconnected from the family’s symbolic order; they simply have a particular way of combining family bonds, domicile, work, and play. For a while, the streets represent more than a means of circulation between definite points; the streets are their domicile and the site of their socialization, where they can experience economic, social, and affective relationships (Rosemberg 1993). To sustain their search, street children se viram.⁷ Street youth have a peculiar way of straddling legitimate and illegitimate worlds. Many of them manage to be in dispute with or negotiate with what I classify as three basic networks—the safety net,

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the control agents, and the illegal or criminal—and to remain autonomous or even independent. In both countries they combine semilegal and illegal activities such as panhandling and the sex trade with illegal activities such as drug dealing and robberies. Although there is a learning process, it should not be viewed as an apprenticeship for a criminal career or specialization. It is a matter of subsistence, an experience, and a strategy. Therefore they panhandle but are not beggars; they deal drugs primarily in order to sustain their consumption; they commit petty crimes, steal, and mug people without getting immersed in organized crime schemes; and some of them sell their bodies but should be called sex traders rather than prostitutes. The viração on the streets does not match with regularly structured activities. The presumption that homelessness as a youth is a precursor for adult homelessness, or that most street children end up as “professional” prostitutes, drug dealers, burglars, or thieves, does not find support in my research and observations of former street youth, although some researchers have found such a relationship (Ploeg and Scholte 1997).⁸ Networking is a fundamental component of a street youth’s life. Peers are those who enable them to survive. However, it is a mistake to think that these spontaneous organizations are ganglike. Social organizations of this sort are always in transition, simultaneously structuring and deconstructing their participants’ lives. Such organizations are characteristic of their age as they provide the adolescents emotional and spiritual support, help generate income, provide protection against aggression, and intensify the moments of entertainment. Previous street youth trajectories revealed that there is no such thing as a totally separate ethical code or street youth subculture. People involved in the so-called illegal business belong to and are influenced by the same broader ideologies or world visions. What differ are the types of combinations, flexibility, and recreation that some groups make according to the circumstances they face. More than adhesion to a subculture, street youth learn how use street smarts. Finally, it does not seem appropriate to talk about the social identity of street youth. Their experience is a condition, not a state. It is a denial of stereotypes, such as “suspicious” populations from the New York ghettos or favelas paulistanas (Paulistan shantytowns). Young people who live for a short or long time on the streets do not usually call or represent themselves as street children or homeless youth. They usually don’t like being called street children or street youth and don’t accept it as an identity in the first place. In general they assimilate that terminology as a result of mediation with state institutions, social organizations, or service provider agencies, but they use it to refer to their condition, not to their identity.⁹ Their leaving home is an emotional choice and a strategy for changing life experience at home. They come to the street in search of themselves, a place to fit in. I think I’ve found what I was looking for on the street. I was looking for, I desired, to be loved, to be cared for. Also I desired to love and care for other people. So I think I found that on the streets. And it was because I found it that could look back and see that I already had that at home. I closed a cycle . . . when I discovered that my mother used to like me very much. It was here, right here, in this living room where we are today that I had the opportunity to talk to her about that. She cried a lot, saying, “It wasn’t that that

Street Youth in New York City and São Paulo

I was trying to express; that wasn’t what I wanted.” So I went back because I found it. If I hadn’t found it I would not have gone back home. In this sense Gramsci is correct when he states that “the new is where you are, but we can’t see it.” I think that the street changed my gaze; it enabled me to see what I already had at home and wasn’t capable of seeing. I had to go to the street to be able to see it. I found it there, but thousands of people aren’t able to find it. (Francisco, forty-two, former street child, São Paulo)

Notes 1. There are no reliable worldwide figures for these populations, but estimates indicate large numbers of street youth on five continents. For instance, a 1994 the Council of Europe studied the prevalence of homeless youth—children under eighteen years of age living on the streets for either short or long periods of time—in twenty-four of its member countries, estimating the size of the population in some European countries. The report concluded that the lack of precise knowledge about street children in Europe may result from the absence of a universal definition or concept of the phenomenon. Finally, the report revealed that there is little recognition of the scale and nature of the phenomenon, if not an explicit denial of its existence. In the United States, according to Palenski and Launer (1987), runaway youth became a widespread problem during the late 1960s. The U.S. General Accounting Office (USGAO 1989) estimates that 1 to 1.3 million youths run away from home each year. A study by Finkelhor et al. (1990) reported the number of runaways to be 577,800 in 1988. In a given year, the approximate homeless youth population in the United States is estimated at 300,000 (Institute for Health Policy Studies 1995). A 1995 study conclude that an estimated 2.8 million young people living at home reported having run away in the previous year (Greene and Ringwal 1995). Studies show that the world map of street children is heavily concentrated in Latin America, which has just 10 percent of the world’s child population but nearly 50 percent of the world’s street children (Aptekar 1991; Ploeg and Scholte 1997). However, Brazil single-handedly casts doubt on these figures. Until the mid-1980s estimates of street children populations in Brazil ranged from thousands to millions. Based on data on the number of children living in households earning less than a quarter of the minimum wage per capita collected by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry estimated the number of minors in need to be thirty-two million (Alvim and Valladares 1988). Although that figure pertained to the number of children living in poverty, many authors (e.g., Agnelli 1986) and institutions applied the statistic to estimate the number of street children. Later estimates, which were based on the number of children expected to be engaged in the informal market, approached seven million; these figures were linked to street children. Since 1986, further attempts to count the population have used the counting on-the-spot method (Rosemberg 1993; Sena and Dos Santos 1996). According to these new studies, it appears that fifteen to twenty thousand children circulate on the streets every year. As a participant in the Brazilian children’s rights movement in the 1980s I witnessed the construction of a social network to address the “street children problem” on an international scale. My engagement in the Movimento Nacional de Meninos e Meninas de Rua (The Brazilian National Movement of Street Boys and Girls) connected me to an international network of nongovernment organizations working with street children and to intergovernment agencies such as UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and UNESCO. These agencies sponsored national, regional, and international events on the topic of street children in regions around

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

the world, focusing on Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Through these meetings and processes, the street child emerged as an international subject of rights at the same time that a community of advocacy-oriented agencies, service providers, and scholars organized around the phenomenon, in a process that has been called the “globalization of grassroots movements” (Appadurai 2000). Although I agree with Glauser, I would take care when equating street children and homeless youth with juvenile gangs. I interviewed several former gang members in New York and ultimately chose not to include their life stories in this study; I realized that although they share some characteristics with street youth, they are not homeless street youth. To give the readers some examples, among the almost 5,000 children who reach Covenant House’s crisis shelter in New York, only about 1,000 are recidivists. In São Paulo, of the 1,268 street children contacted between June 1996 and December 1997, about 68 percent were seen in the same location once or twice. Another 21 percent had a low frequency of return to the same locations, and only 11 percent of them were seen with high frequency on the street (Fundação Projeto Travessia 1997). According to the “Estimate of the Number of Street Children and Adolescents in the City of São Paulo,” carried out in 1993, although children can be found scattered around bus and train terminals sleeping at night, the highest concentration of children are around Praça da Sé in downtown São Paulo, the Santa Ifigênia and Parque Dom Pedro II bus terminal areas contiguous to the downtown area, and Lapa, a western region of the city around the Centrais de Abastecimento do Estado de São Paulo. The female frequency is higher, for example, among the street population contacted by the Travessia Foundation, which operates in the old downtown São Paulo. During the period between June 1996 and December 1997 girls represented 38 percent of the population under eighteen years old reached by the workers. They are an even higher percentage among the young adults under twenty-one years old: 46 percent (Fundação Projeta Travessia 1997). Furthermore, 20 percent were sixteen years and over and 3 percent were less than thirteen years old (Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York 2000:112). Se virar is a term that has been used in Brazilian literature to refer to the different survival strategies street children adopt. Gregori (2000) coined the term viração for the same purpose and made it the subject of her research with street children in São Paulo. It refers to both economic and noneconomic forms of self-sustainability: food, drugs (for many of them), clothing, and entertainment. It also includes their circulation between organizations in search of institutionalized help. New York street youth also se viram in order to survive. In the American literature, one finds the expression multiple hustles, indicating the combination of economic and noneconomic activities of young people (Clatts 1999). In visits to juvenile detention facilities in São Paulo and New York City, despite lacking systematized information, workers think that the number of street youth is large among the inmates. Therefore, it seems that not many of those who are involved in illegal activities were pushed out from home. Along these lines, the literature on juvenile social transgression and crime stresses that juvenile delinquency peaks during the teenage years and decreases sharply by the beginning of young adulthood (Wilson and Herrnstein 1984). In 1981 I conducted a survey at the urban bus terminal in Brasília in order to ask the so-called street children who was a street kid for them and to ask the so-called immediate community (passengers, shop workers, police) for their perceptions of the street youth. None of the kids described themselves as street children. Based on my survey, the children can be placed in three broad categories: working children, children of the street, and juvenile offenders; furthermore, working street children were also children of the street, and children of the street were also

Street Youth in New York City and São Paulo juvenile offenders. The more distant the beholders of the phenomenon, the more likely they were to see it as a homogeneous total and its stereotyped version and act based on the fear-guilt duality; the closer they were, the more likely they were to see the distinctions between the kids, moved by ambivalent pity and anger with their peraltices (transgressions) but more cooperative with them.

References Agnelli, S. 1986. Street Children: A Growing Tragedy. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Alvim, M. R. B. and L. P. Valladares. 1988. Infância e sociedade no Brasil: Uma análise da literatura. Boletim Informativo e Bibliográfico de Ciências Sociais (BIB) Rio de Janeiro, 26: 3–37. Appadurai, A. 2000. Grassroots globalization and the research imagination. Public Culture, 12(1): 1–19. Aptekar, L. 1991. Are the Colombian streetchildren neglected? Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 22: 326–349. ——. 1994. Street children in the developing world: A review of their condition. Cross-Cultural Research, 28(3): 195–224. Blanc, C. S. 1994a. Some comparative urban trends: Street, work, homelessness, schooling and family survival strategies. In C. S. Blanc, ed., Urban Children in Distress, 311–374. New York: UNICEF / Gordon and Breach. ——, ed. 1994b. Urban Children in Distress. New York City: UNICEF / Gordon Breach. Caton, C. and D. Shaffer. 1984. Runaway and Homeless Youth in New York City. New York: Ittleson Foundation. Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York. 2000. Keeping Track of New York City’s Children. New York: Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York. Clatts, M. 1999. Lives in the balance: A profile of homeless youth in New York City. In J. Bluestein and C. Levine, eds., Medical Decision-Making for Adolescents Who Are Alone, 335–390. New Brunswick, NJ: Cambridge University Press. —— and W. R. Davis. 1999. A demographic and behavioral profile of homeless youth in New York City: Implications for AIDS outreach and prevention. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 10: 106–114. Cohen, B. 1980. Deviant Street Networks: Prostitution in New York City. Lexington, MA: Lexington. Douglas, M. 1970. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Felsman, J. K. 1989. Risk and resiliency in childhood: The lives of street children. In R. Coles and T. F. Dugan, eds., The Children in Our Times: Studies in the Development of Resiliency, 56–79. New York: Brunner / Mazel. Finkelhor, D., G. Hotaling, and A. Sedlak. 1990. Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children in America. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Fundação Projeto Travessia. 1997. O Caminho Que a Gente Faz. São Paulo: Fundação Projeto Travessia. Glauser, B. 1997. Street children: Deconstructing a construct. In A. James and A. Prout, eds., Construction and Reconstructing Childhood, 145–162. London: Falmer. Governo do Rio Grande do Sul. n.d. Crianças e Adolescentes em Situação de Rua e Suas Circunstâncias de Vida. Porto Alegre: Governo do Rio Grande do Sul.

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Benedito Rodrigues dos Santos Greene, J. and C. Ringwal. 1995. Youth with Runaway, Throwaway, and Homeless Experiences: Prevalence, Drug Use, and Other At-Risk Behaviors. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families. Gregori, M. F. 2000. Viração: Experiências de Meninos nas Ruas. São Paulo: Companhia Das Letras. Institute for Health Policy Studies. 1995. Street Youth at Risk for AIDS. San Francisco: University of California at San Francisco. Kennedy, M. G. G., M. Clatts, M. Kiple, and S. Mills. 1994. Patterns and Correlates of High-Risk Behavior. National Conference on Risk-Taking Behaviors Among Children and Adolescents. Lalor, K. 1990. Street children: A comparative perspective. Child Abuse & Neglect, 23(8): 759–770. Lusk, M. W. and D. T. Mason. 1994. Fieldwork with Rio’s street children. In I. Rizzini, ed., Children in Brazil Today: A Challenge for the Third Millennium, 157–176. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Universitária Santa Úrsula. Mickelson, R. A., ed. 2000. Children on the Streets of the Americas: Globalization, Homelessness and Education in the United States, Brazil and Cuba. London: Routledge. Palenski, J. E. and H. M. Launer. 1987. The “process” of running away: A redefinition. Adolescence, 22(86): 347–362. Pilotti, F. and I. Rizzini. 1994. The (dis)integration of Latin America and its impact on children. In I. Rizzini, ed., Children in Brazil Today: A Challenge for the Third Millennium, 79–93. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Universitária Santa Úrsula. Ploeg, J. A. and E. Scholte. 1997. Homeless Youth. London: Sage. Raffaelli, M. and R. Larson, eds. 1999. Homeless and Working Youth Around the World: Exploring Developmental Issues. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Rosemberg, F., ed. 1993. Estimativa de Crianças e Adolescentes em Situação de Rua na Cidade de São Paulo. Cardernos de Pesquisa. São Paulo: Fundação Carlos Chagas. Schaffner, L. 1999. Teenage Runaways: Broken Hearts and “Bad Attitudes.” New York: Haworth. Scheper-Hughes, N. and D. Hoffman. 1998. Brazilian apartheid: Street kids and the struggle for urban space. In N. Scheper-Hughes, ed., Small Wars, 252–288. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sena, C. S. and B. Dos Santos. 1996. Mapeamento e Contagem de Crianças e Adolescentes em Situação de Rua em Goiânia-Go. Goiania-Go: Sociedade Cidadão 2000. Shaffer, D. and C. L. M. Caton. 1984. Runaway and Homeless Youth in New York City: A Report to the Litteson Foundation. New York: Division of Child Psychiatry, New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Turner, V. 1996. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. USGAO. 1989. Homelessness and Runaway Youth Receiving Services at Federally Funded Shelters. Washington, DC: USGAO. Vogel, A. and A. S. Mello. 1991. Da casa a rua: A cidade como fascínio e descaminho. In R. Cervini and A. Fausto, eds., O Trabalho e a Rua: Crianças e Adolescentes no Brasil Urbano dos Anos 80, 184–201. São Paulo: Cortez Editora. Wilson, J. Q. and R. J. Herrnstein. 1984. Crime and Human Nature. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Svetlana Stephenson

5. Searching for Home Russian Street Youth and the Criminal Community

Over the last fifteen years, the phenomenon of street children and youth in Russia has become a matter of serious national and international concern. Runaway children sleeping on underground pipes, teenagers begging or washing cars, young girls soliciting sex, groups of youngsters roaming the streets in school hours—until recently all these displays of youth dislocation were largely absent from the Russian urban landscape except in times of war and social catastrophes.¹ Runaway children were quickly picked up by the militia (the Russian term for police) and returned to their families or placed in residential care. Current anxieties about street children stem from the fact that they are seen as victims of poverty and exploitation, as out of control, a threat to adults. In Russia the fears about children go hand in hand with the fears about an emergence of urban lumpenproletariat (Dakhin 1998:47). Because their socialization takes place outside the institutions of family and school, it is widely believed that street experience makes these children deeply asocial. A report on working street children in St. Petersburg states, Teachers and social workers in specialized social rehabilitation institutions believe that the psychological state of these children can be characterized by serious personality problems linked to a change in their system of values. Socially and psychologically these children are unable to conform to social norms. Their system of moral values, their moral conscience and their notions of good and evil are distorted: they often have only basic needs and primitive interests. . . . Teenagers may not know what friendship is, something which is important for any child. . . . These children have no sympathy or compassion for other people and equally are indifferent to other people’s feelings. Consequently their connections to family and society as a whole are very weak. (ILO / IPEC 2000:17)

It must be said that until quite recently similar views were dominant in literature on street children in other parts of the world (Ennew 1994:409–410). These ideas are

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being challenged by scholars highlighting the attempts of children to reconstruct lost families and to create supportive networks (Aptekar 1988; Ennew 1994; Lucchini 1993, 1996; Swart 1990; Tyler et al. 1992). Nevertheless, despite the emphasis on the children’s sociability, their behavior is commonly viewed as a set of survival strategies that are needed in a risky and hostile environment, and their relations with adults are perceived as negative, viewed primarily in terms of abuse and exploitation. Consequently, with scant attention paid to the ideas, beliefs, and aspirations that inform youth practices, particularly in relation to interactions with the outside world, little is known about young people’s expectations of future social memberships and how they influence their current behavior. In this chapter I suggest looking at the social behavior of displaced street children and youth as structured by their attempts to get re-placed in society, to find new physical homes and build immediate and long-term social memberships. They do not merely create their own street collectives as compensation for severed family ties and unmet psychological needs but seek participation in the larger underground noncriminal and criminal communities. Although it is common for youth research to study juvenile social organization as an autonomous world, a closer look beyond particular groups and gangs seems necessary. Only by looking at prison culture and the adult criminal community is it possible to interpret and understand many of the cultural practices of delinquent street-based groups. My research was conducted in Moscow in 1997–2003. The project included an interview-based survey of 123 street children who ranged in age from seven to seventeen (the majority of the interviewees—72 percent—were boys),² interviews with community members and experts, and participant observation at the Children of the Streets center in the southern administrative district in Moscow. In this chapter I will be referring mainly to twenty-five in-depth interviews and eight focus group sessions with twenty-eight young men involved in street gangs. These interviews were held in the Moscow Centre for Temporary Isolation of Underage Delinquents, in charity shelters, and on the streets. I also refer to some of my interviews with male adult members of organized criminal groups in Moscow. The displacement of Russian children and youth is a consequence of profound social changes associated with postcommunist transition. The Soviet economy operated in the conditions of mainly administratively controlled labor mobility and a regulated job market. Informal economic activity did exist, but it was normally connected to the operation (sometimes in the form of additional underground production) of the state enterprise. Nearly full employment, strict administrative control, tight local communities organized around enterprises, and collectivist ethics all precluded social and economic disaffiliation on any large scale. The social role of children was tightly defined by the boundaries of family socialization and education. In the Soviet social structure people were divided into substantive, ideologically defined categories, and a child’s major role was to be prepared to become a “constructor of communism” (Pilkington 1994). Children were not regarded as independent economic agents, and their role as providers for the household was very limited. The stresses and strains of transition and a new political dogma—requiring the state to withdraw from redistribution—contributed to the disruption of collectivistic

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arrangements and to processes of marginalization and informalization. Large sections of the population became progressively excluded from the distributive institutions of mainstream society: the labor market, the housing market, access to education, public health care, social benefits, and pensions. Globalization and the specific conditions of disintegration of the Soviet command economy have led to a rapid growth of an informal economy. This economy has become a characteristic feature of post-Soviet urbanism (Szelenyi 1996). High labor turnover and a high risk of unemployment are common in this sector (OECD 2001:67–68). The collapse of the Soviet social structure—which was built on the foundations of a comprehensive welfare system and full employment—was particularly disastrous for poorly trained manual workers, those with alcohol addictions, and others deeply dependent on Soviet paternalism. A rich tradition of sociological and criminological research shows that the mistreatment of children often is related to adverse class conditions. Family poverty and insecure employment encourage family disruption and produce explosive and erratic parent–child interactions (Hagan and McCarthy 1997; McLoyd 1989; Patterson 1980). Our survey indicated that there are indeed specific conditions and circumstances of parenting associated with children and young people taking to the streets. The parents of street children as a rule occupy the lowest positions on the social scale. Although it must be said that children’s reports of their parents’ employment have limited reliability, they indicate a proliferation of insecure and low-paid employment. According to our survey, 26 percent of the fathers and 29 percent of mothers were unemployed or had temporary or odd jobs in the informal sector, or begged. Sixty-eight percent of the children reported that one or both of their parents had experienced periods of unemployment. This contrasts with the general employment situation in the city of Moscow, where in 2002 only 6 percent of the working-age population was unemployed, and 5 percent had temporary or odd jobs (there are no data on begging). In households headed by a single mother (28 percent of our interviewees were raised in such families), the employment situation was especially precarious. According to children’s reports, 75 percent of single mothers had been out of work. Furthermore, 73 percent of our interviewees reported that one or both of their parents had serious problems with alcohol. Sixty-nine percent reported that members of their family had at least one experience of being arrested or interviewed by police on suspicion of having committed a crime, and 45 percent said that one or more family members had been convicted of a criminal offense. The children in such families bore the full brunt of the disruptive, disorganized, and unsettled lives of the adults. Eighty percent of the children experienced physical violence at home, and 44 percent reported sustaining wounds from beatings. There was an atmosphere of conflict and violence in the family (56 percent reported that their mother had been subjected to physical abuse, although male parents were not the only perpetrators of violence). Most kids ran away after a prolonged campaign of violence, although some reported that a single violent episode was sufficient to make the break. In addition to being exposed to violence, approximately one-third of the young people we interviewed reported that they often went hungry while living at home. From these young people’s accounts it was obvious that instead of providing care for the children, the family often abused and neglected them. The kids described their

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emotional and physical suffering in their families but also expressed their perception of such family life as being abnormal and unsuited to their needs. Maxim, age thirteen, whose alcoholic parents sold their house and moved in with his grandmother, reported, “When somebody says that their parents are in prison, I wish my parents were in prison. Because my parents are not as they should be. Parents should look after a child.” Denied their legitimate child’s role in the family, many of the young people we interviewed decided to take their destiny into their own hands and abandon their homes in search of a more normal life. When asked why they embarked on a street life, the youth we interviewed often responded with indictments of their parents’ violent or negligent behavior: The parents are to blame. When they get drunk, they beat the children up just for the sake of it. (Pavel, age fourteen) When the parents drink, they start to quarrel. My father was drunk, he jumped from the rooftop, even broke his leg. And why did he stab my mother and cut her arm? She screams, I wake up, I am turning on the light, and my dad is cutting my mum. I ran to a neighbor, she called the police, and my father was detained for twenty days. (Vladimir, age ten) The parents beat up their kids. Also, there is not enough money in the family, the kids are hungry and they go away. And often they do not come back, because they think that nobody needs them. (Maxim, age thirteen)

It must be stressed that for many the break with the family home is not absolute. Of the kids who live in Moscow and the Moscow region and are not runaways from more distant regions, 71 percent visit home (31 percent almost every day). Some return home to get money, others to give some of the money earned on the streets to their parents. More than sixty of the young people interviewed said that they would like to return to live at home. As thirteen-year-old Sergei told us, “Kids think, ‘I will run away, let them live without me,’ but then they begin to miss their homes. Even despite the fact that they are badly treated there. It is somehow easier to be at home. Your friends are there. It is generally better at home.” For a young person to come home, however, he or she would want the parents to stop drinking, quarreling, and neglecting and punishing their children.

Displacement and Re-Placement Whereas for children and young people the family home represents their main social anchor, adolescents taking to the streets are displaced from their social role as children who can rely on care and support from their family. They have to build their whole existence in a new social terrain. Pierre Bourdieu (1999:124) argues that “part of the inertia of the structures of social space results from the fact that they are inscribed in physical space and cannot be modified except by a work of transplantation, a moving of things and an uprooting or deporting of people, which itself presupposes extremely difficult and costly social transformations.” The transformations children have to undergo

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are huge. They need new shelter and means of subsistence; they also need to reorient themselves in a new reality; find friends, companions, patrons, and employers; and adjust their social identities and aspirations to their new situation. Philosophically, the ideas of home as a source of belonging have been expressed in the works of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger equated having a place to being in the world, whereas mobility was associated with inauthenticity and uprootedness (Heidegger 1962). A similar view of places where human beings make their homes as centers of meaning, giving worth to human life and binding people with attachments and commitments, is shared by many contemporary geographers (Relph 1976; Sack 1997; Tuan 1999). One could argue that home building for marginal and displaced groups may take place outside the traditional location of the family home and that their experiences can transcend the dichotomy between sedentary and nomadic styles of life. Ethnographers Rapport and Dawson (1998) remark that being “at home” and being “homeless” are not necessarily matters of sedentary life or movement in physical space. To be “at home” means having a cognitive environment in which one can undertake the routines of daily life and through which one finds one’s identity best mediated (Rapport and Dawson 1998). In their ad hoc home building, displaced people may colonize public space and develop new identities and social memberships. Moreover, their economic activities (including those of an outright criminal nature) may also be a way of building future social membership in larger alternative societies. For the mainstream society, however, displacement represents a threat that it must counteract. When a person’s social status is defined through his or her association with the street (“street child,” “street hooligan,” or “street woman”), this almost universally means that this person has strayed from his or her dominant affiliations and is now seen as moving into a delinquent and degraded position. The status of such people as belonging to the streets signifies their displacement beyond socially recognized boundaries. As Mary Douglas (1966:140) Shows, “physical crossing of the social barrier is treated as a dangerous pollution. . . . The polluter becomes a doubly wicked object of reprobation, first because he crossed the line and second because he endangered others.” As Douglas would say, street children become “matter out of place.” The Russian state usually reacts to the displacement of street children with a range of re-placement strategies. In Moscow public resources are directed at containing street youth in educational and leisure establishments. More radical re-placement strategies are applied to the persistent truants, migrants, and homeless children and youth who are beyond the reach of educational establishments. The efforts of the state involve mainly removing them from the streets and sending them back to their parents or placing them in a children’s home, a shelter, or even a hospital. The authorities also engage in a range of quasipenal strategies, including placing children into militia reception centers or into special schools for underage delinquents. Any specific efforts by young people to construct their own social reality are ignored. Furthermore, whenever young people form their own street-based groups, these are perceived as vehicles of disorder and danger. Suspicion and fear seem to be the dominant reactions to any spontaneous youth organization. In the criminal justice system, when adolescents commit group crimes, such as theft or robbery, they get tougher sentences.

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The re-placement strategies adopted by street children are radically different than those exercised by the state. By running away or drifting toward the streets, children hope to be able to settle with their friends and find new families or new opportunities in the city. Sixteen-year-old Olya came to Moscow from a small town in Belarus. From early childhood, life at home was hard; she suffered from hunger, her parents did not buy her decent clothes, and her father used to beat her for the smallest misdeed. While still living at home she used to watch youth programs on TV and was in awe of the degree of freedom that young people in Moscow (members of subcultural groups, e.g., punks, rockers, hippies) seemed to have. She says that after coming to Moscow she found more friends there than in her own town. At present, she is living in the cellars and lofts of high-rise buildings. Fourteen-year-old Lyuba ran away from a small town in the Volga region of Ulyanovsk. Her escape was precipitated by a long history of conflict with her father. Her mother had recently returned from the Russian capital after working as a madam, a procurer of underage sex workers. She employed several girls whose services she sold. While working in Moscow, she used to send home $2,000 every month—an enormous sum by the standards of the small provincial town where they lived. Lyuba decided to try her own luck in Moscow, first as a prostitute and then, after getting “experience and the right connections,” as a procurer herself. In the interview she described touchingly how she and a friend from her hometown stood at the side of a road in central Moscow to attract punters. But when cars began to stop and men asked them about sex, they were too scared to go into cars with them. They are now considering different Moscow careers, working in outdoor markets.

Taking to the Streets The accounts of young people show that the streets are full of opportunities, risks, and threats. Although the sensuous elements of freedom and lack of adult control are definitely important for the young people’s street experience, our interviews demonstrated that maximizing security was viewed as the primary objective. Most of our interviewees experienced the street as a very dangerous place. Fear of violence was overwhelming, and there were particular groups—militia officers, adult homeless people, drunks, drug addicts—whom children cited specifically as sources of fear. Some (particularly kids from small towns and villages) were afraid they might become victims of road accidents. Others lived in fear of pedophiles and sexual predators (8 percent of our interviewees had been sexually assaulted on the streets, so these fears were well justified). There is a complete lawlessness out there, even old women are being raped and killed. Maniacs roam the streets. (Pyotr, age thirteen) The militia can detain you, and then force you to have sex with them—or they threaten to take you to a reception center [for underage criminals]. (Lena, age fifteen)

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Consequently, the task was of making friends was one of their most pressing responsibilities. As thirteen-year-old Sergei reported, “It is terrifying because you are on your own. One cannot live on his own. . . . Even if you have money, you should not be on your own. You must find a group or just somebody.” The children and youth we interviewed managed to find others who had spent more time on the streets. The “veterans” help the newcomers by showing them cellars or lofts of flats where they can sleep, providing them with them food, and inviting them to join their groups. Children who can periodically return home to eat become an important resource for those who cannot. Far from leading isolated, hand-to-mouth existences on the streets, the youth build supportive relationships with each other and demonstrate compassion, kindness, and altruism. Their solidarity is a response to profound insecurity, and the human warmth they give each becomes a response to deprivation and exclusion. Seventeen-year-old Vadim describes how their group helps other kids: When we met Grisha and Stepan, they just wanted to end their lives. They were dirty, did not want to talk to anybody, they looked very down. We asked them, “What has happened?” They explained what happened and then you would sit with them, have a good talk, suggest joining your group. Here they find happiness. In our group we are all friends. Nobody would hurt anybody. You can do what you like. If somebody does not have money because they earned nothing or were not able to steal it, they would come to me and say: “Give me, please, some money, to buy food. I have nothing to eat.” I would say: “Here, take it. . . .” I can even give them all my money, because I know I can be fed at home. And many others would do the same thing.

Systems of support and care are just one facet of home building by street youth. Young people also look for new places where they can live and around which they can build new families, new routines, and new domesticity. These might be the cellars and lofts of high-rise buildings or underground water pipes. In such locations groups of street youth live together, sharing money they have earned from odd jobs, washing cars, cleaning street kiosks, or petty theft.

Criminal Youth Groups Some young people (usually teenage boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen) build new roots and identities through participation in tightly bound gangs, engaging in serious violence and criminality. Approximately one-quarter of male street youths we interviewed joined such gangs. Some of the young men in the gangs have served time in prisons or corrective institutions, mainly for offenses such as hooliganism, theft, or burglary. Others had no prior experience of the penal system. The gangs have no entry standards, but having a criminal past and connections or being a runaway from a children’s home is considered an advantage. The street gangs we studied consisted mainly of homeless runaways but also contained delinquent youth still living at home. These gangs develop strict hierarchies, with a leader and his “deputies.” Gang members must

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give an oath that they will be true to the group’s cause (apart from criminal activities as such, the members of the groups often are bound by nationalistic and purely racist agendas and often participate in harassment of darkies or Chernie: blacks and people from the Caucasus and Central Asia). Gang members mug passersby on the streets, rob houses, and steal mobile phones or passports. The gangs allow homeless kids to settle, find temporary abodes, and rediscover company and emotional bonds. Thus the youth are at least partly re-placed in social and territorial space—in other words, in a social structure. Street children fight against “the fear of not belonging” that, in a rapidly changing world, as Keith Hayward (2004:197) comments, “can well up within individuals across all levels of society.” Sixteen-year-old Andrei joined the street gang after several months of hand-to-mouth existence on the streets. When he was eleven his mother placed him in a children’s home, from which he made repeated runaway attempts, only to be brought back by the militia. On his latest trip he met a member of a street gang and now lives with a group of boys in a cellar in central Moscow. With the gang he acquired a home, which he feels he had never had before: A gang is like paradise for me. I could not understand before what a man lived for, did not understand how life was. And also, one cannot travel all his life. One has to join up with somebody, settle somewhere. I understood that it is possible to find people with whom you can share your thoughts. They can teach you, you can teach them.

In these new groups, young people forge new identities. Such “identity work” by juvenile gang members involves rejecting the meaning systems that connected them to their previous lives. They are no longer children (although in some situations they admit feeling like children; one of our respondents said that is how he feels when he plays football). They reject the world of their peers, whom they call the locals (dvorovie), young people who are believed to lack agency and mobility. The locals’ experiences are thought to be limited to their home; they are “mummy’s boys” who do not understand real life and can afford not to care about their future. They also create hostile relations with Neformali, members of noncriminal youth subcultures. Whereas gang members follow strong behavioral codes, neformali are seen as lacking any moral qualities; for example, gang members place a great emphasis on the cleanliness of private space and personal control over the presentation of the body, but neformali do not follow any visible code of order and discipline. “When you enter the cellar where they get together, you see that they behave like pigs. The place is a complete mess. They can walk around naked. I would not get undressed in the presence of others, not even for medical examinations. It’s humiliating for me. . . . They do not know what they want from life. . . . They have no morals.” Gang members attack the neformali on the streets whenever the chance arises. These acts, regarded as “the cleansing of city territory,” build one’s reputation in the group; weapons are never used in such attacks, and rather than intending serious physical harm, gang members engage in ritualistic altercations to show their moral and physical superiority. In contrast to territorial gangs, normally formed by youths living at home and protecting their local territory, street youths do not fight turf wars; instead, they colonize

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larger geographies. Proudly reporting their travels to other cities in Russia and further afield into former Soviet states, they claim to have networks of business contacts reaching beyond Moscow or their previous home city. Such mobility demonstrates their taste for adventure and their entrepreneurial qualities. These young men in gangs find the mobility and expansiveness of their social connections points of pride and agency. Moving around, they explore the city and beyond, consume various experiences, and avoid being tied down to degraded spaces and places. They refuse to be consigned to an immobile “waste of the world” and they are not “the monster rejects” of the brave new world of mobility and consumption (Bauman 1998:92). On the contrary, they develop an enhanced sense of self by exploring the possibilities and pleasures of movement.

Street Gangs and Prison Culture Re-placement of the street youth is not limited to finding new homes and establishing relationships and identities through their immersion in street life and participation in juvenile gangs. What emerges strongly from our research is that another reality constantly flows beneath the surface of their everyday experiences and powerfully influences their beliefs and behavior. This reality is that of Russia’s adult organized crime and prison culture. This reality is present through a variety of direct and indirect experiences: prior socialization in communities where a significant fraction of the men have been incarcerated, their own experiences of incarceration, direct contact with members of organized crime during life on the streets, and appropriation of criminal notions and values from the media. To understand the attraction of adult criminal society for displaced youth and the ready availability of its culture, one has to be aware of its highly structured and organized character and its importance in the current Russian economy and society. The historical traditions of Russian organized crime date back to the society of thieves, or professional criminals, that existed in the Soviet period and, according to some accounts, before 1917. Today’s organized crime and its new representatives—the socalled bandits—borrow from the old thieves’ moral codes, rituals, and myths to create a prison subculture (Olenik 2003). Researchers studying organized crime have demonstrated that criminals form tight and functionally specialized groups and have suggested significant similarities between American, Sicilian, and Russian organized crime (Volkov 2002). The strength of criminal communities contrasts starkly with the disintegration of many other formal institutions and structures. In Russia, as in other countries involved in global processes where the existing public institutions are failing to deliver and where, as Eric Hobsbawm (1994:15) argues, there is a “disintegration of the old patterns of human social relations,” the attractions of any integrative community cannot be overstated. The power of organized crime does not lie only in the scope of its illegal business or in the system of violent control and domination it establishes in the territories in which it operates; the criminal organization also functions as an alternative social world, providing a sense of relative stability and belonging that are otherwise absent in the lives of displaced people.

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The criminal organization also offers its members the prospects of employment and career development, which are often absent in the mainstream economy. Additionally, these organizations have traditionally offered protection against risk (obviously, the major risk is incarceration) and in “retirement.” Established members of the criminal society—the so-called authorities (avtoriteti)—enjoy the respect and loyalty of the rank and file of the “brotherhood” (the self-adopted name of the Russian mafia structures). They can also expect to be materially supported if sentenced to prison, assisted with housing and money upon release, and helped in old age from the “joint fund” (obschak) belonging to the criminal community. Therefore important notions of ensuring mutual support and solidarity are important. For example, there is the notion of “not eating in one face” (ne iest’ v odno litso), an obligation to share the proceeds of crime with other members of the group; and “warming up the zona” (a collective term for prisons and labor camps), sending money, food, and cigarettes to incarcerated inmates. Such traditions of the criminal community make it attractive to people who suffer from profound insecurity and risk and to the young street youth who experience alienation and displacement. The members of street delinquent groups embrace the prison culture, if not through actual cooperation with criminal groups then through accepting much of its ideology and practices. In groups of street-living youth the norms of prison culture are transmitted to young runaways with brothers, fathers, or neighbors in prison. In our interviews with gang members, nearly everybody knew at least one person who has been to prison. This is not surprising because incarceration rates in Russia are extremely high, with approximately nine hundred thousand inmates (of whom two hundred thousand are in pretrial detention) (Abramkin 2001). A quarter of our interviewees from street gangs had personally experienced detention or incarceration or had been in young people’s correctional institutions (special schools for underage delinquents). The mass media also play a significant role in the transmission and romanticization of this culture. A fascination with the world of “bandits” and “thieves” is fed by the Russian film industry, which represents members of criminal brotherhoods as heroic fighters against total alienation and corruption. Consequently, even without personal experience of prison or contacts with adult criminals, young people get to know the prison repertoire of songs, slang, and symbolism. Their social identities also have referents in the prison culture. They are vagrants, not homeless. Vagrancy, with its romantic connotations of freedom and rejection of the hostile dominant order, is taken as a sign of personal agency. Adult homeless people (city bums, or bomzhi) are deemed to be passive, weak, and solely responsible for their own plight. Bomzhi are despised by the criminal community, and if they are incarcerated, they usually become pariahs in the prison hierarchy, which puts a high premium on masculinity and self-control. Vagrancy, on the other hand, is a legitimate position in prison, and young vagrants trust that they will not be disrespected if they end up in custody. Many of the attributes of a vagrant are the same as the attributes of a member of the prison culture. In fact, respected members of this culture may call themselves vagrants (Efimova 2004:60–63). This is how Danila, a twenty-five-year-old member of one of the organized crime groups in Moscow, describes what it means to be a vagrant: “A vagrant is a lad. He is an open soul. He steals or resells things, but he does not value

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money. Money comes and goes. He is an honest, frank, brave guy. You can rely on him. He will not betray you to the cops.” Many of the young men we interviewed actively seek contact with organized crime. They use contacts developed in their communities or during incarceration. They frequent city bars and game parlors where such criminals are known to spend time. Some gangs establish contacts with adult criminal groups, which provide protection in case of conflicts with other gangs. In return, the youth perform jobs for adult criminal groups (e.g., racketeering or criminal enforcement, drug distribution, stealing of passports and mobile phones). In some cases young people are recruited to adult criminal groups; in other cases, as the gang members grow up, they take gang activities to new levels of organizational sophistication (for a detailed account of young people’s transition to adult criminal gangs in Russia, see Salagaev et al. 2005). Our research with members of delinquent groups of street-living youth in Moscow suggests that the Russian criminal society supplies the key social referents for their identification and offers the main cultural repertoires. For these young people, the world of organized crime is more tangible, more real, than the obscure and distant world of school or employment. Although every street group member we talked to knew how to survive through crime and what was necessary to become a criminal avtoritet, they could not formulate any specific plans of how they could leave the streets and join the mainstream. Seventeen-year-old Georgii’s criminal career included car theft and burglary, sometimes commissioned by older criminals; before joining a Moscow street gang he had been on the run for a year after injuring his opponent in a fight in his hometown in the Urals. He informed us that he “wanted to live normally, settle somewhere and have a job, but did not know where to begin.” However, he was fully aware of how to go about the criminal business, where to meet members of the criminal community, how to behave if you were incarcerated so that you would not be disrespected, and so on.

Investing in Future Social Memberships Looking at the practices of gang members, it is clear that the behaviors that are seemingly mere adaptations to street life, or “pathological” responses to their current displacement, are actually oriented toward securing membership in the criminal community. Because violence is central to Russian gang culture, this is certainly true for much of their violent behavior. Gang members fight with neformali and darkies or mug passersby on the streets (particularly drunks, who are considered fair game). As in other violent communities, street youth violence can be seen as a strategy to obtain respect and assert one’s masculinity (Bourgois 1995) and a way to achieve “sensual involvement” by laying terrifying claims to domination of urban territory (Katz 1988:139). Yet interviews and focus groups with gang members documented that for young people violence is not just for thrills or for honor in the group. It is regarded as an means to build a career in criminal society; through acts of instrumental violence they gain status in the group and build reputations, which could later help them be accepted into the structures of organized crime.

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If I wanted to join a gang, I would go to a leader and say that I want to become a member, he would first test me. For example . . . they would catch a darkie and watch how I would beat him up, with what degree of anger, and if I am fully consumed by anger, then they will accept me, give me a second name [a nickname that will be his new identification]. And I become a normal person, it becomes possible to trust me with anything—they will entrust me with doing [criminal] jobs, stealing what the group wants me to steal, mobile phones, for example, or burgle a flat.” (Georgii)

Just as violence is instrumental in securing further prospects in the “alternative” society, criminal acts can be a means of building a career. Dmitrii, twenty-eight, made the transition from youth street gang to organized criminal group through such acts: dmitrii: You cannot just hang about [on the streets]. You need to do something, commit a crime, to build your capital, because I will start talking to you and I will understand what you can or cannot do. ss: Are these any criminal acts? dmitrii: Of course not. If you rape an old lady, you would not build your reputation. You need, for example, to steal a car. It is also important what size of job you have done. If you steal a million dollars, people would applaud, this shows you have brains. ss: How do adult criminals get to know about the children’s achievements? dmitrii: There are places where people meet. Politicians meet in clubs or saunas to talk, these guys [criminals] meet in bars or restaurants. They have to attract attention of older boys, they do something and people will see—these are “correct” lads, they are only fourteen, but they live the right way. And further on such a lad will get a hand up, he will do a job with the older guys, will show himself, and so he grows up, becomes an avtoritet, buys himself a Mercedes. If he is not killed or put to prison in the meantime, he’s done well.

In addition to establishing their mettle through violence and crime, the young men must prove that they are reliable and trustworthy, that they respect the criminal authorities and are willing to support their brothers in need. They must demonstrate that they are not bespredelshiki—“lawless people” who have no respect for rules or norms. Valera, a sixteen-year-old Russian from Moldova, earned his living through a combination of theft, small jobs in the market, and his own prostitution business (supplying street girls and even older homeless women to clients he met at train stations and on the streets of Moscow). He told us that he regularly sent money and cigarettes to the inmates in the zona, although he himself had never been to prison. He does this not because he was forced to pay through some kind of racket but to provide for his own future. valera: People there are suffering, and it is necessary to help them. All the vagrants who steal, the next generation, they all pay, they all give. Some buy three kilos of tea, three blocks of cigarettes and send them to the zona. ss: If you end up in the zona, will you get help? valera: Of course.

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ss: From those people who were helped by you? valera: No, from others. It arrives from me, and if I come there, my name will be known.

Consequently, the need to establish a name is very important. Individual reputations have a vital place in this social system, which is organized in such a way that, despite the vast territory of Russia, everyone has a name (a recognized nickname) that can be checked out, if necessary, even if he is many thousands of kilometers away from his normal habitat. Dmitrii, the previously mentioned member of an adult criminal group, explains how a name is acquired: Let us say you are a young man. You do not have a name. You are nobody. You are just a brave guy. Say you carry a gun with you. But you are nothing, and your name is zero. . . . One of the rules of the criminal world is that you do not eat in your own face, you steal, this is normal, this is your work, but you do not forget about your nearest and dearest. And here are your comrades in the crime business, and you remember those who were unlucky, and you give them attention. This is a known expression, and if you say this— “Who do you give attention to?”—you will find people looking at you with interest. And as a rule, in order to get a reputation, they collect money and send it to a member of the criminal community [in prison]. If there is a business meeting [of criminals] where people will divide the zones of their interests, people would ask them, “Who are you, what do you do?” And they will say, “We are helping Vassili the Cripple. Do you know him?” “Yes, we do.” So they are helping a small or big avtoritet. And if Vassili is contacted in the zona, he will say: “Yes, these are normal lads, they are not bespredelschiki, they know the rules.” Children are often greedy, right? And these ones are not greedy, they have been taught by their older comrades. So they create an advertising campaign for themselves, to get a name.

Many of the practices of these adolescents can be interpreted as building social capital, in the sense used by Bourdieu, a system of social relationships, networks, connections, obligations, and identities that provide support and access to resources (Bourdieu 1984, 1986, 1993). Here we are dealing with specific criminal capital, developed by street children in order to become members of the criminal community.

PPP Our research demonstrates that Moscow’s street children are not simply an aggregate of alienated social atoms drifting around in a homogeneously hostile environment but are resourceful social agents. Transplanted beyond the spaces of homes, family, and local community, they try, although at a high price, to find alternative homes and memberships. Further research is needed to see whether street youths’ socialization in the prison culture leads to an actual embeddedness in the structures of organized crime or whether they stay in the world of petty criminality or eventually leave the streets, start families, and go into mainstream employment. For many of our interviewees, idealization of the

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criminal brotherhood coexisted with an awareness of the hardships and risks of criminal enterprise, and while in focus groups they seemed upbeat about their future in the mafia structures; in the in-depth interviews they fantasized about finding a proper job and returning to the “world of people” (as one put it). When asked where they thought they would be in five years, only five out of twenty-five interviewees—members of street violent groups—said that they would probably be in criminal gangs, three expected to be in prison, two thought they would become homeless tramps, and 1 thought he would be dead. On the more optimistic side, four hoped to have mainstream jobs, and two hoped to go to college. The rest had no idea what to expect. Even those young people who aspired to become members of organized crime understood that their lack of a stable place of residence presented a serious difficulty for any future career. Although members of the criminal community do give occasional jobs and assignments to street youth, they would not necessarily engage in continuous relationships with them for much the same reasons as mainstream employers. Whatever re-placement strategies the kids follow, the lack of a physical home remains the key obstacle to their integration into any system of relationships. As seventeen-year-old Igor told us, “They [the criminals] live at home, and what are we? Generally speaking, what are we? Nobodies.” The struggles of displaced young people to get reinserted into stable systems of relations often are completely misunderstood by Russian officialdom. Our recent survey of youth policies and the views of public administrators and educators in Moscow revealed that the problem of street youth is not generally seen in relation to young people’s reaction to a lack of prospects and opportunities, poverty, or social exclusion. “Containment” strategies are hardly sufficient to prevent dislocation if its deeper structural causes—and the complex cultural practices of young people that emerge in response to it—are not addressed. Such flawed policies stem, it seems, from a lack of understanding and appreciation of the enormous social consequences of large-scale transformation, which manifest themselves, among other places, in youth dislocation. One can find significant similarities between the situation in Russia and the processes happening in the West in the course of globalization. There is a visible expansion of street-level economic activity and growth of the new urban poor, resulting from the transformation of welfare states and changes in global labor markets (Dean and Gale 1999; Esping-Andersen 1996). Manuel Castells (1998) refers to the increasing structural irrelevance of people and places in the global informational age. The old core–periphery distinctions are breaking down. As Castells (1998:164–165) argues, a new “fourth world” is emerging, not only in the impoverished areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia but “also present in literally every country, and every city, in this new geography of social exclusion.” There are new forces at work, which are marginalizing sections of the population and coming to bear on a diversity of poor minorities and vulnerable groups. With the growing transparency of national borders it may be that—in a deviation from Marx’s prediction—not the proletariat but the lumpenproletariat of the world will unite. Self-organization of marginal people on the streets of the world cities and their inclusion in larger criminal and noncriminal networks is a phenomenon that may progressively transcend nation-states. It is therefore even more important to look more

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deeply at the social behavior of displaced populations in all countries and to challenge the common view that below a certain status line people become asocial. On the contrary, our evidence suggests that displacement leads to a search for new homes, new affiliations, but not necessarily of the kind that the mainstream society and political classes would recognize. Notes 1. On street children in the 1920s–1940s see Stole 1988; Goldman 1993. 2. In the Russian context, the notion of “street children” is used to refer to two groups of adolescents: beznadzornie—children who spend time on the streets without adult control and supervision, and besprizornie—homeless children. Our research project concentrated on a particular, rather narrowly defined, group of street children. These are children who have to make their living in the streets and who have no guaranteed access to housing. They do not necessarily live permanently on the streets, and in many cases they have homes from which they ran away and / or have relatives who they may periodically visit, or may stay in temporary accommodations provided by their employers or friends. But their access to accommodation is risky and the street is the main context of their lives. They are separated from other street children by one important factor: they must find their own means of survival. This deprives them of their “childhood” status, as they are not “looked after” by adults bound by their obligations as carers. Thus in this respect these street children have become more or less equal players with other members of “street society” in the informal markets that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet organized economy.

References Abramkin, V. 2001, Nov. 14. Posle T’urmi Strashno Viiti na Ulitsu. Izvestia. Aptekar, L. 1988. Street Children of Cali. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bauman, Z. 1998. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Oxford: Polity. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge. ——. 1986. The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 241–258. New York: Greenwood. ——. 1993. Sociology in Question. London: Sage. ——. 1999. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Cambridge: Polity. Bourgois, P. 1995. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castells, M. 1998. End of Millennium. Oxford: Blackwell. Dakhin, V. 1998. Politicheskie Aspekti Transformatsii Sotsialnoi Spheri v Rossii. In T. Zaslavskaya, ed., Kuda Idet Rossiya? Transformatsia Sotsial’noi Sferi i Sotsial’naya Politika, 196–199. Moscow: Izdatelstvo Delo. Dean, H. and K. Gale. 1999. Begging and the contradictions of citizenship. In H. Dean, ed., Begging Questions: Street-Level Economic Activity and Social Policy Failure, 13–26. Bristol: The Policy Press. Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Efimova, E. 2004. Sovremennaia T’urma. Bit, Traditsii i Folklor. Moscow: O.G.I.

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Svetlana Stephenson Ennew, J. 1994. Parentless friends: A cross-cultural examination of networks among street children and street youth. In F. Nestman and K. Hurrelman, eds., Social Networks and Social Support in Childhood and Adolescence, 409–428. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Esping-Andersen, G. 1996. Welfare States in Transition: National Adaptations in Global Economies. London: Sage. Goldman, W. Z. 1993. Women, the State and the Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1933. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hagan, J. and B. McCarthy. 1997. Mean Streets. Youth Crime and Homelessness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hayward, K. J. 2004. City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience. London: Glasshouse. Heidegger, M. 1962. On Time and Being. New York: Harper & Row. Hobsbawm, E. J. 1994. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. London: Michael Joseph. ILO / IPEC. 2000. In-Depth Analysis of the Situation of Working Street Children in Saint Petersburg. St. Petersburg: ILO / IPEC. Katz, J. 1988. Seduction of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books. Lucchini, R. 1993. Enfant de la Rue: Identité, Sociabilité, Drogue. Paris: Droz. ——. 1996. Sociologie de la Survie: L’enfant dans la Rue. Paris: PUF. McLoyd, V. C. 1989. Socialization and development in a changing economy: The effects of paternal job and income loss on children. American Psychologist, 44: 577–602. OECD. 2001. The Social Crisis in the Russian Federation. Paris: OECD. Olenik, A. N. 2003. Organized Crime, Prison and the Post-Soviet Society. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Patterson, G. 1980. Children who steal. In T. Hirshi and M. Gottfredson, eds., Understanding Crime: Current Theory and Research, 73–90. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Pilkington, H. 1994. Russia’s Youth and Its Culture. London: Routledge. Rapport, N. and A. Dawson, eds. 1998. Migrants of Identity. Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg. Relph, E. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Sack, R. 1997. Homo Geographicus. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Salagaev, A., A. Shashkin, I. Sherbakova, and E. Touriyanskiy. 2005. Contemporary Russian gangs: History, membership, and crime involvement. In S. Decker and F. M. Weerman, eds., European Street Gangs and Troublesome Youth Groups, 169–192. New York: Altamira. Stolee, M. K. 1988. Homeless children in the USSR, 1917–1957. Soviet Studies, 40(1): 64–83. Swart, J. 1990. Malunde: Street Children of Hillbrow. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Szelenyi, I. 1996. Cities after socialism—and after. In G. Andrusz, M. Harloe, and I. Szlenyi, eds., Cities After Socialism. Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-socialist Societies, 286–317. Oxford: Blackwell. Tuan, Y.-F. 1999. A view of geography. Geographical Review, 81(1): 99–107. Tyler, F. B., S. L. Tyler, A. Tommasello, and M. R. Connoly. 1992. Huckleberry Finn and street youth everywhere: An approach to primary prevention. In E. G. Albee, L. A. Bond, and T. V. Cook, eds., Improving Children’s Lives: Global Perspectives on Primary Prevention of Psychopathology, Vol. 14, 200–212. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Volkov, V. 2002. Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Part 3. Gangs and Street Cultures in the Globalized City

James Diego Vigil

6. Social Control and Street Gangs in Los Angeles

The study of gangs in Los Angeles must consider how social control has broken down and why troubled youth in low-income, ethnic minority neighborhoods come to join and participate in the destructive, unconventional activities that mark gang life (Klein 1995; Moore 1978, 1991; Vigil 1988a, 2002). Social control theory offers some important middle-ground insights in how this occurs and points the way toward grounded public policy strategies that address the sources of gang life. An examination of Chicano gang members in various barrios in the greater Los Angeles area will document how family, schooling, and law enforcement institutions, among other social control influences, either increase or decrease one’s propensity to join or avoid gangs; examples from other ethnic groups will also be noted when appropriate (Huff 1996). Toward this end, a social control explanation is contextualized within a larger, macro framework showing how major forces work to undermine or thwart social control factors. In short, a social control explanation is embedded in a macro framework (Barnard 2000:17). In previous work I have used a macrostructural and macrohistorical framework called multiple marginality (Vigil 2002; Vigil and Yun 2002). To broaden and deepen the picture of why and how there are social control breakdowns, many other factors must be considered, such as ecological, socioeconomic, sociocultural, and sociopsychological, particularly in light of the maladaptation to cities that low-income ethnic minority groups experience. They all intersect strongly with one another. To understand any of them, it is necessary to understand all of them. As noted, the breakdown of social control unfolds in the throes of these larger forces, and an examination of it must take this relationship into account. Based on what I have witnessed and researched, I have concluded that the street gang is an outcome of marginalization, that is, the relegation of certain people or groups to the fringes of society, where social and economic conditions result in powerlessness. This process occurs on multiple levels as a product of pressures and forces in play over a long period of time. Some of the gang members I have known have come

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from such stressed and unstable circumstances that one wonders how they have survived. The phrase multiple marginality reflects these complexities and their persistence over time. Macrohistorical and macrostructural forces—those that occur at the broader levels of society—lead to economic insecurity and lack of opportunity, fragmented institutions of social control, poverty, and psychological and emotional barriers among large segments of the ethnic minority communities in Los Angeles. These are communities, such as the Chicanos and other ethnic groups dealt with in this chapter, whose members face inadequate living conditions, stressful personal and family changes, and racism and cultural repression in schools (Moreno 1999). Most members of these communities successfully cope with adverse circumstances to lead productive, conventional ways of life. The fact that only 10–20 percent of youth in such communities join gangs attests to how the most marginalized of them are victims. A multiple marginality framework lends itself to a holistic analysis of social control that examines links within the various factors and the actions and interactions between them and notes the cumulative buildup leading to family stress and disruption, schooling discontinuities, and frictional interaction with law enforcement. Because the latter institutional influences are weak or nonexistent, street socialization materializes in their absence, and gang values and norms begin to guide street youth. Social control theory is useful because it is based on a simple premise: Conformity, not deviance, is the behavior to explain. Freud (1923) recognized long ago that humans are driven by instinctual drives and are born essentially unsocialized. Integral to human development, following this logic, humans are socialized to conform to the rules and regulations of whatever society they are raised in. If there is anything I am certain of it is that gang members are largely unsocialized to the majority society. Anthropologists have used the concept of enculturation to explain part of this process in hundreds, if not thousands, of societies throughout the world. As one of the earliest applications of this conformity notion, Hirschi’s (1969) theory of social control is the most popular. However, there have been many revised versions of this perspective (Covey et al. 1992; Goffredson and Hirschi 1990; Vigil 2002). Social control interpretations maintain that conformity is achieved through socialization (or enculturation), which is defined as the bonds shared between an individual and other entities in the society in which that individual lives. In a modified version of Hirschi’s social control theory (Vigil 2002), I hold that there are four major bonds within society that facilitate conformity: connections, engagement, involvement, and belief. It is a weakening of these societal bonds that allows for gang delinquency. A person’s connections, or social bonds, with significant others ordinarily begin with the family and gradually extend to others outside kinship networks (Copeland and White 1991). Parents serve as role models and teach their children socially acceptable behavior, so the family environment is the primary source of such bonds. However, I have noted in my studies that gang members lack even that basic environment. The breakdown of family life and schooling routines is a major outcome of multiple marginalization. This can result in a generally untethered existence for a youth, which leads to more time spent on the streets. Less home socialization equals more opportunities

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for socialization elsewhere, namely the streets under the aegis of a multiple-aged peer group, primarily the gang. This is all that many street-raised youth have. The second stage of socialization is engagement, an expression of well-defined goals and the striving for higher status. The manifest intention of our schools is to reinforce constructive goals and aspirations inculcated initially in the family. Low-income children often exhibit a gap between aspirations and expectations, believing that what they might wish for is beyond their means of attainment. Engagement corresponds to the aspiration of going to college, attaining a high-status job, and adhering to the values (ought-tos) and norms (blueprints for actions) of society. Such an investment in conventional behavior provides another societal bond, the third facet of socialization. Involvement is related to the youth’s participation in conventional, dominant majority activities that lead toward socially valued success and status objectives. The quality of a youth’s activities and their relationship to future goals and objectives plays a crucial role in the prevention of delinquency (Vigil 1993b). Lacking involvement in conventional activities, youths spend an inordinate amount of time on the streets with their peers. Some of their experiences and activities there are actually quite benign; others are clearly dangerous and antisocial. Contacts and interactions with the police, sometimes leading to incarceration, begin to play a role in their lives. Over time, seemingly petty activity can lead to gang involvement that is more dangerous, especially if police and detention facilities early on are unable to deter street youths. For example, staying up past curfew to continue playing in the streets, running in front of automobiles to bring drivers to a screeching halt, and shoplifting penny candies from the local store are seemingly innocuous activities that might set the tone for more serious, deadly infractions. When the development of connections, engagements, and involvement is stunted, youths have weakened ties to the conventional values of society. Clearly, without the fourth facet of belief, this sequence ends with little or no adherence to the dominant belief system or even any real understanding of the ideology that drives it. Belief is acceptance of the moral validity of the central sociovalue system. Beliefs are inculcated primarily by parents, followed by schools and, especially during the passage from childhood to adulthood, by peers. It is law enforcement and the criminal justice apparatus that serve as the arbiters of last resort for people who consistently fail to conform; they have become the street social control specialists. Social control theorists underscore that there is generally one dominant set of values in a society (e.g., one ought to respect older adults and show it by deferring to them or value punctuality by being on time) and that although delinquents may recognize the validity of those values, they may not feel bound to them because of weakened ties (e.g., seldom respecting older adults and not being concerned with punctuality) to the dominant social order. This argument is based on the premise that the less rule bound people feel, the more likely they are to skirt or break the rules. I have taken the position that gang members are not so much defiant of the rules as unexposed and unsocialized to the rules. Therefore their antisocial behavior stems more from omission than commission (Vigil 1999, 2004). Although it is clear that breakdowns of social control create and perpetuate street gangs throughout Los Angeles, we need to know specifically how these disruptions

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occurred and how Chicanos and other groups experienced the pattern. That is why the historical background is essential to my work. It is equally important to unravel the degree to which families and individuals varied in their responses and outcomes. In short, we must collect and examine evidence on social control issues in such key areas as family life, schools, and law enforcement and then analyze it in a wider historical context, both group and personal. Society and the criminal justice system have not fashioned adequate responses to curtail the emergence and proliferation of gangs. Families, schools, and law enforcement merit special scrutiny in this regard for two main reasons. First, they are the primary agents of social control in society. Second, they are uniquely adaptive and responsive to the concerns of society. Although each of these institutions has made its separate contribution to the gang problem, it is their joint actions (or inactions) that make the problem worse. It is in the vacuum of their collective failure that street socialization has taken over and rooted the quasi-institution of the street gang. Multiple forces working jointly lead to children spending more time on the streets, under the purview and guidance of a multiple-aged peer group. In various Los Angeles ethnic communities, this group often takes the form of the street gang. It is a variable process, however, in that the rate and depth of street socialization determine the type of gang (Klein 1995) and gang member (Vigil 1988a), some being more violent and longer lasting and others merely a passing fancy. For girls as well as boys, the street becomes a haven and gang life is romanticized, even though it often ultimately brings them trouble and, for girls, additional victimization. What established gangs in the neighborhood have to offer is nurture, protection, friendship, emotional support, and other ministrations for unattended, unchaperoned resident youth. In other words, street socialization fills the voids left by inadequate parenting and schooling, especially inadequate familial care and supervision. This street-based process molds the youth to conform to the ways of the street. On the streets, the person acquires the models and means for new norms, values, and attitudes. The ought-tos (values) and blueprints for action (norms) often substitute for the voids left by conventional social control institutions. Many times I have heard the words, “These guys are like a family and take care of me.” What follows is a broad descriptive analysis and interpretation of ethnographic evidence gathered over twenty years in various Chicano barrios in urban, suburban, and rural settings in the greater Los Angeles area (Vigil 1988a, 1996a, 1996b, 2002, 2003a, 2003b). I have specifically examined male adolescents and youth but also include females where possible (Moore et al. 1995; Vigil 1987). Most of my informants have been gang members or have a street identity and allegiance. Augmenting my earlier fieldwork, I draw also from more recent observations and interviews conducted at four high schools in Los Angeles; two of these schools I have been following for more than thirty years. I am a Chicano researcher forged by the 1960s, and I have charted a path of investigations focusing on Chicano community issues and problems. I taught high school in the mid-1960s and worked closely with street gang members during the War on Poverty; integral to that involvement, I also joined and actively participated in the Chicano movement.¹ I began back then with an examination of macrohistorical issues

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(Vigil 1988a), educational problems (Vigil 1999), and, in particular, the gang phenomenon that plagues Chicano youth in Los Angeles (Vigil 1988b) and other ethnic groups (2002) and also, later, in southern Mexico (Rus and Vigil 2007). I began college-level teaching in Chicano studies in 1968 (I taught all the Chicano studies classes at Chaffey Community College from 1971 through 1981 and remain a staunch supporter of Chicano studies) and used various methodological strategies over the decades to address persistent social problems in the Chicano community. Moreover, my research has an applied component. Specifically, what I’m doing is not just basic research to understand the world but is structured with a pragmatic orientation toward changing policies to alleviate or resolve social problems, thus generating new approaches that transform public policy. Sam Rios (1978) is more emphatic on this objective and suggests that action anthropology is the most appropriate strategy. In this perspective, my gang research aims to serve the community by reviewing the literature on a social issue to determine knowledge gaps and voids that need to be addressed and using that information to change existing institutional responses. Occasionally in this analysis I refer to other ethnic groups to underscore a point about the social control developments that reflect gang life and gang members. In addition, there is tremendous variation between families who have children in gangs, as there is between gangs and members within gangs; when necessary these variations are mentioned to elaborate upon a point.

Connections Family stress and disorganization caused by economic disruption have served as a primary strain on home conditions in the Mexican American population in Los Angeles. Macrostructural forces including economic restructuring and job segregation have led to a narrowing of opportunity in the job market for both the immigrant parents and the Mexican American youth. Low wages caused by worker exploitation and a scarcity of resources often necessitate that both parents seek full-time employment in order to meet financial obligations. As a result, conventional influences in the home are disrupted because both parents often are absent and are thus unable to serve as role models to teach their children socially acceptable behavior; in large part, there is a tremendous disconnect in such households. A common form of family stress is noted in the cases of mother-centered welfare households, and absent-father households often are cited by gang members as a problem source. Death, divorce, and precarious marriages also contribute to the ruptures in family organization and continuity. For example, a father’s death might simply bring to a climax a long history of problematic family tensions; in the absence of a father, a seventeen-year-old male from Pomona looked elsewhere for love and support, which he found in the gang. Another fifteen-year-old peripheral gang member from Ontario had a whole life change: I was taken out of Catholic school. . . . My father and I were very close, and when he died, he was the only one I looked up to. We had to move to another place. When I went

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to school, some guys came up to me and asked where I was from. I said, “Nowhere,” and they said, “Forget about it, you’re from here now.”

More commonly, father absence is initiated by divorce. In such cases, especially, there is also a pattern of conflict leading up to that breakup. Generally, however, there is a radical turn for the worse thereafter, as in this case of a veterano (veteran) from South Fontana who was twenty-seven years old when he told the following story: Mom and Dad fought constantly, it was like hand-to-hand combat practically every Thursday and weekends. So Mom and Dad ended their marriage of nineteen years. It was mainly due to Dad’s nasty habits. She tried her best to make it with the rest of us [eleven children] but lost the battle.

Less common are instances of father-centered households, the causes of which include death, divorce, or abandonment. One seventeen-year-old former gang member from Chino stated that he and his six siblings had to fend for themselves when the mother died. He even “adopted a neighbor family” when he was thirteen years old, about the same time he started hanging around with the local youths on the street. Overall, the children lacked regular supervision and guidance and spent many hours outside the home. Even families that remain intact, of course, are not immune to sometimes severe stresses. Bickering parents, an off-and-on marriage, or a precarious father– mother relationship characterize their lives. Sometimes, neither parent is a particularly positive role model where unconventional habits prevail. Recently, with large-scale and continuous immigration from Mexico, there has been another source of family disruption stemming from citizenship status. For instance, one fifteeen-year-old from Cuatro Flats in east Los Angeles was left with a maternal aunt when his parents returned to Mexico to tend to their property and remained there for more than a year. The young teenager’s street socialization deepened as he became a more involved and committed gang member. Another sixteen-year-old male from the same barrio had a mother in the United States and a father in Mexico. Although he had become firmly attached to his father during childhood and wanted to visit him in Mexico, his mother forbade such visits for fear that he would not be able to return. Generally, severe stresses and strains from altered family situations tend to characterize regular and peripheral gang members, those who are more deeply and consistently involved in street life.² Most notably, a father’s absence in the mother-centered homes left little chance for bonds between the child and a positive male role model to materialize, so it is not surprising that regular gang members tended to come from this type of family. In an early study, of thirteen participants from mother-centered homes, nine were regularly involved in gang activities (Vigil 1988a). A more recent investigation in a public housing development supported this tendency, as a comparison of gang and nongang families showed that gang families were more likely to be female headed (Vigil 1996a). However, care in overstating this interpretation is advised because the latter study also found single mothers who ran a tight ship and were able to steer their children in conventional directions; there is wide variation in outcomes in female-headed single-parent households (McLanahan and Sandefur 1994). I became acquainted with

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a single mother in my public housing investigation (1996a) who steadily nurtured and guided her children throughout the day, involving them in different activities. She even choreographed having the father show up after school to greet the kids to publicly demonstrate to onlookers that they had a father. (He would obediently leave after he had done his duty.) In contrast, temporary and situational gang members were more likely to be found in traditional households with more intact families following conventional connection routines. Of sixteen participants in the early study (Vigil 1988a) who listed parents with earned incomes (and mostly skilled incomes), twelve were from traditional households where the father was the wage earner and the mother a homemaker, and most were temporary or situational members. Interestingly, the public housing data (Vigil 1996a) differed in this regard because they were gathered in a concentrated poor area, high in crime and drugs, with a gang tradition of more than fifty years. In this barrio, you were either in or out of the gang, with very little shading of temporary or situational gang involvement; also, plenty of non–gang members followed similar gang practices and habits in dress, petty crime, and drug and alcohol use and abuse. Interestingly, older barrios such as this one sometimes experienced the emergence of other youth subcultures. For example, in the 1980s a Stoners clique appeared, with kids dressing like hippies and sporting longer hair, pedaling Stingray bicycles, and playing video games. They eventually phased out, however, and folded into the younger set of gang members. In the 1990s taggers (dedicated to spreading their personal graffiti as far and wide as possible) were in vogue. There was a younger cohort then, and the local priest called them the pandilla mogruesos (snot-nosed preteens). Both of these groups ran the streets, and both matriculated into the gangs, gang attire, and demeanor predominant in their mid-teens. Children commonly react to family tensions with feelings of rejection or inadequacy, leading them to seek support elsewhere. Furthermore, the domestic climates of instability often dissipate parental energies in ways that undermine supervision of offspring, thus weakening connections and the home socialization experience. A consequence of the loosening of family control engendered by tension and stress is that youths spend an inordinate amount of time outside the home with street peers, creating primary bonds that reflect deviant and unconventional roles. These peers thus became major agents of socialization, filling the void that the absent or inattentive parents have left. This shift to secondary connections often places the peer (gang) group in the role of a surrogate family, substituting for the broken or disorganized family. Thus, the gang is a source of attraction that provides many family-type functions. This “spontaneous” street social unit reflects a group of youths whose lives are neglected. Parents and other family members, whose physical and psychological childrearing shortcomings fail to make an early connection bond, force many marginalized youth to seek an alternative bonding source. The street gang arises as a source of familial compensation where all else fails. Clearly, the group represents a ready source of nurturance and acceptance and helps to provide a sense of structure to the youth who has been raised under disconnected familial circumstances. In short, there appears to be a close association between family stress and disruption and the tendency of some youth to seek another family source, the street gang, thus completing a shift from

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primary to secondary connections. A seventeen-year-old male from Pomona recounts what happened to him in third grade: They didn’t sound like eight-year-olds; they talked older, like someone about fifteen or sixteen. Then one guy pulled out a box of cigarettes and asked me if I wanted one. I said that I didn’t know how to smoke, and the guys that were there just laughed at me when I said that. They said they would show me how.

Such a statement underscores the notion that the youth group serves as a surrogate family for those raised in disrupted homes. However, unlike the parental bond, which serves as socialization for conventional behavior, these multiple-aged street role models often exhibit deviant and delinquent behavior, which is then passed on to other youth through street socialization. In sum, the examination of connection bonds and the street socialization process demonstrates several things in the lives of gang members. For a number of reasons, family and home life has become destabilized, especially for the most marginalized segments of the population (Vigil 1996a). With such voids at home and the absence of consistent parenting and supervision, youngsters find their way out into the streets, the alleyways, rooftops, empty lots, and street corners. What start off as play groups, sometimes too mischievous and adventurous but rather innocuous, end up as a local street gang subculture, with its own rules and regulations. The multiple-aged peer groups, a street population bereft of conventional socialization influences from home, school, and law enforcement, evolve into a quasi-institution of a gang subculture where older males help guide and induct the novitiates into street gang ways. I have often noted how much the younger gang members look up to the veteranos (or original gangsters [O.G.s]) and demonstrate this admiration by mimicking the dress and demeanor of a seemingly cool but hard-looking tough guy. This street gang subculture is not a marked departure from the play group activities of the earlier years but is part of a life cycle that adds more dangerous and destructive practices to what came before. Generally, youth grow and develop by becoming familiar and competent over time with the people and places that surround them. Attitudes and behaviors are formed by the values and norms of significant others in the contexts of time and place. If these contexts change and are different from what is conventionally expected, then the socialization experience will also differ. For example, middle-class children’s play groups could involve indoor video games that promote the socialization of aggression through “reels.” In contrast, in low-income neighborhoods where crowded home conditions prevail, much of the play group socialization occurs outside the home, sometimes far from the front door and often streets away, where the socialization of aggression “is for reals.” Thus, the gang mixes normal cohorting behavior with the more deviant activities, and, in fact, most of the gang member’s time is spent in the former realm. Because primary connections are inadequately established and conventional home socialization processes falter, secondary connections at an early age dominate the street socialization of many youth. This protracted exposure and experience leads to gang involvement. Speaking of these bonds and ties, gang members consider each other family. It is not

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so much that these youth are attracted (through cultural reference theory) to peers who are delinquent but rather that their primary socialization is forged under street auspices.

Engagement Engagement in conventional activities is an expression of well-defined goals (Wiatrowski et al. 1981). Participation in gang activities precludes such aspirations. For gang members, future goals are not well defined, nor are they conventional. Given the marginalization of their lives and the failure of their families to raise them carefully, the educational experience of gang members is abysmal. College and higher status through conventional means are not even on their radar screen.³ Because ethnic minorities have historically encountered insensitive (or outright racist) policies and personnel in the public school system, minority children, especially the most marginalized segments of the population, often leave school at an early age and commit themselves to the gang’s values and norms. Their alienation from conventional values, reinforced by ongoing street socialization, intensifies the discrimination that minority group members so often face. These problems with societal engagement engendered by family and school difficulties are exacerbated by the generally poor job prospects for minority youth. In this historical and cultural context, much research has carefully documented the many barriers and problems faced by Chicano children in American schools, such as segregation from Anglos, language and cultural exclusion, academic tracking, high dropout rates, unequal school financing, and a number of other obstacles (SuarezOrozco and Suarez-Orozco 1995; Valencia 1991). All of this, as I have noted elsewhere (Vigil 1999), affects their access, exposure, and identity to Anglo American dominant conventions. Thus many of the gang informants’ school careers began with skepticism, limited parental encouragement, and early exposure to street experiences that did little to promote self-discipline and engagement in academics as a means of attaining higher status. Tuning out precedes dropping out, and many gang informants left school (or were expelled) as early as ninth grade—or rather they were “turned off.” One of the most serious problems is that schools have neglected (or avoided) addressing the street socialization that leads to gang membership. This neglect is reflected in school policies toward students who are gang members or who simply dress and carry themselves in the street style of the day. To complement the formal policy of dropping out (Rumberger 1991), through this informal practice gang members are “pushed” (e.g., suspended) or “kicked” (e.g., expelled) out in ways that appear neutral rather than targeted at particular youths. One principal even told me that she and her staff try to turn gang members away from school. One way of ridding schools of marginal students, especially gang members, is to send them to special institutions such as alternative or continuation schools (Raywid 1995). Continuation schools vary across districts and cities, but one common ingredient is the massing together of students with emotional, behavioral, and learning problems. The

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critical mass of such students is overwhelming for even the best-intentioned staff. Some former gang members I have talked with referred to their local continuation school as a pre-pinta (pre-prison) preparatory experience (Vigil 1989); another researcher called them “soft jails” (Munoz 2001; Raywid 1995). Recently, I heard from a Los Angeles school official that a boys’ school in east Los Angeles (Jackson High School) was converted to an elementary school, and during the renovations and repairs a jail cell, steel bars and all, was found in the cellar. Apparently the school principal acted as a warden when one of the students needed to “cool off.” The street socialization process is thus strongly influenced by the youth’s curtailed engagement in the school system and other conventional steps, such as employment, toward a successful future (Flores-Gonzalez 2002). Underclass status often affects what is learned in schools and on the streets. On average, street associations and interactions with gang members start between the ages of seven and nine years (Vigil 1988a, 1993a, 1999); this is especially the case for youth raised in neighborhoods where persistent and concentrated poverty reigns, such as public housing developments (Venkatesh 2000; Vigil 1996a). In addition to this lack of adequate family and school influences, a majority of gang members said that a brother, uncle, or other older male role model had stepped in and become influential in their early exposure to street life; thus a pattern of unconventional or deviant socialization through alternative connections often materializes. An older member, twenty-four, recounts this story growing up in Chino, in a gang that is deeply rooted as far back as the 1940s: “At the age of eight I started smoking weed with my uncle. He showed me how to smoke it. I like the feeling of being loaded. It was a different feeling than everyday life.” In most instances, this early socialization pattern is a modification of the Mexican palomilla (literally, a covey of doves, signifying a cohort of youth) tradition representing “simple, congenial, and unstable associations of friends . . . who interact with considerable frequency” (Rubel 1966:94). However, the more stressful ecological and structural conditions of the barrio streets have revamped this cultural practice; other early ethnic groups’ gang traditions reflect a similar pattern, such as the Italians in big cities. As a general backdrop for identity formulation and personal emulation, street socialization sometimes involves participating in delinquent behavior such as vandalism and petty shoplifting. More serious habits, such as the use of weapons or drugs, are even rarer at these early ages. Much of the socialization thus is normal “kids learning from kids” during play, except that some of the mischief borders on dangerous adventures. For many of these youths, the early associations provide a sense of friendship and mutual trust that later proves useful in gang circles, especially in backing up one another in case of trouble. One veterano (gang veteran) from La Colonia (the colony) in south central Los Angeles reminisced about the early years with his camaradas (comrades, gang associates) and how they played around in empty fields, alleyways, and rooftops. Bonding early in play groups, they spent an inordinate amount of time away from their homes. Sometimes, he said, they traveled miles away from home and visited downtown Los Angeles and tried to sneak into the movie houses. Later, on the way home, they stole candies from stores and got home very late.

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Such stories have been repeated and underscored so often by various gang members that one cannot fail to note the slight smile on their faces as they recount bonding events that last forever, not to mention the tremendous danger that early on helped them become resourceful. It is especially true that events and incidents that occur when gang members are young make for a trust and dependence leading to extremely tight social connections in later years. Such secondary bonds typically are expressed in kinship terms, as this sixteen-year-old from El Hoyo Marvilla affirmed in an interview, stating that his friends were primos (cousins) when they were not related by blood. Camaradas, homeboys, and, among black gang members, Cuz, all reflect this need to apply a kinlike name to street significant others. It is hard to explain, but when I ran the streets as a youth and, later, worked with gangs during the War on Poverty, I felt, as gang members themselves say, as if someone was always watching my back. Reflecting back now, it is an eerie feeling to know that something considered negative and destructive, the street gang, could provide such a sense of security and protection. In addressing the social and cultural strains of a low-income life and how this condition contributes to the formation of a subculture, Merton (1949) has underscored the way in which American society encourages the population to aspire to certain goals but maintains social class inequalities and consequent differences in means of attainment. This goals-means discrepancy model has been enlarged upon by Cloward and Ohlin (1960); and Moore (1978) has applied the construct to research involving Chicanos in east Los Angeles. Alienated youth whose education and occupational prospects preclude them from what Cohen calls “the respectable status system” undergo many personal identity problems. How can such youth become engaged in a social system if they realize that some things are out of reach? Under these conditions the disjuncture between future goals and the means to achieve them serves as a catalyst for delinquency as “the delinquent subculture deals with these problems (of attaining a status identity) by providing criteria of status which these children can meet” (Cohen 1955:121). For example, one sixteen-year-old gang member from east Los Angeles aspired to be a police officer, but when questioned knew he could never do so. In such cases social status within the gang takes another form and is dictated by the demands and habits of the street. This notion is different from Ogbu’s (1978) idea of voluntary and involuntary minorities, as blacks were involuntarily forced into the United States (i.e., slavery) and Chicanos, once here, typically underwent additional strains in cities in the modern period. Instead, status is sought and attained through other channels. For example, doing time often is considered a badge of honor and prestige among younger gang members. Even contacts with police add an air of importance to a youth’s image, heightening one’s reputation and respect among fellow gang members. Seeking peer affirmation, a twenty-year-old from Chino said, “I thought I was going to the joint once. I wanted to go, I wanted to make it. I thought all my friends would look up to me. They did. Pretty soon they started talking better to me.” In this case, engagement as an expression of a desire for higher status is not related to college or conventional success. It is an alteration of a gang member’s definition of success, one that is deviant and unconventional and adds to the disequilibrium of their

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lives. The veteranos have all done some type of jail time, some many years, which hardens their demeanor, a front that young gang members strain to emulate.

Involvement As noted earlier, gang members’ backgrounds show limited conventional activities. Moreover, the quality of these activities is undermined by factors outside their control, such as an inadequate material life, crowded conditions at home, insensitive schools, lack of recreational facilities, and unconventional street values. One common problem in the home situation of gang members is crowded conditions; for instance, the average size of the family was 8.5 for a sample in 1988 (Vigil 1988) and for gang families in a housing project in 1995 it was 6.0, compared with an average of 2.9 for Los Angeles County (Vigil 1996a). One male, twenty, who was a temporary gang member from Chino, belonged to a mother-centered family with four other brothers, and he said that in a two-bedroom house, “Three of us slept in one bedroom, and sometimes I moved out to the living room. We had a set of bunk beds, and sometimes one of us slept on the floor.” When visiting and interviewing gang members I often noticed that the session took place in the enclosed back porch, a converted garage, or, in one instance, an old Chevy van, with the front seats serving as the living room. Similar accounts of crowded conditions and a scarcity of resources were expressed by a twenty-seven-year-old male veterano from South Fontana, who grew up in a mother-centered family of thirteen children. Most of their income was from welfare: Our mother tried her best to make it with all of us but lost the battle. . . . Gavachos [Anglo-Americans] used to kind of make me feel bad ’cause they came to school with nice clothes. They always had plenty to eat for lunch, or they had money to buy their hot lunch. There would be times my brothers and sisters had nothing for lunch. The only time we ate hot lunches was when we worked in the school cafeteria. Boy, it was an honor to work a whole week in the school cafeteria.

Such basic poverty conditions affect welfare families in such a way as to force children to participate in child labor. Older gang members recall times when they had to join their families in the migrant stream, up and down California, picking tomatoes, citrus, or grapes. Crowding forces youth to escape the home to seek private space in public arenas (e.g., parks, alleyways, rooftops, and deserted houses), and child labor causes them to later strive to make up the lost time of childhood, even if it means early street socialization. Involvement in the form of participation in conventional activities that lead to socially valued success and status objectives is nearly impossible for these adolescents. Their marginal backgrounds preclude such traditional activities. Instead, they pursue the types of activities that provide practical solutions to everyday living concerns. In other words, these children are unable to become involved in schooling and homework (in anticipation of long-term rewards) because their backgrounds require that they expend their

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efforts on short-term rewards, including money and goods that they acquire by any means possible, be they conventional or unconventional. Youths living under such circumstances often resort to petty crime. A sheriff sergeant once relayed to me a telling story in this regard. As the officer worked the special gang detail, he became quite familiar with some of the gang members. At a hamburger stand, two of his gang acquaintances approached him and asked, “Buy us a hamburger, we’re tired of stealing.” Another subcultural factor that hampers the Mexican gang youth’s ability to become involved in conventional status-seeking activities is difficulty in acculturating to the American school system (Valencia 2002). Involvement in the academic realm is a major agent of social control in American society, yet persistent discriminatory practices toward Mexican American youth in the school system reinforce ethnic identification and alienate the youth from both academic institutions and society at large. Many gang participants describe their school experiences in terms of the insensitive treatment at the hands of teachers and administrators and overt racial antagonism from nonChicano peers. One eighteen-year-old informant from Pomona explains, I did poorly in school because I couldn’t speak English. We used to segregate ourselves at school, because that’s what everybody did. It was expected. I never went outside the barrio except to go to school. This didn’t make me conscious of the injustice, because I took it as the order of things.

Informants from the 1960s and 1970s civil rights era were more apt to actively protest discrimination, as in the case of a young woman who instigated and helped organize a walkout in junior high school: “We had about half the students on the front lawn with a sign saying ‘pay attention to us, we’re people too!’ We were asking the staff to say they were sorry for calling us names. Before long, the vice principal . . . with tears in his eyes, apologized. We were all admitted back to classes.” (The 1968 walkouts in Los Angeles were the first massive demonstration, but repression set in soon after, and only a few of the reforms demanded by the students remained.) Academic achievement and school behavior usually begin on a discordant note and steadily decline. Several informants mentioned problems as early as kindergarten, citing language as the source. Others spoke simply of a general malaise toward school. Discrimination against them subsequently reinforced their difficulties. School problems usually increase with time, which youths often respond to by tuning out, frequent ditching, and eventually dropping out. Most of the informants of this study left school soon after reaching the age of sixteen, before which attendance is mandatory under California law. Engagement in the form of well-defined future goals and aspirations of going to college is highly improbable under such circumstances, and the quality of the youth’s academic activities and their relationship to future goals and objectives steadily declines, thus a crucial agent of social control as a preventer of delinquency is negated. Extracurricular activities (nonacademic) that may relate to future goals are largely unavailable to these youths because of economic restructuring and the narrowing of economic opportunity. Primary agents of social control including family and school often are ineffective among these youth. In large, stress-filled families, for example, primary social control

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networks tend to loosen. As a result, an unsupervised child spends more time outside the home with street peers. The street peers, some slightly older and a few in their early teens (often including older siblings) become major agents of socialization. Concomitantly, school behavior and performance also tend to suffer when parental guidance is lacking. School problems and the influence of street-based peer groups reinforce one another in a youth’s increasingly marginal development. There are numerous examples of how street socialization eventually leads to gang initiation (Vigil 1996b). One eighteen-year-old male from Venice mixed conventional and street activities, such as playing Little League baseball and other sports during the day and at night joining his night friends to run around in the streets and look into what trouble they could get into. Even at the early age of ten he was taking drugs, secobarbital (downers), and acting loco (crazy) with the older guys to show that he could take it. He was just thirteen years old when the older guys “jumped” (gang initiation) him in. He said he acted older than his age, and the older guys liked him because he would do anything. The veteranos made him like a kind of gang mascot. By the time he was sixteen he had been arrested for grand theft auto and spent time in a youth authority. Sometimes, associations begin at school and then expand after school. A male, eighteen, from Little Valley told this story about an event in third grade: When I showed up to school the first day these older-talking guys came up to me and asked if I wanted a cigarette, and I said no. But they made me smoke with them anyway. When I starting coughing, they just laughed. But they liked me because I would do what they wanted.

Soon he was dressing like them and began to spend even more time hanging around even though he lived a little farther away from the gang’s barrio. Close relatives who are or have been in gangs cannot resist telling war stories, and right by their sides are the entranced story listeners. Uncles teaching nephews, big brothers bragging to little brothers, and cousins showing cousins the ropes are common gang stories. This is a clear and interesting example of tutors and tutees, older relatives charting the way for the younger brood, and learning taking place without the benefit of the street backdrop. One eighteen year old from Chino became a very active gang banger and alcohol and drug user, but another non-gang-member uncle talked him into joining the Army, a move that helped stabilize him. Many youths cite older brothers as models for early street socialization. A male, eighteen, from White Fence, “naturally followed” in his brother’s footsteps and became a gang member, although he avoided becoming a tecato (heroin addict); one of the things I’ve noticed is that younger gang members don’t march lockstep with their relatives and often chart a variation of the gang path, sometimes avoiding serious problems. Another male, twenty, from Placentia recalls wishing (as early as age eight) to be “tough and grown up” like his brother. Successful in this pursuit, he also abused drugs and gang banged and ended up in a juvenile incarceration facility. A seventeen-year-old from Pacoima had several role model sources, and what he didn’t learn from his cousins and older brothers directly on the streets he emulated from the stories he heard about

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his father, a former gang member. Both parents attempted to redirect the path that had been set for him from such modeling, but it was too late. Moving to another neighborhood and placing him in another school, they thought, would break the street socialization path he was on; their earlier inattentiveness and failure to monitor his behavior proved too much to overcome. Also, they moved only a few miles away from the barrio in a low-income tract home area, a reflection of how low income determines where you will live. Deep into street gang life and gang banging, he eventually was involved in a gang shooting, and the victim died. Older males in the neighborhood also serve as observed examples in street ways. How to dress, stand, talk, and show a measured command of the scene and situation is something that several gang members mentioned in their accounts. “I wanted to look cool, like him,” “He always looked like he knew what he was doing,” and “His khakis were always ironed and straight,” were observations that increased a young person’s desire to grow up like that. War stories, real and imagined, and how gang members perceived their early role models made them want to measure up. A contributing factor to a dependence on street peers for social support is the lack of other community outlets for recreation and social events. In fact, teenaged ennui is reflected in these accounts (e.g., “There wasn’t much to do” or “I was out of school and out of work”). Such statements underscore the importance of engagement and involvement (with regard to school and work) as major agents of social control and the prevention of delinquent behavior (Esbensen 2000). By “stealing time” away for the youths, these activities would reduce the time that is otherwise spent on the streets.

Belief The acceptance of the “rightness” of the central social value system is pivotal to social control and citizenship. People obviously are more likely to break the rules if they do not believe in the rules and regulations. Phrased another way, are street youth really resisting, countering, and rejecting a value system that they have never experienced? Some researchers assert that the defiant, acting-out attitudes and behaviors displayed by gang members at school, for instance, are motivated by a conscious resistance to authority (Giroux 1983). Other researchers, including me, suggest that such matters as particular socialization routines outside the purview of family and schools must be considered. Resistance to a dominant culture is not the same for one who is a part of that culture as it is for youth socialized to an alternative culture, in this case that of the street or gang. Multiple marginality forces have compelled gang members in the direction away from prosocial auspices and influences. Social order depends on the personal internalization of the values of society (the ought-tos) and of the patterned behavior that adheres to the norms of society (the blueprints for action). The latter are inculcated primarily by parents, followed by schools, and reinforced early on by peers, especially during the passage from childhood to adulthood. As we shall see shortly, this enculturation (i.e., learning one’s culture) experience is nonexistent among gang members, and the acculturation (i.e., learning the dominant culture) process is problematic.

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Youths who are weakly (or not at all) tethered to home and school have weakened ties to society’s conventional institutions and values. Because of these loose strands, members of law enforcement—the street social control specialists—often step in as the controlling authority of last resort for our youth. Law enforcement and the criminal justice apparatus serve as the sanctioning source for people who consistently fail to conform. When they enter the picture, it is clear that society not only has failed to properly integrate its low-income members but also is making it easier for them to become street socialized. A general assessment of gang subculture values and norms that emanate from street socialization is in order to show how a different belief system prevails. There are personal and group motivations and qualities to the inculcation of these patterns. First, personal voids and gaps in the life of a person almost compel them to join a street gang as they seek protection, emotional support and attention, and friendship from fellow gang members. Second, these needs are valued and met by, respectively, such norms as watching a fellow gang member’s back, sharing resources like a family, and establishing comarada (comrade) relationships. Third, a gang member returns the favor by demonstrating cora (heart, stalwart) behavior, keeping his palabra (word), proving allegiance and loyalty (claiming “turf ”), and deferring to and respecting gang elders (i.e., veteranos or O.G.s). Finally, integral to these symbiotic relationships and exchanges is how new gang members mimic the experienced ones in the signs, symbols, and sounds of the gang (i.e., the dress, talk, walk, music, cars, tattoos, and graffiti). The violence and mayhem more generally associated with the gang also are part of the picture as group psychology shapes an antisocial mindset, a locura (crazy-like) state of mind for different occasions, and a borrowed, inherited dislike of gang rivals and enemies. All of this adds up to an entirely different belief system, mostly removed from that of the dominant culture.

PPP Society through its social control institutions always seeks to ensure that people behave in acceptable ways and defines the proper sanctions to take when they don’t. As anthropologists have long noted, social control is an important function of all cultures. However, social control theory is best used as a construct within a wider framework. Social control explanations by themselves help us understand the dynamics of family life, schooling issues, and law enforcement problems, but the forces that undermine and shape these dynamics are largely lost in such a constrained rendition. A multiple marginality construct thus emphasizes the much broader and deeper dynamics stemming from macrohistorical and macrostructural influences (see also Bronfenbrenner 1979). In short, the breakdowns in families, the stresses and strains of raising children in poverty situations and conditions, and the schooling difficulties and police– community relations go back a long time and have deep roots. The bondings necessary to connect, engage, involve, and ground a belief system of a society are missing if social control is absent. In this void it is difficult to aid and shape conformity to a dominant society that heretofore has shown little interest in assisting and smoothing the integration of large numbers of marginalized children.

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Street socialization has taken over, and conformity to new street gang rules and regulations has emerged. The street gang subculture is rife with values and norms that almost predictably encourage nonconformity and thus an antisocial lifestyle. Laying out how family ruptures, substandard schooling policies and learning deficits, and friction with law enforcement are related to the rise and persistence of street gangs is a first step toward developing new policy approaches. For a variety of reasons, our solution to the gang problem and the youth who join gangs has simply been suppression and a markedly uneven application of law enforcement. Everything about a youth’s early life is ignored, tossed aside as insignificant and outside the purview of meaningful solutions to the problem. Little consideration is given to the macrohistorical experiences and macrostructural backgrounds that trigger and set in motion the social control disruptions. Although some government and political leaders of late have begun to reconsider the importance of strategies that begin earlier in the lives of youth from gang-infested areas, the allocation of resources and level of investment in prevention and intervention pale in comparison to those earmarked for suppression efforts. What is needed today to address gang problems (and other social problems as well) is a balance of prevention, intervention, and law enforcement, the carrots and sticks that enable parents to help their children conform. Failing to realize that the present criminal justice apparatus is a form of welfare, criminal justice welfare, the public forgets that hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year to warehouse hundreds of thousands of largely poor, ethnic minority peoples. Sadly, the usual approach to youth crime continues despite studies that show that the tactics of early intervention and prevention cost far less, yield greater benefits, and far surpass in savings those of the current strategy. Notes 1. My brother, Mangas Coloradas (aka Richard Vigil), was one of the L.A. Thirteen arrested after the 1968 walkouts, and I was one of the Biltmore Fourteen arrested in 1969 during a Governor Ronald Reagan speech at an L.A. conference titled Nuevas Vistas; I knew all of the Brown Berets before they became Brown Berets, when we all used to meet at the Piranya Coffeehouse. It was there that I steeled my resolve to fight and write for social justice. 2. Most gang typologies separate gang members into hardcore and fringe categories, but I have attempted to show more temporal and behavioral variation by noting how time spent, with whom, and where, among other situations and conditions, distinguish regular, peripheral, temporary, and situational gang members (Vigil 1988a:99, chapter 4); regular and peripheral can be lumped into hardcore, and temporary and situational can be lumped into fringe. 3. Such lower aspirations do not appear to be the case in New York and other places. New York gangs differ from Los Angeles gangs in other ways as well, such as the degree and depth of gang violence (see Brotherton and Barrios 2004).

References Barnard, A. 2000. History and Theory in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bronfenbrenner, U. 1979. The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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James Diego Vigil Brotherton, D. C. and L. Barrios. 2004. The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York Street Gang. New York: Columbia University Press. Cloward, R. A. and L. E. Ohlin. 1960. Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs. New York: Free Press. Cohen, A. 1955. Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Copeland, A. P. and K. M. White. 1991. Studying Families. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Covey, H., C. S. Menard, and R. J. Franzese. 1992. Juvenile Gangs. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Esbensen, F.-A. 2000. Preventing Adolescent Gang Involvement. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Flores-Gonzalez, N. 2002. School Kids / Street Kids: Identity Development in Latino Students. New York: Teachers College Press. Freud, S. 1923. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. New York: W.W. Norton. Giroux, H. 1983. Theories of reproduction and resistance in the new sociology of education: A critical analysis. Harvard Educational Review, 53(3): 257–293. Goffredson, M. and T. Hirschi. 1990. A General Theory of Crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hirschi, T. 1969. Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Huff, C. R., ed. 1996. Gangs in America, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage. Klein, M. W. 1995. The American Street Gang: Its Nature, Prevalence, and Control. New York: Oxford University Press. McLanahan, S. and G. Sandefur. 1994. Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merton, R. K. 1949. Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Moore, J. W. 1978. Homeboys. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ——. 1991. Going Down to the Barrio. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ——, J. D. Vigil, and J. Levy. 1995. Huisas of the street: Chicana gang members. Latino Studies, 6(1): 27–48. Moreno, J. D., ed. 1999. The Elusive Quest for Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Review, Harvard University Press. Munoz, J. 2001. Re-examining the margins of public education: New models of analysis of alternative education for at-risk students. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Ogbu, J. 1978. Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-Cultural Perspective. New York: Academic Press. Raywid, M. A. 1995. Alternatives and marginal students. In M. C. Wang and M. C. Reynolds, eds., Making a Difference for Students at Risk, 119–155. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Rios, S. 1978. Action anthropology. In S. F. Arvizu, ed., Chicano Perspectives on De-Colonizing Anthropology, 35–48. Berkeley, CA: Quinto Sol. Rubel, A. J. 1966. Across the Tracks: Mexican Americans in a Texas City. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rumberger, R. W. 1991. Chicano dropouts: A review of research and policy issues. In R. R. Valencia, ed., Chicano School Failure and Success: Research and Policy Agendas for the 1990s, 64–89. London: Falmer. Rus, J. and J. D. Vigil. 2007. Regional social and economic changes, urbanization, and the emergence of street children in Chiapas, Mexico: The case of San Cristobal de las Casas. In J. Hagedorn, ed., Gangs in the Global City, 152–184. Champaign–Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Social Control and Street Gangs in Los Angeles Suarez-Orozco, C. and M. Suarez-Orozco. 1995. Migration: Generational discontinuities and the making of Latino identities. In L. Romanuci-Ross and G. De Vos, eds., Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict, and Accommodation, 321–348. London: Altamira. Valencia, R. R., ed. 1991. Chicano School Failure and Success: Research and Policy Agendas for the 1990s. London: Falmer. ——. 2002. Chicano School Failure and Success: Past, Present and Future, 2nd ed. London: Falmer. Venkatesh, S. A. 2000. American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vigil, J. D. 1987. The nexus of class, culture, and gender in the education of Mexican American females. In T. McKenna and F. I. Martinez, eds., The Broken Web: The Education of Hispanic Women, 79–103. Claremont, CA: Claremont College Tomas Rivera Center for Policy Studies. ——. 1988a. Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California. Austin: University of Texas Press. ——. 1988b. Group processes and street identity: Adolescent Chicano gang members. Ethos, 16(4): 421–445. ——. 1989. An Emerging Barrio Underclass: Irregular Lifestyles Among Former Chicano Gang Members. New Directions for Latino Public Policy Research: A Project of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research and the Social Science Research Council, Public Policy Research on Contemporary Hispanic Issues. Austin: University of Texas. ——. 1993a. The established gang. In S. Cummings and D. Monti, eds., Gangs: The Origins and Impact of Contemporary Youth Gangs in the United States, 95–112. New York: State University of New York Press. ——. 1993b. Ways to redirect street youth. In S. B. Heath and M. W. McLaughlin, eds., Identity and Inner-City Youth: Beyond Ethnicity and Gender, 94–119. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University. ——. 1996a. Gangs: Families in a Public Housing Project. report to Department of Health and Human Services based on 1992–1995 investigation. Grant 90-CL-1105. Washington, DC: Department of Health and Human Services. ——. 1996b. Street baptism: Chicano gang initiation. Human Organization, 55: 149–153. ——. 1999. Streets and schools: How educators can help Chicano marginalized gang youth. Harvard Educational Review, 69(3): 270–288. ——. 2002. A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures in the Mega-City. Austin: University of Texas Press. ——. 2003a. Personas Mexicanas: Chicano High Schoolers in a Changing Los Angeles. Belmont, CA: Thomson. ——. 2003b. Urban violence and street gangs. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32: 1–51. ——. 2004. Gangs and group membership: Implications for schooling. In M. Gibson, P. Gandara, and J. Koyama, eds., Peers, Schools, and the Educational Achievement of U.S.–Mexican Youth, 87–106. New York: Columbia Teachers College Press. —— and S. C. Yun. 2002. Cross-cultural framework to understand gangs: Multiple marginality and Los Angeles. In R. Huff, ed., Gangs in America, 3rd ed., 161–174. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Wiatrowski, M. D., D. B. Griswold, and M. K. Roberts. 1981. Social control theory and delinquency. American Sociological Review, 46: 525–541.

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7. Youth Subcultures, Resistance, and the Street Organization in Late Modern New York

In the last two decades, a number of researchers and theorists have described the hypermasculine, violent gang subcultures that have become common in U.S. ghettoes and barrios as a response to the multiple, intersecting forces of economic, social, and cultural marginalization inflicted on minority communities during a period of deindustrialization (Anderson 1999; Bourgois 1995; Hagedorn 1988; Moore 1991; Vigil 1988; Wilson 1987; Young 1999). Of course, although there are sharp disagreements as to who or what is responsible for these structured pathologies (see Wacquant 2002), with a vibrant debate around notions of the underclass, the historical consequences of U.S. racism, and the complicity of the academy in neoliberal hegemony, most scholars agree that the urban youth street gang is the quintessential example of social reproduction at work. Much evidence can be mustered to defend such a position, but it is equally important to consider the possibility that street gangs in late modernity can also constitute counterhegemonic forms and moments of both individual and collective resistance organized deep within the poorest subaltern communities. In this chapter, based on ethnographic street research carried out in New York City in the late 1990s among the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation (ALKQN), I compare the psychosocial resistance exhibited by many of the group’s members with the skepticism and cynicism that pervade much of the gang literature and show how certain characteristics and properties of this resistance can be understood through critical treatments of the notions of “recovery,” literacy, and societal reentry. These resistance practices illustrate the extent to which youth groups such as the ALKQN differ substantially not only from the widely held neoconservative notions of the gang as pathological deviants but also from more liberal conceptions of the gang as an oppositional culture that are frequently cited in otherwise radical treatments of the phenomenon (cf. Moore 1991; Vigil 1988). Moreover, once we begin to recognize the existence of such resistances we can link them to a growing literature in the politics of contestation outside criminology, for example in the social movement studies of

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Touraine (1988), the South Asian anthropological peasant studies of Scott (1977, 1992), or the “from-below” historical analyses of the U.S. black working class by Kelley (1994). On the other hand, if we limit ourselves to narrow and often syndromatic versions of youth deviance, we obscure and sometimes completely misread the motives, styles, imaginations, and organizations of oppressed peoples as they make the everyday.

Critical Ethnographic Research Among a Street Organization In 1996–2000 an ethnographic study was carried out by the author and a team of field researchers (see Brotherton and Barrios 2004) into lifeworlds of the ALKQN.¹ Among the data collected were sixty-seven life history interviews (thirty-nine males and twenty-eight females). This research was carried out in the traditions of critical ethnography (Conquergood 1992; Ferrell 1997; Thomas 1993), approaching the subjects as multidimensional, rational, imaginative, hedonistic, purposive, and contradictory. Thus, all subjects were assumed to be Struggling for cultural meanings within both clear and opaque, unequal social, economic, and cultural power relations Historically situated and capable of history making Part of a broader self-organized, nonpathological community Capable of practices that could socially reproduce oppression but could also lend themselves to cultures of resistance Possessors and makers of multiple forms of local and subjugated knowledge Creators of and participants in a complex and variegated underground aesthetic The interviews covered multiple areas. The relationship between the researchers and the researched was carefully and reflexively cultivated, ensuring that the principles of anonymity, commitment, trust, openness, and mutual respect were both monitored and consistently adhered to. The researchers also explained that their approach to the production of knowledge was not for selfish, careerist, and individualistic goals but to contribute to a deeper understanding of the processes of domination and empowerment. In addition, the researchers gave assurances that they would strive for a nonpathological representation of the groups, thereby resisting any tendency toward ethnographic “othering,” the portrayal of subjects as exotic, stereotypical, subhuman, or primitive (see Conquergood 1997; Di Leonardo 1998).

Pathology, Social Reproduction, and Resistance Under the gang bill, a sentence of at least 10 years would be required for an act of violence; at least 20 years for serious assaults; and at least 30 years for kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse or maiming. The bill would demand life imprisonment or the death penalty for any crime resulting in death, and would also impose adult penalties

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on some juvenile gang members. . . . The prospects for the measure in the Senate are uncertain, but opponents concede that as an anti-gang bill nicknamed “gangbusters” it is likely to pass in some form. Supporters of the bill say it is needed to fight violence by networks of young criminals that stretch across state and national borders. The Justice Department estimates that there are 750,000 gang members in the United States. Immigration authorities recently arrested more than 100 members of an especially violent Latin American street gang that was started in Los Angeles, MS-13. “They have a board of directors outside the prisons,” Mr. Forbes said, “and a board of directors inside the prisons.” (Kirkpatrick 2005:A13)

Reports such as this one are common in the country’s media and show the extent to which the street gang has been normalized as an ill-defined urban “other” (see Brotherton and Barrios 2004). Any notion of rehabilitating such groups, of reintegrating their members back into the mainstream have been completely abandoned in favor of a simplistic war against an internal enemy that is often equated with urban terrorists (see Brotherton 2004). As Hedges (2003) explains, the culture of war that dominates the United States and other less powerful nation-states is built on media myths and scholastic fallacies that produce a binary imagination, a world outlook that reduces complex societal problems to a struggle between good and evil, straight and deviant, and healthy and pathological. It is precisely this zeitgeist that reigns supreme in much of the discourse that passes for criminal justice policy, especially in relation to urban youth and more specifically to street gangs. Although little humanistic or creative thinking can be expected of Justice Department apparatchiks or poll-sensitive congresspeople who cannot afford to dilute their “tough on crime” images, the same cannot be said of academics, whose job it is to uncover the complex, to shed light on the overlooked, and to point to alternative vistas for the nation’s socially and culturally undernourished. Yet it appears that a pathological notion of the street gang is also a dominant concept in much current writing on the subject, dressed up in the more liberal terminology of social reproduction. Contradictorily, therefore, the street culture of resistance is predicated on the destruction of its participants and the community harboring them. In other words, although street culture emerges out of a personal search for dignity and a rejection of racism and subjugation, it ultimately becomes an active agent in personal degradation and community ruin. (Bourgois 1995:9)

Bourgois’s assertion is a classic rendition of the social reproduction paradigm in which elements of the lower class are presumed to make a rod for their own backs as they expressively and symbolically resist the values, norms, and ideologies of the dominant class and race culture. This perspective, also theoretically and empirically contained in the studies of Willis (1977), Fordham (1996), and Ogbu (1978), among others, was particularly prevalent in debates on the nature and trajectory of the “underclass” that raged in the early 1990s (see Di Leonardo 1998; Reed 1992; Wacquant 1997). Understandably, this discussion had an important impact on the way youth resistance among inner-city gangs was interpreted and eventually conceived.

Youth Subcultures, Resistance, and Street Organization

“Are street youth really resisting, countering, and rejecting a value system that they have never experienced?” asks Vigil (see chapter 6, this volume). In a shift away from Cohen’s (1955) classic formulation that delinquent gangs emerge out of the conflict between the middle-class value system underpinning public schools and the lifeworlds of their mainly lower-class charges, the contemporary view of gangs is that they emerge from a class so socioeconomically isolated that their members have little or no contact with mainstream institutions across generations. In this reading, the gang fills the mainstream’s institutional vacuum, establishing a set of norms, values, rites, and rituals to create a subproletarian form of street socialization (heavily dominated by males) with consequences not unlike those of the reproductionist imaginary offered by Bourgois.²

Resistance, Subcultures, and the Street Organization Based on the assumption that gang members live within a bounded social ecology, complete with its bleak socioeconomic landscapes and pathological cultural contexts, the notion of youth resistance has predictably limited currency. This position is summed up by Moore (1991:43) when she concludes, “Defiance and resistance are, in effect, an energetic spinning of the wheels: but not revolutionary.” But what do we make of the underclass gang that is not so hermetically sealed off from the rest of society, as Young (1999) theorizes?³ And, more important for this study, what emerges when the street gang is not homogeneously underclass but a mix of proletarian and subproletarian elements with an ideology aimed at dismantling the barriers to its own isolation? With such questions consistently emerging from and eventually guiding our ethnographic work, the significance of expanding the notion of gang resistance can be appreciated. Such considerations have prompted us to develop an alternative definition of youth subcultural street behavior, which we have called a street organization: A group formed largely by youth and adults of a marginalized social class which aims to provide its members with a resistant identity, an opportunity to be individually and collectively empowered, a voice to speak back to and challenge the dominant culture, a refuge from the stresses and strains of barrio or ghetto life and a spiritual enclave within which its own sacred rituals can be generated and practiced. (Brotherton and Barrios 2004:23)

They have also prompted us to reconsider the range of youth subcultural models typically used in U.S. and British studies (table 7.1). From table 7.1 we see that the street organizational model not only is in striking contrast to most U.S. mainstream gang paradigms but also differs significantly from the more radical perspectives of the Birmingham school in Britain (see Hall and Jefferson 1975; Hebdige 1979). However, the philosophical and methodological differences between the street organizational approach and that of orthodox criminology are concerned primarily with three areas: the role of history, the acceptance of positivism, and the conception of agency, whereas the contrast with the Birmingham School is centered mainly on the notion of agency.

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David C. Brotherton TA B L E 7.1 Comparative Approaches to Youth Subcultures STREET ORGANIZATIONAL MODEL

SOURCE

U.S. MODEL

BRITISH MODEL

Class values

Lower class, proletarian, and subproletarian

Specific to the working-class and middle-class history of the subculture

Working-class and subproletarian strongly infused with specific racial and ethnic experiences

Relationship to mainstream or dominant class structure

Adaptive or rejectionist

Subversive and magically oppositional but never transformative

Subversive, partly adaptive, partly oppositional, intentionally transformative

Observable deviance from the prototypical mainstream

Mainly delinquent, involving group organized fighting, crime, drugs, and other antisocial behaviors

Heavily aesthetic and stylistic, some drug use, some fighting

Stylistic, political and ideological, members recruited from both working and subworking classes

Historical contingency (i.e., does the analysis take pains to dialectically and historically situate the phenomena)

Mostly transhistorical, but there are exceptions, such as the work of Hagedorn (the black underclass) and Moore and Vigil (the Latino underclass)

Rooted in specific historical conditions

Highly historical, shaped by discrete resistances from below and social control processes from above

Representational forms

Socially organized, displays of turf allegiance, some later attention to attire and body and verbal language

Wide range of symbolism involving music, attire, and language

Wide range of symbolism involving music, graffiti, physical and verbal language, attire, and written texts

Source: Adapted from Brotherton and Barrios ().

Orthodox Criminology and the Street Organizational Model Orthodox gang treatments rarely involve an analysis of the subjects situated in any historical context. To this extent, gang members typically are seen as transhistorical, as if the processes they make possible can occur without some recognition of the epoch in which such groups emerge and develop or any grounded reference to the reproducing social structures in which these social actors are embedded. Even in the best of the orthodox gang treatments, such as Thrasher (1927), there is no mention of capitalist social relations or of the roots of the global pushes and pulls that were creating the

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cultural conflicts that gangs were supposedly reflecting. In contrast, I argue that all gang subjects both make and are made by historical forces (using a fairly traditional Marxist concept of materialism) and that it is essential to locate our studies in such a historical and political economic framework to understand more fully the contexts of action, the meaning webs of culture, and the contradictions of institutional settings (e.g. schools, prison). My second problem with orthodox criminological approaches is their reverence for the methods of positivism. Rarely are the wide-ranging and longstanding epistemological debates on the ideological nature of social scientific truth claims, the asymmetrical relationships between the observer and the observed, or the politics of grant-financed research allowed to enter into the discourse. With few exceptions, gang criminology languishes in a time warp, incorporating the worst traditions of empiricism without a shred of reflexivity or critical engagement. Against this status quo, I advocate a multitiered research project drawing on a plurality of traditions from the naturalist Chicago school of Thrasher to the neo-Marxist critiques of the Birmingham School to the radical reflexivity of the cultural criminologists (Ferrell 1997; Lyng 1990; Young 1999). Adopting such an approach does not mean throwing out rational positivism per se but does require a more critical and discerning appropriation of it, starting with the understanding that “social facts” are cultural texts and have to be seen in relation to the political economy of thought, action, and emotions. My third primary critique relates to agency. In most orthodox accounts of gangs there is little that deviates from both liberal and conservative versions of social reproduction, as stated earlier. However, it is clear from my research that gang members can be as conscious of their actions and their structural contexts as any other social actor. Furthermore, their individual and group praxes can be extremely contentious, subverting hegemonic norms in a variety of overt and covert ways from intergenerational underground manifestoes and subaltern spiritual rituals to spoken counternarratives and nonverbal interactional performances.

The Birmingham School and the Street Organizational Approach Although it is true that the Birmingham School celebrates the notion of subcultural agency through style, its adherents failed to attribute anything transformative to such behavior. Part of the problem with this interpretation for U.S. subcultures is that much of the explanation for subcultural development is located in the tensions between adults and youth and that many subcultures express the contradictory need to rebel against parental cultures while maintaining many of the class traditions parents themselves embody (see Cohen 1972; Willis 1977). Thus, Hall et al. (1975) state that the subcultural, though stylistically oppositional, should not be mistaken for the countercultural, which is more consciously political, ideological, and organized. And again, as Hebdige (1979:138) argues, “I have tried to avoid the temptation to portray subculture (as some writers influenced by Marcuse were once prone to do) as the repository of ‘Truth,’ to locate in its forms some obscure, revolutionary potential.” In contrast, I argue for a much greater appreciation of transformative agency within the street organizational model based on three major considerations. First, the

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subcultural in late modernity has become more autonomous (although not as much as that advocated by Alexander and Smith [2004]), and social movements are rapidly emerging in a range of local and transnational guises (see Castells 1997) as youth, in particular, rebel against the global corporatization of culture, time, space, production, and social relations. A hallmark of this period, therefore, is the widespread emergence of “spaces of hope” developed by youth and oppressed peoples out of traditional social interactions but also, of course, through the extraordinary proliferation of new information sources. Such movements are fueled by an eclectic mix of ideologies and contestational positions, from humanist socialism and communism to anarchism, liberation theology, and situationism. In the following quote from the excellent compilation “We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism” (Notes from Nowhere 2003), we read of the anonymous authors’ Port Huron–like statement on their resistance motives: Resisting together, our hope is reignited: hope because we have the power to reclaim memory from those who would impose oblivion, hope because we are more powerful than they can possibly imagine, hope because history is ours when we make it with our own hands.” (Notes from Nowhere 2003:76)

The second consideration, which is particularly important in the U.S. context, is that many contemporary youth subcultures come out of the hybridization of street and prison cultures, especially in this period of mass incarceration for people of color and the poor. Consequently, the structuration of these groups, in terms of their organizational, ideological, and representational practices, can be much more revolutionary than the “playful” acts of the street, reflecting the exponential growth in interlocking regimes of punishment, torture, and social control that are now common in the nation’s incarcerated and civil societies (see Christie 1994; Parenti 1999). The third consideration, which again is of primary importance in understanding street subcultures in the United States, relates to a previous point I made with regard to the intergenerational exclusion of certain communities. I argue that although such long-term processes of structured exclusion produce the spaces for street socialization (as Vigil and others cogently argue), such socialization does not have to be accommodationist or social reproductionist. Rather, under certain conditions a more politically resistant and socially transformative street subculture can take root, complete with its own trenchant critiques of power relations, alternative “transcripts” (Scott 1992), and models of self-organization that ensure a continuous flow of street and prison rebels, resisters, and radicals.

Three Moments of Resistance in the ALKQN By now, the reader should be aware that gangs and street organizations do not have to be viewed as the natural milieu for street socialization and its corollary of rejection, marginalization, and even self-destruction. Nor do such subcultures need to be seen

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purely through the lens of style, however magical, innovative, and syncretic the properties of such subcultures are taken to be. Rather the practices of the street organization (and here I am particularly referring to the ALKQN, but there are other variants in New York, such as the Ñetas, Zulu Nation, and La Familia) can be understood through a range of transformative resistance practices that intersect, combine, and reinforce each other. In this section I briefly analyze and describe three of them: recovery, renaming, and reintegration. Such resistances can be interpreted as the psychological, cognitive, and social properties of a subculture.

Recovery The process by which people over the life course cope with physical, social, and psychological problems associated with alcohol and drug abuse and various forms of trauma is dealt with most widely in three literatures: public health, clinical psychology, and therapeutic counseling. For the most part, this literature has described recovery in relation to alcohol and drug abuse twelve-step programs and refers to the recovery of the true self, a self that has been lost or corrupted by some form of affliction. Rapping (1996) argues convincingly that the popularity of the recovery movement in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s reflects the problems facing men due to changes in the workplace (i.e., postindustrialization) that undermined their occupational statuses and traditional familial roles, leading them to drink heavily and act out; and the post-1960s backlash against feminism (Faludi 1992) and the New Left after such movements had succeeded in questioning the status quo but failed to complete many of their agendas. For Rapping, the recovery movement shows both the successes of feminism, as women demonstrated that they were no longer prepared to mask their oppression and suffer their pain in private, and the continuation of many of these oppressive relationships, which are being responded to collectively (i.e., through support groups) but solved individualistically (i.e., through astructural, subjectivist diagnoses and solutions such as the disease model of psychosocial trauma). Thus Rapping (1996:75) asks, “Why are we hurting so much? Why are we turning to drugs and other forms of self-destruction to function? Why are we in need of so many powerful crutches to get through a day of life in America?” and then goes on to posit, “If we can further ‘come to believe’ that our compulsive attraction to food, shopping or abusive males is rooted in diseases and allergies, which can be sometimes partly controlled by a spiritual, confessional group process . . . we are on the road to a massive system of social control—from church basements to prison yards.” Consequently, the recovery movement is an extremely contradictory social and psychological response to our unmet needs in late capitalism and the ongoing perversions to our true selves that result. This explains to some extent why the concept of recovery, a seemingly innocuous term, has been handily applied to the broader experience of personal trauma often rooted in socially embedded stresses that now include catastrophic natural or life events, assault and rape, loss of a significant person, abusive relationships, prisoner-of-war experiences, occupational trauma from military or police work, violent crime, and exposure to violence.

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In the following instances drawn from the life histories of ALKQN members we see graphically the range of trauma that was experienced by at least 50 percent of the sixty-seven subjects: i: Tell me about your parents. king a: My father drinks a lot, right . . . and he liked to beat up my mother, there always used to be a fight and then, before the fight was over he used to pick on me, pick on one of my sisters. He liked to beat the shit out of us and things like that. . . . Even a dog, when you buy a dog if you give that dog love that dog will give you love too. And that’s . . . part of the cause why my life is so fucked up. . . . Because whipping was everything and it’s not all about whipping. You gotta talk, take a toy away from the kid, things like that. You beat me up and . . . sooner or later, I’ll start hating you. i: What kind of relationship do you have with your father? king p: I don’t have a relationship with him. We can get along for one day, the second day I wanna put a knife to his throat. It’s that serious. i: What does he do that gets to you? king p: I used to get my ass kicked every day. Every single day that I remember being with him I used to get hit. i: What happened when they took you away from your parents? king s: They put us all in foster care. I had a temporary father, he wanted me to call his wife, “mother.”. . . He had these sons, one was a bounty hunter. When I refused to do what they asked me they used to abuse me. They used to like beat me up. I mean, handcuff me to the radiator. I mean tortured. i: How did you learn about the Nation? queen r: The Nation saved my life, almost twelve years ago. I was married at age twelve. OK? My husband was chosen for me and it wasn’t the right choice. For ten years I took abuse, beatings, insults, and I had four kids. One day on the beach my husband came back because his mistress had left him. That’s the only time I was ever happy when he had a mistress, he wouldn’t hit me. He came by, he took an aluminum baseball bat, broke all my ribs, both my legs, my arms, and he was ready to strike my head when a Latin King stepped in. . . . I was a mass of nothing. I don’t even consider myself at that time a human, you know? i: You have no contact with your dad; how come? queen f: Because my mother told me he just didn’t want me ’cuz I was a girl. He told my mother that if she had me he was gonna kick her stomach and not have me. Like, when I was twelve I saw him on the street and he told me, “You’re not my daughter,” and I just said, “I know” and kept on walking. I know that’s my father, but he’s denied me. queen b: Then my mom got drugs four years ago and from drugs she jumped a guy and it’s like guys are just like drugs. I was always second, left home alone to take care of the kids again, you know. . . . I’m basically the mother and she’s the child. king tone: I had a real strong relapse where even my job couldn’t find me. I was gone. And that’s when I started getting arrested. Getting my little bullshit cases. I used to get caught with a stem. And the judge used to see me like four times in one week. I

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remember a judge actually said, “Mr. Fernandez, you need a rest. I just seen you two days ago.”

These accounts show informants who have been seriously addicted to drugs or alcohol; victims of parental violence, abandonment, neglect, or sexual predation; victims of spousal violence; or socialized in households where one or both parents had serious drug or alcohol problems. Such experiences would make them prime candidates for the recovery movement, and a number of them had indeed been involved in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, often compelled by judges or prison detoxification programs. However, what is important to reflect upon, especially from the perspective of resistance, is why few informants suggested that their participation in such therapy had been successful, whereas when they entered their subculture the level of their “recovery” seemed to increase almost instantly. king tone: I wanted to find myself in the midst of the confusion of life. I needed something. I needed somethin’ to put me back on track. Not my mother and not my father. None of that shit. I needed somethin’ for me. I needed me to tell me somethin’. . . . I kneeled down before the Almighty Crown and I told my God, I said, “God, I’ve found somethin’ that’ll make me somebody. I have found somethin’ that I could go in and be a part of and help change stuff for Latinos. (Brotherton and Barrios 2004:136)

In this description by King Tone, his recovery pathway is in marked contrast to those in the mainstream movement. In Tone’s account, his “recovery” moment is not about giving himself up to a higher power to individually repossess and heal himself but rather to be once again part of the Latino community with whom he most identifies but from which he feels most estranged. For the Kings and Queens their pathways of recovery are not a straightforward sequence of steps, as often portrayed in positivistic life course narratives, but a complex, dialectical process in which subjects advance, get thwarted, resume their journey, and eventually negotiate a different relationship with their social world. This process of recovery has much in common with the critical analyses of both Rapping (1996) and hooks (1993), both of whom seek to rescue recovery’s radical essence by reconstructing recovery as a personal and social quest to restore a self that has been politically, culturally, and economically distorted, and a resistance praxis focused on disassembling society’s asymmetrical power relations.⁴ As Rapping makes clear, in the mainstream recovery movement the individual has to cure himself or herself of the disease (i.e., the addiction) to get back to participating in the status quo, which often means being a productive worker. For the Kings and Queens, it is precisely the status quo that is the problem, and it is the interlocking class, racial, and gendered orders manifested in the history of colonization that are the generating source of their abusive (both to the self and to others) behaviors. Thus, in order to increase their sense of self-value, to be righteous men and women, to become independent and responsible citizens, they need to take action on their own behalf and in their own interests. This requires them to be resistant, questioning, transformative social actors rather than the fatalistic, doomed, albeit earnest codependents of the barrio, which

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is often how the social reproductionists project their subjects. Therefore, in taking back their lives and their psyches, Kings and Queens are the antitheses of the social actors depicted in the depoliticized recovery movement and represent the embodiment of lower-class resisters to subservience through their own indigenous subcultures.

Renaming king b: Remember, four years ago I couldn’t read. I couldn’t read! I don’t even know how to add. This word here [he holds a leaflet in front of him that advertises a conference on death row inmate Mumia]. Maybe I still drop some words like this, “explosive” [he points to the word on the leaflet]. Now that word “explosive.” You think four years ago I would remember that word? db: So where did you learn it? king b: By bein’ in the Nation . . . study, culture classes. You know what I’m sayin’? ’Cuz our lessons teach us that, you know. It also teaches us not only to become a man but to become a King. And when you become a King you have responsibilities, you have self-esteem, you have self-respect, you have belief.

King B. is discussing openly a painful deficiency in his cognitive development. Until fairly recently, he was one of thousands of functional illiterates in the United States, despite (or perhaps because of ) having spent years in school and subsequently in prison. Somehow, King B. fell through the cracks of these interlocking institutions and systems, masking his disability throughout, as is common with many nonreaders seeking to avoid being stigmatized. But reading, as Freire (1970), Macedo (1994), and other critical pedagogues have insisted, is not simply a skill but an intensely political act. Freire calls literacy a form of “reading the world,” and though his numerous literacy projects he has shown how teaching adults to read is intrinsically linked to the projects of empowerment, self-organization, and consciousness raising. For Freire, the pathway to reading is inseparable from collaborating with subjects to critically understand their place in the world, not to contemplate it but to act on it. The point of literacy therefore is not to help people decode the world for adaptational purposes (as in top-down policies that call for populations to learn certain skills to meet the changing demands of the labor market) but rather to challenge people to see, imagine, interact with, creatively discover, and change the world by changing themselves. As Freire (1996:128) states, I base my literacy practice . . . on the following points: 1. Literacy education is an act of knowing, an act of creating, and not the act of mechanically memorizing letters and syllables. 2. Literacy education must challenge learners to take on the role of subjects in learning both reading and writing. 3. Literacy education must originate from research about the vocabulary universe of the learners, which also gives their thematic universe. The first codifications to be “read,” decodified, by the learners offer possibilities to discuss the concept of culture. To understand culture as a human creation, an extension of the world by men and women through

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their work, helps to overcome the politically tragic experience of immobility caused by fatalism. If men and women can change, through action and technology (whether incipient or sophisticated), the physical world, which they did not create, why can’t they change the world of history—social, economic, and political—which they did create?

Freire’s approach to literacy and to organic knowledge development is close to a resistance practice of the ALKQN I call renaming. By this I am referring to the group’s commitment to a form of education in which the world is read, interpreted, and reinterpreted in line with the group’s class experience. Thus education for the group is about breaking through barriers of exclusion, elbowing their way into a semipublic discourse to counter the demonizing narratives that frame their every move. Out of this encounter with the dominant culture and its various apparatuses, group members produce their own counternarrative (and countermemories) that are authentic accounts of community and subcultural life, revealing the group’s syncretic pasts, presents, and futures. Such written and oral accounts of the group’s history and practices are contained in its “bible”—a sacrilegious manuscript cherished by the membership, particularly the youth, for its prison-based aphorisms, insider group knowledge, and semisecret rules of the organization—and the constant extemporaneous monologues and dialogues that are hallmarks of the group’s universal (monthly) meetings. In King B.’s testimony, he relates his newly acquired skill to his group membership, to his identity formation, to his reinforced psychological state, and to the strengthening of his character. But it is equally important to recognize the verve behind his utterances, which reflect the joy and pride of members’ inventing their own street and prison discourses, their constantly evolving subcultural vocabularies and semiotic systems, and their penchant for dissecting, co-opting, provoking, parodying, and contesting the mainstream world from which many are barred and quarantined (see Conquergood 1997; Ferrell 1997). In other words, it is crucial to understand how seductive these subcultures are to the “culturally deficient,” not simply because of their promises of deviance, taboo, and secret carnal pleasures but because they occupy “third spaces” (Soja 1996) in which they subvert or reflect back the gaze of the social controllers. A perfect example of this is the group’s demonstrative performances of prayer rituals in front of amassed police officers during street protests, courthouses during their members’ trials, and police precincts during in-your-face confrontations with their would-be brutalizers. Such forms of resistance have been long practiced by movements and organizations of faith as they confront a range of social injustices from Jim Crow laws to nuclear proliferation. Thus as we argue in our book (Brotherton and Barrios 2004), the ALKQN draws on different forms of New York’s community traditions of resistance and selforganization, from the radicalism of the Black Panthers and Young Lords to the local institution-building of Orthodox Jews. To use Freire’s terms, the ALKQN and its members create their own thematic universes, which is their resourceful way of making the world knowable, meaningful, spiritual, and historical. These acts of contestation and deconstruction are not unique to the ALKQN, for they have also been recorded and analyzed by urban ethnographers Dwight Conquergood (1992, 1997), Jeff Ferrell (1996), Joe Austin (2001), and Susan Phillips (2001)

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and New York filmmakers Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant (1983), all of whom have depicted the agency and creativity contained in the street youth practices and performances of graffiti writing. In the following text we see two examples of knowledge that are foundation stones and markers of the ALKQN’s self-identity, demonstrating why for this subculture reading the world is so akin to renaming it: There are many ways to prove to your self how much of a King you are. Not always you have to die in order to become a hero of the Nation. Just be a good teacher. Help those who most need that help. Teach our youngest the same way we will teach our own kids. Learn how to be “under before you think about been in top.” Give to your brother what you like to receive. (ALKQN Manifesto 2001) We must remember where we come from. We created this for the 3rd oppressed world. And our oppressed peoples, even that they want to learn, they was blinded by the oppressor so they can’t ever learn. . . . You don’t need a Degree when your heart is in the Nation. . . . Don’t matter how slow you might be to learn what is written on paper if you really love your people you will die for them and this is what counts. (ALKQN Manifesto, written by King Blood)

Reintegration A great deal of rhetoric in criminal justice discourses is expended on the notion of reentry, which refers to ex-inmates returning from prison gulags to our not-so-civil society. In this late modern epoch in which the United States boasts the highest number of inmates in its history, it should be obvious why the specter of so many undesirables possibly moving next door is at the forefront of so many policy debates on the nature of crime, punishment, and deterrence. But why should such an inevitable societal process be considered an act of resistance? Surely the state must want ex-inmates to reenter the so-called mainstream, if only for both manifest and latent purposes of social control. In a widely read anthology of essays called Invisible Punishment (Chesney-Lind and Mauer 2003), the various authors make case after case regarding the extraordinary levels of vindictiveness engaged in by the state and its agents to prevent ex-inmates from resuming their normal lives. As a task force of the American Bar Association spelled out, the following could easily be the consequences for a first-time offender guilty of possessing marijuana in the first decade of the new millennium: [The] offender may be sentenced to a term of probation, community service, and court costs. Unbeknownst to this offender, and perhaps to any other actor in the sentencing process, as a result of his conviction he may be ineligible for many federally-funded health and welfare benefits, food stamps, public housing, and federal educational assistance. His driver’s license may be automatically suspended, and he may no longer qualify for certain employment and professional licenses. If he is convicted of another crime he may be subject to imprisonment as a repeat offender. He will not be permitted to enlist in the military, or possess a firearm, or obtain a federal security clearance.

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If a citizen, he may lose the right to vote; if not, he becomes immediately deportable. (Chesney-Lind and Mauer 2003:5)

Therefore, by promoting the legitimate pathways of its ex-inmate members, by encouraging all its members to increase their participation in the nation’s civil institutions through voting, running for office, joining parent-teacher associations, entering college, and staying in school, the ALKQN is actively negating the pathological trajectory that has been intentionally and unintentionally designed by the state in its clumsy efforts to rein in the dangerous classes. In contradistinction to many of the open and implicit assumptions in the gang literature, the ALKQN inserts itself into the everyday lives of its members to support, enable, and empower them precisely because the state absolves itself of its most basic humanistic responsibilities to its own citizens. In effect, whether it’s the inadequate funds for public education at state and federal levels, the government lies over the Iraqi war, the constant erosion of civil liberties, or the mushrooming numbers of citizens without health insurance, the state repeatedly and demonstratively tears up the social contract in the faces of the marginalized, nurturing the roots of their humiliation at every turn. This principled political position of the group in support of its members’ reintegration is in contrast to the many reentry policies that seek to steer the ex-inmate away from the supposedly infecting and corrupting influences of his or her traditional social networks (i.e., his or her peer group). But what is the reality of the state’s approach, so steeped in paternalistic and cynical thinking? How can people returning from total institutions where their friends and associates often were gang related, from places where such groups often are the only providers of economic, physical, and social lifelines, remove themselves so entirely from such influences? And why, given their experiences of the straight world, would they want to in any case? Moreover, it is not just about whom one may consort with but about where one may go, that is, about places and spaces that are sanitized and acceptable. Sibley (1995) refers to such tendencies in late modernity as geographies of exclusion and social control, and it is this normative practice of the carceral state that many ex-inmates inevitably confront on leaving the gates of the penitentiary. Consequently, it is important to understand that the ALKQN’s quest for their own social spaces is also tied to this process of reintegration and not just about their ability to act freely as a street subculture. Therefore, into this complex, risk-filled, highly interconnected world, the ALKQN thrusts itself with gusto, taking on the tasks of managing the unmanageable by providing surrogate families for the disconnected, finding shelters for the displaced, and being there around the clock for the angry, frustrated, confused, and traumatized. King Tone talks about his dreams for his Nation just days before he was sentenced to thirteen years for bagging two hundred dollars’ worth of heroin in a scheme set up by pinnacles of the “straight world”: the local antigang task force. What I want for this Nation is to build some kind of half-way house, a place where the brothers and sisters can come when they first get out. I want them to know they have a home and that we are gonna take care of them. That we’re not gonna reject them and we’re gonna be there for them to get them back on their feet, get them back with their

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families, make sure they don’t relapse and kick that drug shit. We’ll use all our friends in the community to get them the jobs and education they need. And then we’re gonna hold our politicians accountable, make ’em represent us, all of us. That’s my dream for this Nation. I don’t think it’s crazy, do you?

Commentary: The Global Connection Although the research for this analysis of the ALKQN was carried out primarily in New York City, this development of the group is not simply a local affair. In the last five years there have been reliable reports that this group in different forms can be found in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Spain. There are many reasons for the organization’s globalization (see also Hagedorn 2005). In the cases of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic it is a result of generations of youth and adults migrating constantly to and from the United States, under the weight of dependency relations, which have facilitated the interpenetration of different subcultures. This is particularly the case with the Dominican Republic as thousands of returning deportees, forcibly repatriated under draconian U.S. immigration laws, have resettled with their gang affiliations intact. Such subcultures have recently found fertile ground in a country suffering from extremely high rates of poverty, little social mobility, and one of the lowest rates of social investment in Latin America (Barrios and Brotherton 2004). The spread of the ALKQN to Spain (principally Barcelona and Madrid) has taken a different path. Essentially, the organization has developed through the children of Dominican and Ecuadorian women who were recruited as guest workers (mainly maids and cleaners) to service the lifestyles of the expanding middle classes. As the children grew up with deep feelings of resentment at their families’ cultural and economic marginality in the increasingly stratified new Spain, while taking particular note of their fathers’ exclusion from the labor market (through denial of work permits), membership in the ALKQN became a means to restore their ethnic pride and reaffirm their sociocultural identity (Feixa 2005). The origins of the group in Ecuador are less clear, but data from some of our earlier New York interviews suggest they are linked to transnational family networks conditioned by labor migration and recent deportations. It should also be noted that the group in Barcelona most closely resembles the New York City organization, complete with a rapidly emerging sociopolitical agenda that includes being legally recognized as a nonprofit self-help group and collaborations with social democratic members of Barcelona City Council on youth and educational projects.

PPP In our studies of street organizations, we have found that both individual and collective agency were extremely important aspects of membership, with respondents recounting consistently the tangible benefits of group membership, such as the enhancement to their self-esteem, the strengthening of their ethnic identity, and the broadening of their formal and informal knowledge bases (Brotherton and Barrios 2004). In particular, we found that this positive, mutually beneficial relationship between the group

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and the individual was apparent in the efforts of individuals to overcome psychosocial trauma or drug or alcohol addiction, much of which was experienced in their youth; educational deficiencies; and obstacles to rejoining civil society on being released from prison. Though certainly incorporating expressions of street and prison style and of barrio proletarian and subproletarian self-organization, these subcultural groups crucially functioned as an incubator of personal development and as an unlikely vehicle of late modernistic agency and personal recovery. In this organized, imagined community, “marginal” men and women through legitimate albeit subcultural means resurrected and reconfigured their individual and collective selves. New forms of communitas were established within which strategies for personal and collective redemption were enacted. This is not to say that their subculture was the only solution, but given the socially restrictive and economically structured conditions that characterized their lives, this syncretic, plastic, and creative subculture thwarted their presumed path of pathology. Thus, in the face of the misery and the crises of the everyday, almost nothing they had encountered by way of public or private service providers, including those in the prison system, was sufficient, appropriate, or engaging enough to make their recovery, their education, or their reintegration possible. Rather, these informants were drawn to, recruited by, and seduced by the subcultural: a vivacious, resistant, beckoning social sphere embedded deep in their own communities, lived out through their own peers, regenerated through their own local narratives, and constituted by their own intergenerational barrio or ghetto rites, rules, practices, and actions. For them, their street organization was the site to recover, to comprehend the personal, and to revisit the problems that no one else could understand or deal with. It was in this organizational setting and cultural space that the bulimic pushes and pulls were resisted and made comprehensible and where they were welcomed, valued, and made divine. This was the cultural setting where making, undoing, and remaking their worlds was the norm. Although most of these analyses are drawn from data collected in the late 1990s, this does not imply that these subcultures are no longer present. As I have noted in this chapter, the group has begun to take on an international dimension, although this should not be understood in conspiratorial terms, as is the tendency of many police agencies when presented with such news. In the following quote, from a recent newspaper account of New York’s Puerto Rican Day Parade, we also see the group’s enduring local presence as it once again becomes the subject of a moral panic: About an hour later, cops moved in to break up a group of about 150 Latin Kings gang members who gathered on Sixth Ave. near Central Park South and apparently planned to join the parade en masse. Throngs of men wearing black-and-gold Latin Kings shirts linked arms and prepared to march when cops moved in to arrest them. Police said they recovered one gun and several knives. “We just come over here to enjoy our day,” said King Terra, 32, a self-proclaimed gang member from Jamaica, Queens. “They got arrested for no reason.” (Vielking et al. 2005:15)

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The report would pass almost unnoticed as just another selective interpretation of public safety if not for the fact that it had been almost five years since New York’s chief of police boasted of his victory over these same lower-class “reprobates.” Such urban subcultures will continue to defy the status quo both consciously and unconsciously as they make sense of the dystopia bequeathed them by adults in power.

Notes 1. The ALKQN came to New York State in 1986, founded in Collins Correctional Facility by, among others, Luis Felipe, better known as King Blood. What began as a small Latino inmate self-defense and self-help organization, based on the principles and rituals of the Latin Kings in Chicago, by the early 1990s had become an extensive street gang in New York City, with perhaps two thousand or more members. During its growth period, the organization was labeled by local law enforcement as one of the most dangerous and disciplined gangs in the city, and in 1994 almost its entire leadership was indicted by a grand jury for multiple counts of homicide and assault. King Blood eventually received the most severe prison sentence, other than execution, for a federal prisoner since World War II. In 1995, a new leadership emerged in the ALKQN that pledged to transform the organization into a community-based movement for uplifting the Latino poor in New York City. This rhetorical commitment to reform a street gang of such notoriety was met with great skepticism by law enforcement, but several years later the new Latin Kings had effectively ended the internal bloodletting and had become a staple among the city’s pantheon of radical political groups, particularly around such issues as police brutality and Puerto Rican independence. 2. Ironically, this position is not so dissimilar from that of orthodox criminologist Miller (1958), who several decades earlier argued that the lower-class “focal concerns” of gang youth ensured their social immobility. 3. That is, what happens when gang populations are economically excluded by the mainstream but culturally included by the corporate media and its consumerist ideology? 4. Such relations often are referred to in the literature as society’s intersectionality, that is, the overlaying of class, race, and gender oppression that produces so many psychosocial disorders (see Collins 1989; Kovel 1984; Richie 1995).

References Alexander, J. and P. Smith. 2004. The strong program in cultural sociology. In J. Alexander, ed., The Meanings of Social Life, 11–26. New York: Oxford University Press. Anderson, E. 1999. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: W.W. Norton. Austin, J. 2001. Taking the Train. New York: Columbia University Press. Barrios, L. and D. Brotherton. 2004. Update Dominican Republic: From poster child to basket case. NACLA, 38(3): 11–13. Bourgois, P. 1995. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. New York: Cambridge University Press. Brotherton, D. C. 2004. What happened to the pathological gang: Notes from a case study of the Latin Kings in New York. In J. Ferrell, K. Hayward, W. Morrison, and M. Presdee, eds., Cultural Criminology Unleashed, 263–286. London: Cavendish.

Youth Subcultures, Resistance, and Street Organization —— and L. Barrios. 2004. The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York Gang. New York: Columbia University Press. Castells, M. 1997. The Power of Identity. New York: Blackwell. Chesney-Lind, M. and M. Mauer, eds. 2003. Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment. New York: New Press. Christie, N. 1994. Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags Western Style. London: Routledge. Cohen, A. 1955. Delinquent Boys. New York: Free Press. Cohen, P. 1972. Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class Community. Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1. Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham, Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Collins, P. H. 1989. The social construction of black feminist thought. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14(4): 745–773. Conquergood, D. 1992. On Reppin’ and Rhetoric: Gang Representations. Paper presented at the Philosophy and Rhetoric of Inquiry Seminar, University of Iowa. ——. 1997. Street literacy. In J. Flood, S. B. Heath, and D. Lapp, eds., Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy Through the Communicative and Visual Arts, 354–375. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan. Di Leonardo, M. 1998. Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Faludi, S. 1992. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Anchor. Feixa, C. 2005. Jovenes Latinos: Espacio Public y Cultura Urbana. Presentation and report to the Barcelona City Council in the conference Jovenes Latinos: Espacio Public y Cultura Urbana, November 21–22, Barcelona. Ferrell, J. 1996. Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality. Boston: Northeastern University Press. ——. 1997. Criminological verstehen: Inside the immediacy of crime. Justice Quarterly, 14(1): 3–23. Fordham, C. 1996. Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury. ——. 1996. Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life and Work. New York: Routledge. Hagedorn, J. 1988. People and Folks. Chicago: Lake View Press. ——. 2005. The global impact of gangs. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 21(2): 153–169. Hall, S. and T. Jefferson, eds. 1975. Resistance Through Rituals. London: Routledge. ——, ——, C. Crichter, J. Clarke, and B. Roberts. 1975. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. New York: Holmes and Meier. Hebdige, D. 1979. The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Hedges, C. 2003. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Anchor. hooks, b. 1993. Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. Boston: South End Press. Kelley, R. D. G. 1994. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working-Class. New York: Free Press. Kirkpatrick, D. 2005, May 11. Congress rekindles battles on mandatory sentences. New York Times, A13. Kovel, J. 1984. White Racism. New York: Columbia University Press. Lyng, S. 1990. Edgework: A social psychological analysis of voluntary risk taking. American Journal of Sociology, 95: 851–886. Macedo, D. 1994. Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know. Boulder, CO: Westview.

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David C. Brotherton Miller, W. 1958. Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency. Journal of Social Issues, 14: 5–19. Moore, J. 1991. Going Down to the Barrio: Homeboys and Homegirls in Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Notes from Nowhere, eds. 2003. We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism. New York: Verso. Ogbu, J. 1978. Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-Cultural Perspective. New York: Academic Press. Parenti, C. 1999. Lockdown America. New York: Verso. Phillips, S. 2001. Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rapping, E. 1996. The Culture of Recovery: Making Sense of the Self-Help Movement in Women’s Lives. Boston: Beacon. Reed, A. 1992, Jan. The underclass as myth and symbol: The poverty of discourse about poverty. Radical America, 24: 21–40. Richie, B. 1995. Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women. New York: Routledge. Scott, J. 1977. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in South East Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ——. 1992. Domination and the Art of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sibley, D. 1995. Geographies of Exclusion. London: Routledge. Silver, T. and H. Chalfant. 1983. Stylewars. New York: Plexifilm. Soja, E. 1996. Third Space: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Thomas, J. 1993. Doing Critical Ethnography. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Thrasher, F. 1927. The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Touraine, A. 1988. Return of the Actor. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Vielking, J., A. Sacks, and F. Goldimer. 2005, June 13. A fun-filled fiesta on fifth: Parade marred by knifing, 175 busts. Daily News, p. 15. Vigil, J. D. 1988. Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wacquant, L. 1997, July. Three pernicious premises in the study of the American ghetto. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 341–353. ——. 2002, May 1. Deadly symbiosis. Boston Review, 1–25. Willis, P. 1977. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Westmead, UK: Saxon House. Wilson, W. J. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Young, J. 1999. The Exclusive Society: Social Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity. London: Sage.

Ana Daza, David C. Brotherton, Gipsy Escobar, and Michael Flynn

8. Children of the Land, Fruit of the Ghetto

In this chapter we describe and analytically trace the prosocial development of a youth street gang in Medellín, Colombia. Based on observational and interview data with gang members and community residents over a seven-year period, we examine the organizational emergence of this collective of young social bandits (Hobsbawm 1959) who fill the social and economic void left by dependency and an ineffectual state machine that is at best negligent and at worst complicit in the spiral of violent conflicts between paramilitaries, guerrillas, and street gangs (Salazar 1994). We trace the social history of a neighborhood and the context for a gang’s emergence and transformation. This case study resonates with other recent studies on youth subcultural resistance in the United States (Brotherton and Barrios 2004; Conquergood 1992; Venkatesh 2000) and elsewhere (Dowdney 2005; Feixa et al. 2005) in which we see the possibility of gangs developing prosocial tendencies that can be understood only as the outgrowth of social reciprocity, a primary characteristic of poor communities struggling to cope with their structured marginality (Gans 1982; Stack 1997). We argue that this example of youth gang development is indicative of trends in global social, economic, and cultural processes in which social collectives emerge, taking on the characteristics of cultural and economic communes (Castells 1997).

Method The data for this study were collected by the first author during the period 1997–2004. They were accumulated during two phases. Phase 1 took place from 1997 to 1998, when she was hired by the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace to study the dynamics of urban conflict in the neighborhood Paris, which lies within the city of Medellín in the state of Antioquia. Her task was to report on the conditions under which disputes between paramilitary groups, guerrillas, and street gangs were taking place and to act as a conduit between the various parties and the government. The

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primary goal was to find ways to mitigate the cultures of violence that had become embedded in Colombian daily life and thus alter the cycles of revenge killings that had become the norm. After a year in the field, she decided to stay and work with the street gangs that were such a permanent part of the community and to interview residents to try to understand the conditions and practices of survival that the community was adopting. For the next six years, she carried out field research in that neighborhood in particular and succeeded in interviewing fifty members of Los Muchachos (thirty of whom were interviewed in prison) between the ages of sixteen and twenty-eight. She used both structured and unstructured interview questions, recording the responses in a notebook. In addition, she was a participant and nonparticipant observer in conflict resolution workshops, gang meetings, and family social events and spent long periods gathering data on the formal and informal networks of the neighborhood economy.

Literature Too little has been written on the gang’s capacity to function as a prosocial organization, even though there is ample and growing evidence that this is occurring simultaneously in various parts of the United States and in other parts of the world (Brotherton and Barrios 2004; Feixa et al. 2005; Hayden 2004). The reasons for this paucity of alternative perspectives on the gang problem are manifold. It results from ideological biases, discursive blinders, the positionality of white middle-class researchers, and the complicity of criminology and criminal justice in the ethnic cleansing of the inner city (see Conquergood 1997; Katz and Jackson-Jacobs 2004; Young and Brotherton 2006). With few exceptions, gang criminology has failed to meet the promise of the 1950s gang subcultural theorists and invigorate studies of the poor with the creativity of the ghetto and the barrio that has been readily appropriated and exploited by the popular culture industry. Nonetheless, it is still possible to discern a body of literature in mainstream and critical criminology that goes against the grain of the canon, much of which, particularly in criminal justice–related studies, revolves around the axis of a Hirschian imagination of the “deviant.” Thus Moore and Garcia’s (1978) pioneering work with gang members in prison highlights their self-help proclivities, Jankowski (1991) argues that gangs as organizations fill a deindustrialized economic and social chasm, Venkatesh (2000) recounts how gangs and nongang residents benefit from one another through systems of social, political, and economic reciprocity, and Zatz and Portillo (2000:370) conclude that gang members can be seen “as integral parts of their communities, engaging in some actions that hurt the community and in some that help it.” Consequently, even in the mainstream criminological and sociological literature a more nuanced, ambivalent view of gang-community relationships can be discerned. But perhaps the strongest critique of the gang-pathology nexus comes from the critical and more unorthodox wing of gang research. For example, Brotherton and Barrios (2004) document gangs that perform and function subversively through rituals of empowerment, self-renewal, and cultural affirmation, Hayden (2004) sees the potential of gang members to become change agents and peacemakers, Conquergood (1997) analyzes the semiotic innovations of gang subcultures that invert and transgress their

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socioeconomic invisibility, and Hagedorn (2006) argues for a globalizing context to understand their gang possibilities and not just their pathologies. It is with the encouragement of findings and analyses from this more counterintuitive gang literature in which the binaries of gangs are resisted (i.e., are they prosocial or antisocial, rational or irrational, healthy or pathological?) that we examine the gray area of a gang in the data collected from the small urban community of Paris in Colombia. In what follows we provide a rare glimpse into the violent historical and socioeconomic background of an urban street gang in the now infamous terrain of Medellín, detailing the context for its emergence, the plausible explanation for its transformation, and the relationship of these local processes with global trends of marginality and agency.

Setting Paris: Origins and Traditions of Community Organization Paris, immersed in fog for most of the year, is situated on the highest side of the occidental mountain, overlooking the Valley of Aburrá. There is little commercial activity inside its borders and no connection to public transit, so few outsiders have any reason to enter its environs. Sandwiched politically and administratively between two municipalities—Bello (with a population of approximately 380,000) and Medellín (with a population of approximately 2 million), both of which have denied any resources for its development—the area finds itself geographically, socially, and economically isolated. Until 1945 the area was mainly rural when its land was divided into plots, laying the basis for its development as a new urban enclave for the poor. It was settled originally by twelve families in 1960, and the remaining land was divided into smaller sections that were consequently occupied by multiple flows of migration that ended in the late 1990s. Since its early days, the neighborhood’s families have had to guarantee their own access to basic goods and services, for example by extracting water from natural sources and using coal or petroleum to generate energy. Over time, in the absence of attention from the state, residents organized collectively to meet their needs in two ways: clerically, through the Catholic Church, and civically, through a Community Action Council. Both forms of grassroots organization have generally complemented each other because they shared the same approach to resource management. There were two levels to this self-organization. The first relates to the establishment of basic committees by which the projects were organized. For example, after an aqueduct was built, committees were created to build a communal pond. This involved members of the local community who worked on the construction and maintenance and also helped to finance it by paying monthly fees to the “lords” of traditional peasant families who were entrusted with the project’s management. The second level involved leaders of the committee, who made investment decisions and attempted a fair distribution of the goods. One important task of this second level of organization was to develop wealth in the local area. Thus part of the money collected for the water service was invested in the

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PA R I S . P H O T O S B Y FE R NANDO CUE VAS UL I TZ S C H , 1999.

salaries of community members who worked on the maintenance of the water production and sewer system. Their salaries were paid in bonds that could be exchanged for food. However, the amount of food bought by members of this committee produced a network of recipients that extended to other circuits of social life. In this way, a complex organization of communal empowerment developed, with multiple layers of reciprocal relations involving both civic and church institutions. For example, any member of the community who needed food received a basket of groceries from the priest in exchange for helping the sick with their household duties. Once recovered, formerly sick people would then help others (e.g., by looking after children while their parents were working). By the end of the 1980s, water, electricity, and sewer services were completed as the communitarian model of self-organization had succeeded in providing at least some of the population’s basic needs. But other needs such as healthcare, transportation, and roads were delayed until the end of the twentieth century, when the state finally honored its responsibilities.

Poverty and Crime In recent years (2000–2001), according to the local government Web site, the average family in Paris still lived in dire poverty, earning a monthly income of US$129,

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H O U S I N G A N D E DUCATI O NAL CO NDI TI O NS I N PARIS. PH OT OS BY F ERN AN DO C U EVAS U LITZSCH, 1999.

compared to the minimum needed to survive per month of US$343. This means that many families have only enough income to sustain themselves for nineteen days in every thirty. Furthermore, the poverty level is exacerbated by the extremely crowded and substandard housing conditions. According to the same source, there were 427 inhabitants per hectare, almost twice the population of the local region (approximately 244), or 8.7 members per household. In the early years, the neighborhood’s previous rural culture had helped to protect it from many of the trends of urban social life seen in the adjacent cities. But in the mid-1950s this began to change as residents increasingly engaged in nighttime leisure activities in and around local bars and ice cream stores, which seemed to be accompanied by a rise in antisocial behavior, highlighted by alcohol-related conflicts involving knives, machetes, and a small number of guns being carried and used by residents. By the mid-1970s the first home-made guns were more widely on display (called trabucos, a one-shot gun), and one of the most infamous sons of this area, Pablo Escobar, built the neighborhood’s first floodlit football field. Still, to the outsider, Paris in the late 1970s remained a sleepy backwater, a neighborhood with few houses, dusty roads, no sidewalks, and only one bus station. However, for insiders there was a different story. Although many adults were tied to the informal social controls of the peasant, the neighborhood’s younger inhabitants were already consuming a local form of crack known as bazuco. It is during this period that we see

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a decrease in any legitimate forms of law enforcement, while homicides sponsored by drug dealers over turf disputes and addict-related murders become increasingly common. This increase in crime in Paris was part of a general pattern of illegal activities throughout the metropolitan area of the Aburrá Valley, where the expanding informal economy of drugs, black market guns, and contraband was becoming a major economic resource for a range of social classes.

Rise of a Culture of Violence Beginning in the mid-1980s, the trend toward violence increased, and knives and other weapons were replaced by a culture of guns. This culture and its accompanying violence are reflected in such expressions as “let’s go and try the fierro [gun] with four or five [murders]” or, in the case of selling a gun, “I’ll give it to you already tested,” referring to a murder that had already been committed with it. This culture penetrated both old and young alike. The first people to buy guns were the business owners, especially if they were engaged in occupations considered dangerous, such as a trader. Youngsters had access to trabucos, made in a more sophisticated way, using TV antennas as materials: “a double tube for a 38 [ammunition], attached with black tape.” Furthermore, murder for hire became a popular occupation for many youth, and soon assassinations were a normative means of resolving personal conflicts and earning a living. The task of the hit man often was carried out on a motorcycle and spread beyond the local terrain to contracts perpetrated in other provinces and even other countries. However, payment for the job also changed and was replaced by the concept of exchange (cambiazo), in which two parties mutually agree to carry out hits for one another in lieu of a monetary payment.¹ At the same time, the police appeared to be directly involved in a range of illegal activities, such as committing robberies, charging “taxes” to criminals, and selling weapons. This rising corruption contributed to the public’s extreme dislike for police officers in general, which was bolstered by the Medellín drug cartel of Pablo Escobar, who offered a reward for each dead police officer. This relationship between young men and the police worsened, with gang members paying US$43 to avoid being arrested. By 1997 police were paid an average of US$215 per week, and in the words of one gang member, “they had to rob to pay the police.”

Dark Forces Emerge According to informants, illegal activities of the first wave of gangs were minor affairs such as the theft of chickens or of clothes left outside to dry, and the perpetrators were easily identified. By the 1990s the crimes had increased in number and seriousness. As the problems kept increasing, gangs started to form . . . on the Upper Side, others on the Lower One, and whoever walked by, mugged you. They were gangs of psychos that wanted to take over the sector. One case was a boy that was killed in the cruelest way possible. They took boys and girls not related to gangs, broke into their houses, raped them,

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men and women indiscriminately, shot the victim in the foot, brought them to the ground, opened their bodies with knives and then threw rocks at their heads. It was a group of boys between twelve and fifteen years old. (Interview with former gang member)

This increasing insecurity created the conditions for the emergence of the militias (vigilantes), also known as the dark forces. These groups offered to control the streets and socially cleanse the area. As their legitimacy increased they advanced a political agenda that included the geographic domination of the area in order to provide a direct view of the municipalities of Bello and Medellín and give them control of the zone’s exit to the region of Urabá.² These dark forces were of two kinds: those related to undercover and illegal actions of the security agents of the state and those related to the armed groups affiliated with militias or urban projects of the guerrillas (basically the National Liberation Army). During this period, torture, disappearances, and collective murders occurred, and the gangs resorted to warlike strategies. In particular, 1991 is considered a pivotal year, marked by an escalating and bloody conflict between gangs, between police and gangs, between police and non-gang-related men, between gangs and militias, and between militias and young men. It was described by one interviewee in Hobbesian terms as “a war of all against all,” with more than fifty killings every day. In response to the lawlessness, the police threatened to kill ten young men for each member of their organization who was murdered. As the 1990s continued, the influence of organized crime diminished, as did the war between the vigilantes and the armed revolutionaries, but the street gangs remained. But as the illegal market got smaller, the gang wars became more intense. These wars were not conventional ones with two armies, each struggling to achieve territorial advantage over the other. Rather, it was a highly parochial and personal war, more like the defense of a location or a spot (where one generation of combatants replaced the previous one). For some of the warriors the relevance of the territory was economic, for others it was geographically strategic, and for still more it was important for reasons related to their sense of place, isolation, and the psychosocial need for self-affirmation, as indicated by these field notes: The day before he died, “el Tino,” one of the leaders of Los Muchachos, told me [the first author] that he was in a gang because it was his only way of being immortal in his neighborhood. He told me that I could always write articles and books, but the only thing left for him was a loud death. In his funeral, there were thousands of people from his neighborhood. and he managed to appear in the city newspaper with his Christian name not just his street name. He was already immortal in a community that will produce a new generation of gangs. (Field notes, A. Daza)

Rise and Transformation of Los Muchachos According to gang informants, there were three waves of street gangs. The first wave grew up under more stable conditions and stayed active until 1990, eventually

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becoming the group’s oldest members (i.e., its veteranos). The next waves emerged at the beginning of the war and included youth who specialized in highly sadistic killings, leaving “ugly bodies” behind (e.g., after killing people they would cut off their ears). The third wave of gangs replaced the second one just two years after its appearance, around 1992. This wave grew up in the middle of the war and for a while continued the traditions of fighting but then changed their objectives to one of ending the war. They will are called Los Muchachos. This third wave of gangs participated directly in a territorial war against the militias and among themselves. Members of this third wave were on average sixteen years old, as were their militia counterparts. For Los Muchachos, however, the militias were made up of illegitimate delinquents who did not represent the local traditions of their neighborhood and who wanted to monopolize the limited illegal market. In addition, both residents of the neighborhood and gang members felt they were victims of the militias, who charged a weekly fee for their services but without distributing any profit. Eventually, Los Muchachos defeated the militias, creating a power vacuum and forcing them to come to terms with their new social obligations: Improve services to the community, including justice and security management, and the redistribution of goods.

Los Muchachos: Ideology and Rules Los Muchachos changed to reflect both the needs of the community and the different dynamics in the legal and illegal economies. Over time, they resorted to a community management model that had been the traditional model in the neighborhood and alongside it developed an ideology. From the year 2000 on Los Muchachos went one step further when they consolidated an organizational structure similar to that of an army. The main tenets of this ideology were as follows:    

  

To promote peace but also to reserve the right to defend ourselves To promote independence and not to allow dependency To remain politically neutral, neither for the guerrillas nor for the paramilitaries To remain united by sharing with each other or helping each other get what they need To respect the survivors of the wars and to allow everyone to have a voice To be serious and disciplined and not to mess with the people or abuse our power To fulfill all tasks and, whenever there’s danger, demand solidarity, with everyone looking out for everyone else

Although punishments for transgressions were not officially written down and codified, the following are some examples of how Los Muchachos applied sanctions, which were internalized by the community: 

A drunk broke the windows of a bus and beat up the driver. As punishment he was confined to his house until he had recovered and had reflected on his antisocial actions.

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Riders who damaged the buses or abused the driver (e.g., by demanding a free ride) received an admonishment. People who performed an illegal act without permission or those who, while drunk, fired shots into the air received an admonishment. People who stole inside the neighborhood or abused their power were expelled from the neighborhood and sometimes provided with a gun to survive in the “outside world.”

Entry into the group was accomplished by one of two means: through recommendation, particularly if the subject was not born in Paris; or, if the subject was born in Paris, by doing minor jobs for Los Muchachos or hanging out with them from a young age. Either means led to the next step, which was to prove that one is “firm and correct.” To judge whether one had reached this level, internal observers watched members consistently, noting whether prospective members were prone to jealousy, whether they avoided money problems, and whether they accorded due respect to their superiors. If a member reached this stage, then more responsibility was granted, which meant responsibility to oneself, to the group, and to the community.

Los Muchachos Make Good on Their Social Obligations According to leaders of Los Muchachos, they adopted the traditional community management model developed previously. This model included helping local residents financially, increasing social capital, and promoting recreational and cultural activities. In a short while, Los Muchachos reduced the number of crimes in the neighborhood and turned their attention to the extortion of buses in return for security. Here, two members of Los Muchachos describe their conflict resolution techniques and their evolving relationships with the community: Here we have to solve couples’ problems. We will like to learn how to deal with that, get skills in this sense, many times those women come to us, and we do not pay too much attention because we do not know what to do. How can we get involved in a family matter if we know it is a domestic issue and not a street one? If the problem is between neighbors we get involved, but in the family cases every one has their own reasons, their own problems.

If there is a problem with housing, Los Muchachos tell the parties to “leave it like that,” to not build any additional brick until the Mayor’s planning office solves it, because if I get involved and tell one of them to stop the construction, I become his enemy. . . . People think we are god, but we can only support them in some issues, in others . . . we bring both persons together, because if we meet with them separately, each one will tells us whatever he wants. So we prefer to make them discuss with each other in the street, in the area where the problem first developed. People respect us and we have earned that respect. We deserve it not because they saw us killing. They respect us because they know that if they leave out a boom box or their clothing, they will find it

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Ana Daza, David C. Brotherton, Gipsy Escobar, and Michael Flynn TA B L E 8.1

Relationship Between the Community and Los Muchachos

RELATIONSHIP

CHARACTERISTICS

What are the benefits for the community?

Security, tranquility, employment, educational resources, and cleanliness. They seek prosperity. They solve problems between neighbors, mothers, and sons. They provide recreation, cultural events, and economic aid.

How does the community feel about Los Muchachos?

Some people are satisfied with them because they have been benefited in one way or another. Some people are dissatisfied with them because a loved one was killed by Los Muchachos, they were charged with something they did not do, they got caught with Los Muchachos but think Los Muchachos are the guilty ones, or they have been victims of blackmail (the drivers) by Los Muchachos. Some people are jealous of Los Muchachos.

Which members of the community do Los Muchachos relate to?

Everyone.

What is the community willing to do for Los Muchachos?

Hide them, warn them when the police are coming, receive and hide guns for them, feed them, participate in walkouts, and provide sporadic support for the children’s recreation.

What problems does the presence of Los Muchachos bring to the community?

Uproar, insecurity, and jealousy from other gangs.

What forces threaten Los Muchachos?

Police, government.

there the next morning, they do not respect us because they are afraid, they do it because we earned it. The community helps us, right here we do not have phone lines, but you can be sure that if the police arrive, we will immediately get a call, “Boys be careful, a lady saw the police in that area” and they would say, “Come this way son, come here and hide”; people with those things are very serious. When they arrest one of us, twenty or thirty ladies go behind the police arguing.

In 1994 a peace process began in Paris during which interviews with a group of residents focusing on the relationship between the community and Los Muchachos were conducted. Table 8.1 summarizes respondents’ answers. In essence, Los Muchachos became involved in every sort of community problem. According to the same survey, respondents also described a web of relations involving Los Muchachos in a multilevel schema of community-based conflict resolution (table 8.2).

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Relationships Involving Los Muchachos in a Multilevel Schema of Community-Based Conflict Resolution

TA B L E 8.2

PROBLEM

PREFERENCE

Drunk husband

Los Muchachos.

REASON FOR THE PREFERENCE

FORMS OF ACTION OF THE GROUP

Trust, respect, quick response, no fear.

Los Muchachos first call him to discuss the situation, make an appointment. 2nd time, they inform the civil inspector’s office.

Civil inspector. Misbehaving boys, kids who start to commit transgressions

Los Muchachos.

Problematic neighbors

Los Muchachos. Civil inspector.

No money to pay for water, electricity, etc.

Go to the companies and ask for more time. Ask for a loan. Go with Los Muchachos.

Robbery

Complain to Los Muchachos.

3rd time, they send him to the civil inspector. Able to apply sanctions, improve discipline and selfreflection.

They give advice (“we have been there before”), providing themselves as examples. They hold a dialogue and give warnings (in matters of water or properties).

They investigate and try to recover what was stolen.

The transformation toward a community management model lies in Los Muchachos’ capacity to use values associated with the provision and distribution of goods to generate a new benefit: justice. This process led to an ideology based on the dynamics of collective action and helped the group play an integral role in the neighborhood’s social life. In figure 8.5 we map the benefits of the distribution of resources obtained by this method. Based on extensive fieldwork in the neighborhood, we estimate that this form of economic intervention helped around 8,692 people: 5,040 benefited directly and 3,652 indirectly. Because the neighborhood had around 24,000 inhabitants, this means that one in every three people benefited from an economic activity recognized as illegal.

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Children of the Land, Fruit of the Ghetto

PPP What we have briefly described, based on gang member interviews and a grounded study of community relations, is the appearance and change of a street gang into a more responsible organization consciously and collectively responding to the basic social, economic, and security needs of its own community. In many respects this response is similar to the gang and nongang processes identified in the work of Jankowski (1991), Venkatesh (2000), and Brotherton and Barrios (2004) in the United States and Feixa et al. (2005) in Spain. This finding leads us to conclude, however tentatively, that in the absence of any responsible state government or viable public–private socioeconomic infrastructure, particularly in a period of late modern, global neoliberalism (see Bauman 2004; Bourdieu 1998; Wacquant 2002; Young 1999), this outcome does not come as a surprise. Indeed, in the work of Melucci (1996), Touraine (1988), and Castells (1997) there are ample theoretical and substantive reasons for the emergence of such apparently unexpected forms of agency during a period of extraordinary sociocultural shifts in our previously fixed notions of place and identity, which obviously must have ramifications for constructions (social and otherwise) of the community. Notes 1. An exchange occurs when a person in one neighborhood who needs a hit finds a party in another neighborhood who has the same need in relation to a different victim. Essentially, the two parties meet the needs of the other in a mutual exchange relationship. As a consequence, the victim has no direct relationship to his or her assassin, making detection based on probable cause very difficult. The practice of exchange homicides reduced the probability of retaliation in certain neighborhoods, helping to produce neighborhood zones that were the undisputed territories of certain groups. Respondents in our study recounted that these territorial divisions were clear by 1986, although they could still visit other zones. This situation changed in 1991 when the internecine war between the drug cartels sharply increased the number of homicides among gang members. 2. At the time, the Urabá region was being contested by guerrillas and paramilitaries trying to gain control of this strategic exit to the Atlantic Ocean. Control of this area meant control of the black market of weapons and drugs. The location of Paris in the pathway to Urabá made of it an alluring turf for both groups. The transit of weapons and combatants through the area was common.

References Bauman, Z. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. 1998. Act of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. New York: New Press. Brotherton, D. C. and L. Barrios. 2004. The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York Gang. New York: Columbia University Press. Castells, M. 1997. The Power of Identity. New York: Blackwell. Conquergood, D. 1992. On Reppin’ and Rhetoric: Gang Representations. Paper presented at the Philosophy and Rhetoric of Inquiry Seminar, University of Iowa.

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Ana Daza, David C. Brotherton, Gipsy Escobar, and Michael Flynn ——. 1997. Street literacy. In J. Flood, S. B. Heath, and D. Lapp, eds., Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy Through the Communicative and Visual Arts, 354–375. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan. Dowdney, L. 2005. Neither War nor Peace: International Comparisons of Children and Youth in Organised Armed Violence. Rio de Janeiro: COAV. Feixa, C. et al. 2005. Cinco Bandas (Five Gangs). Report to the Barcelona City Council on Urban Latino Youth and Conflict. Gans, H. 1982. The Urban Villagers, 2nd ed. New York: Free Press. Hagedorn, J., ed. 2006. Gangs in the Global City: Alternatives to Traditional Criminology. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hayden, T. 2004. Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence. New York: New Press. Hobsbawm, E. 1959. Primitive Rebels. London: W.W. Norton. Katz, J. and C. Jackson-Jacobs. 2004. The criminologists’ gang. In C. Sumner, ed., Blackwell Companion to Criminology, 91–124. London: Blackwell. Jankowski, M. S. 1991. Islands in the Street: Gangs in American Urban Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Melucci, A. 1996. Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age. New York: Cambridge University Press. Moore, J. and R. García. 1978. Homeboys: Gangs, Drugs and Prison in the Barrios of Los Angeles. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Salazar, A. 1994, May–June. Young assassins of the drug trade. NACLA Report on the Americas. Stack, C. 1997. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Basic Books. Touraine, A. 1988. Return of the Actor. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Venkatesh, S. A. 2000. American Project: The Rise and Fall of an American Ghetto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wacquant, L. 2002. Scrutinizing the street: Poverty, morality, and the pitfalls of urban ethnography. American Journal of Sociology, 107(6): 1468–1532. Young, J. 1999. The Exclusive Society: Social Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity. London: Sage. —— and D. Brotherton. 2006. Cultural Criminology and Its Practices: A Dialogue Between the Theorist and the Street Researcher. Presentation at the American Sociological Association, Toronto. Zatz, M. and E. Portillo. 2000. Voices from the barrio: Chicano / a gangs, families, and communities. Criminology, 38(2): 369–401.

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9. Victimization, Resistance, and Violence Exploring the Links Between Girls in Gangs

Recent research on female gangs has provided greater insight into girls’ diverse and complex roles in their groups and the strategies they use to navigate gendered power dynamics both in their groups and in the broader environment in which their groups exist. Although these accounts produce varied portraits of girls’ gang membership, some common threads have emerged. One such thread or theme to grow out of these works is that of resistance. Anne Campbell (1991) was one of the first scholars to describe urban adolescent girls’ gang membership as a temporary haven of sorts in which they collectively attempted to resist the poverty, marginalization, exploitation, and domestic demands that would increase as they moved into adulthood and faced the limitations of their roles as mothers, wives or girlfriends, and primary caretakers of children. According to Campbell’s qualitative research on female gang members in New York (in the late 1970s and early 1980s), gang membership provided a respite during adolescence; it offered camaraderie, excitement, belonging, fulfillment, and a brief escape from the fate that awaited them. Although Campbell’s study suggested that girls’ gang membership was at least partly an act of resistance against the cultural and community standards, definitions, and expectations of women’s roles, resistance (in various forms) plays a prominent role in much of the more recent research on girls’ and women’s gang involvement (see Brotherton and Salazar-Atias 2003; Miller 2001; Venkatesh 1998). Others have described girls’ youth gang membership (or related delinquent behavior) in the context of the cycle of violence (Widom 2000; Widom and Maxfield 2001). Several longitudinal studies examining the influence of childhood maltreatment (including physical or sexual victimization or neglect) on subsequent delinquent or criminal behavior have confirmed that children who suffer abuse are at greater risk of arrest, at a younger age, and for more significant and repeated criminal behavior, than youth who are not abused or neglected. The effects of abuse are particularly notable for girls; for example, Widom and Maxfield’s (2001) most recent update on the cycle of violence revealed that women who experienced childhood abuse or neglect were at greater risk for involvement in

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violent crime than youth in the comparison group; interestingly, abused males were not at greater risk for violence than the male control group. There are myriad reasons for how and why victimization experiences increase the likelihood of subsequent offending but little qualitative research examining the pathways through which this link is actualized. In this chapter we present findings from a qualitative study of young women’s gang and clique membership and suggest that the “gangs as resistance” perspective and the “cycle of violence” or “victimization” perspective are largely compatible. Our findings illustrate the links between young women’s physical and sexual victimization experiences (typically in their homes throughout their childhood) and their subsequent gang involvement and violent behavior. We examined the connection between girls’ experiences as victims and offenders, the ways in which resistance to victimization plays a role in their gang membership and gang-related criminal offending, and the gang’s function as a support group for some of the victimized young women. Before describing and interpreting the findings of our fieldwork with female gangs, we review the research linking girls’ victimization and delinquent or criminal behavior.

Background: Evidence Linking Victimization and Offending One of the more consistent findings in the research on girls’ and young women’s criminal offending is its link to prior victimization. The background of young women who eventually become involved in crime often includes being the victim of physical or sexual abuse, along with exposure to other forms of dysfunction such as family violence, drugs, or alcoholism. Such girls often spend as much time away from home as they can, or they leave entirely. Often too young and ill prepared to support themselves through employment, many turn to property crime, drug trafficking, or prostitution as a means of survival. In escaping abusive and dysfunctional homes, girls often find themselves in environments where they are vulnerable to further victimization. Estimates of the prevalence of girls’ violent victimization vary significantly, depending on the populations studied and data collection strategy used, but the evidence clearly suggests that victimization rates are higher among the female offender population than among women in the general population and that female offenders’ victimization histories exceed those of male offenders’. Studies of incarcerated women consistently find high proportions to have been physically or sexually abused. Surveys comparing women involved in the justice system with those who are not suggest that the rates of sexual and physical abuse may be about twice as high among the system-involved women. For example, Owen and Bloom (1995) found that about 30 percent of incarcerated women had been physically or sexually abused as children, 32 percent had been sexually assaulted, and 59 percent were physically abused as adults. Harlow (1999) found that more than 50 percent of women in state and federal prisons or on probation to have been physically or sexually abused as adults by an intimate partner. In the general population, studies consistently find that about 8–15 percent of women have been the victim of rape (Bureau of Justice Statistics 1997; Spitzberg 1999;

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Tjaden and Thoennes 2000, 2006), and 10–20 percent have been physically or sexually abused as children (Duncan 2000; Gorey and Leslie 1997). In a series of studies, Widom (1989a, 1989b, 1989c, 2000) examined evidence of crime and delinquency committed by abused and neglected youth and that of a control group with no known history of maltreatment. Widom found the rate of crime and delinquency among the abused and neglected youth to be about 50 percent greater than for a control group. Widom’s results confirm those of an earlier study by Bolton et al. (1977), who found that the delinquency rate for maltreated youth (16 percent) was twice that of a comparison group (8 percent).

Victimization and Street Life: Running Away, Drugs, and Crime Although the separate relationships between sexual victimization and high-risk behaviors and contexts are well established (Stark and Hodgson 2003; Widom and Kuhns 1996), the interactions between them are complex and the causal connections not fully understood. For example, research has found a variety of risk factors (particularly sexual and physical abuse, substance abuse, running away, or homelessness) to be associated with women’s violence, drug offenses, and other crimes (Farley et al. 2003; Michaud 1988; McCarthy 1995; Seng 1989; Stark and Hodgson 2003; Webber 1991). Youths who experience the childhood traumas of violence or sexual abuse are at a higher risk of running away (McCarthy 1995); many studies over the past twenty years have repeatedly found that runaways and homeless street youth are drawn from abusive households (Hagan and McCarthy 1992). Running away can have a direct influence on crime by providing powerful motivations, such as an urgent need for money. Girls with little or no work experience and limited marketable job skills have an immediate need for food and shelter. Drug dealing, shoplifting, petty theft, and prostitution may be the quickest and most readily available avenues for a displaced youth to generate income or acquire food. In addition to such direct influences, running away from home and the street life that often follows can influence crime more indirectly through the process of revictimization. That is, many girls and young women run away from home to escape physical or sexual victimization, but doing so often places them at high risk of subsequent victimization. Runaways are vulnerable to exploitation by older and more experienced people (e.g., pimps, drug sellers, or gang members), who may offer them help with the unstated expectation of being paid back through prostitution, shoplifting, or drug sales. The interactions and cycles outlined here may also include gang involvement because street gangs are attractive to disenfranchised youth searching for a sense of safety or security, family, belonging, identity, and meaning. Consistent with the findings on women offenders’ rates of abuse and victimization, research on girl gangs has revealed a high rate of victimization experiences among members. For example, Joe and Chesney-Lind’s (1995) study of girl gang members in Hawaii revealed that 62 percent of the girls reported having previously experienced sexual abuse or assault, and 75 percent reported physical abuse. Joan Moore’s (1991) research on Mexican American gang

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youth in Los Angeles found that 29 percent of female members reported experiencing incest (and she believed this to be an underestimate of the true scope of the problem among this sample). Overall, most studies on girls and gangs reveal victimization histories, family problems, and running away behavior to be common among members. Research findings suggest that personal victimization experiences often are a factor in girls’ decisions to join a gang and that once in the group, they may experience additional victimization (at the hands of male gang members or through gang-related violence) (see Miller 1998; Moore 1991).

Direct Consequences of Victimization Crime has a number of profound negative effects on victims, with the kinds of impacts depending on the type of crime, its severity, and other circumstances. Violent crime usually results in some level of physical trauma, such as cuts, bruises, or broken bones. Sexual assaults carry additional, unique physical consequences; for example, female victims of forced intercourse may become pregnant, and victims of most kinds of rape are at risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases. Nearly all crimes create some level of negative psychological impact, such as feelings of personal violation, distrust of others, anger, and increased fear of crime (Norris and Kaniasty 1994). Violent crimes can create an array of psychological and emotional effects such as depression, suicide or suicidal ideation, and sleep and eating disorders (Farley et al. 2003). Combinations of symptoms are diagnosable as disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or rape trauma syndrome (Resick 1993). Posttraumatic stress disorder is a set of symptoms commonly found in victims of serious crime, violence, and other types of trauma (American Psychological Association 1994). According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH 2001), PTSD is an extremely debilitating condition that can occur after any terrifying event in which the victim feared or sustained serious physical harm. Among the symptoms of PTSD are flashback episodes in which the person has vivid memories or nightmares about the traumatic experience. Such episodes often occur when victims are exposed to something reminiscent of the event, such as an anniversary or a location similar in appearance to where they were traumatized. People with PTSD may also experience sleep disorders, debilitating fear, anxiety, irritability, anger, and depression. Emotional numbness, problems in interpersonal relationships, and feelings of guilt about the incident may also arise (NIMH 2001). Teplin and colleagues (1996) found that one-third of the sample of incarcerated female offenders studied suffered from PTSD. Other posttraumatic reactions such as acute stress disorder, dissociative amnesia, and major depressive disorder (Dutton 1995) may also occur among victimized women; PTSD is just one of the more common identifiable disorders associated with such experiences. Among the symptoms documented in studies of rape victims are depression, sleep disorders, anxiety attacks, generalized fear, and withdrawal from social interaction (Kilpatrick et al. 1987). If left untreated or addressed, such trauma-based disorders may contribute to suicidal thoughts or actions. Rape victims have been found to attempt

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or seriously consider suicide at more than three times the rate of victims of other types of violent crime, such as aggravated assault and robbery (Kilpatrick et al. 1987; see also Vannatta 1996). Widom’s “cycle of violence” research revealed that abused youth were significantly more likely than nonabused youth to contemplate or attempt suicide, exhibit antisocial personality characteristics, and have alcohol abuse or dependency problems. Abused females were more likely to suffer these effects than the abused males studied (Widom 2000). Although many people regard rape committed by people known to the victim somehow to be less severe than other types (and it is true that stranger rapes usually are more physically damaging), there is overwhelming evidence that the emotional impact of nonstranger rape on victims is at least as severe as that of rapes committed by strangers. For example, research reveals that the degree of postrape depression, fear, and problems with social adjustment is no less for acquaintance rape than for stranger rape (Kilpatrick et al. 1987; Koss and Dinero 1988). Researchers have even found some symptoms to be more severe in acquaintance rape victims. For example, Katz (2000) found acquaintance rape victims to have longer recovery time, to view themselves more negatively, and to blame themselves more for their victimization. In order to cope with depression and other symptoms of victimization and of the bleakness and stress of street life, some girls and women may turn to drugs. Studies of criminal offenders find that men use drugs primarily for pleasure, whereas women more often do so as a kind of self-medication for depression and to help them endure the stress and danger of the streets (Inciardi et al., 1993). If girls become addicted to drugs, they’ll have an additional need for money and decreased ability to generate it through legitimate means. This cycle, through which victimization leads to street life, street life leads to victimization, and victimization leads to crime, is all too common in female offenders’ accounts of their experiences.

Explaining the Connections Between Female Victimization, Crime, and Gangs Researchers consistently find that victimization is associated with subsequent delinquent or criminal behavior, but the challenge remains in accurately characterizing and explaining the mechanisms at work in linking victimization, criminal behavior, and gang involvement. Many different theories attempt to explain the processes resulting in this relationship (see Cicchetti and Carlson 1989 and a review by Smith and Thornberry 1995). It has been proposed that victimization disrupts normal developmental processes in children and adolescents and that improper or incomplete social and psychological development can lead to various kinds of behavior problems, including delinquency. Others have argued that although the majority of abused and neglected youth are resilient and appear to overcome the effects of their maltreatment (Rutter 1987; Zingraff et al. 1993), some develop coping methods that may help them to endure their treatment but are inappropriate for normal social interactions. Abuse may also lead to children developing negative attitudes toward themselves and others, which can generate patterns of behavior that are delinquent or lead to delinquency. In addition, abused

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youth may become more aggressive, leading to rejection by their mainstream peers and acceptance into delinquent and deviant peer groups; association with these delinquent peers increases the likelihood of crime and delinquency (Mueller and Silverman 1989; Osgood et al. 1996; Reiss and Farrington 1991). Although there are many ways in which victimization can contribute to offending, the study described in this chapter highlights the pathway between girls’ victimization experiences and their subsequent immersion in street life, gang involvement, and violent behavior.

Studying Girl Gangs in Boston The findings presented here are from a qualitative research study of girls’ gang and clique involvement in Boston. Between 1997 and 2002, Nurge conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews with a community-based sample of seventy-five young women who considered themselves to be members of either a gang or clique and undertook fieldwork among a group of fifteen girls who were involved in a public housing– based recreational program. This research on girls’ groups in Boston occurred shortly after the city began implementing a multifaceted youth violence strategy. This intervention, known as Operation Ceasefire, focused on male gang members’ gun violence, which had been escalating throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s (Braga et al. 2001). Given that girls and young women in the city were not responsible for much of the growing gun violence problem, they were not a primary target of the mid-1990s suppression, intervention, or prevention approaches that were implemented. However, girls, gangs, and violence were a growing topic of discussion among many of the practitioners involved in these youth violence efforts, and their concern about these issues prompted my interest in studying them. The city’s justice and social service practitioners voiced a general perception that girls’ gang membership was increasing, becoming more problematic, and being largely ignored, but there was a lack of clarity about who these groups (and their members) were and what could or should be done to address the issue. This research was undertaken in an effort to shed further light on these issues.

Research Setting Boston is the United States’ twenty-third largest city, with roughly six hundred thousand residents, of whom approximately 54 percent are white, 25 percent are black, 14 percent are Hispanic / Latino (any race), 7 percent are Asian, and less than 1 percent are of any other race (U.S. Census Bureau 2000). In 2000 the Boston Redevelopment Authority reported that the citywide unemployment rate was 2.9 percent, its lowest in three decades, and one percentage point lower than the national average (Boston Redevelopment Authority 2001). Although the citywide unemployment rate remains low relative to other cities of its size and density, several of Boston’s neighborhoods suffer from higher rates of unemployment. For example, Roxbury and Dorchester exhibited the highest unemployment rates (14.3 percent and 11.5 percent, respectively) in the city and higher poverty rates than the rest of the city. These are the two communities that

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are home to the majority of gangs in Boston, in which the majority of gang members in this study resided. Citywide, the poverty rate in Boston increased from 18.7 percent in 1990 to 19.5 percent in 2000. However, in Roxbury (the fieldwork site for this study and home to many of the gang members interviewed), which is 71 percent black and 19 percent Hispanic, 27 percent of the population was living in poverty in 2000 (Boston Foundation 2004). Although poverty rates for Boston’s minority groups (especially Latinos) declined in the 1990s, they still remained three to four times higher than those of whites (McArdle 2003). This racial and ethnic disparity is further evidenced by Boston neighborhood poverty data: blacks and Latinos are five to six times more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20 percent or higher (McArdle 2003).

Sample With the help of several youth outreach workers (most of whom were former gang members) and other people who were well connected to the city’s gang-involved youth, Nurge met and interviewed seventy-five girls who were involved in gangs or cliques. These young women were members of twenty-five different groups (fourteen gangs and eleven cliques), which were located in fifteen different neighborhoods across the city. Sixty percent of the interviewees were African American, 30 percent were Latina (primarily Puerto Rican and Dominican), and 10 percent were of mixed racial and ethnic identity (including Cape Verdean, Jamaican, Haitian, and Caucasian). The average age of girls in the sample was sixteen. Forty-five of the young women interviewed were from groups that they labeled and defined as gangs, and thirty of the young women sampled were members of groups they identified as cliques. Although a full discussion of the differences between cliques and gangs is beyond the scope of this chapter, generally speaking, cliques were smaller (averaging five members), less organized, and less delinquent than gangs. The gang members studied were involved in more serious types of crime than those in cliques (and committed crime more frequently), although the prevalence of clique and gang members’ arrests was roughly equivalent. About 50 percent of all clique and gang members had been arrested at least once. However, the majority of clique members’ arrests (91 percent) were for fighting, whereas gang members’ arrests were more varied; they included shoplifting, assault and battery, armed robbery, disorderly conduct, drug sales, and attempted murder. Overall, however, there was great variation in the extent to which gangs (collectively) and gang members (individually) engaged in crime and delinquency. Some gangs and cliques regularly sold drugs, engaged in ongoing fights with other gangs, or engaged in other types of crime (e.g., one coed gang specialized in car theft; another frequently shoplifted or boosted), whereas others were seldom involved in any type of delinquent or criminal activity. Almost all of the gang and clique members were frequently involved in fights, however (both alone and with their group), and these altercations usually took place without the use of weapons. The young women in this study typically lived in a single-parent household; the majority had no contact with or financial support from their biological fathers. Although the respondents typically described their socioeconomic status as “OK” or “getting by,”

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it was clear that their households were experiencing multiple sources and outcomes of financial stress. Most of the young women interviewed noted that their mothers were working more than one job, which minimized their ability to spend time with or supervise their children. The majority of jobs in which their moms were employed were minimum-wage (or slightly above) service sector positions (e.g., janitorial or cleaning work at local hospitals, retail). The girls’ family incomes were no match for the Boston rental housing market (one of the most expensive in the country), and many of them were living in subsidized government housing (either Section 8 or housing projects), in which the rates of crime, gangs, and drugs are notably higher. Consistent with prior research on girls’ delinquency and gang membership, many of the young women in this sample came from troubled home environments (Acoca 1999; Moore 1991). About 50 percent of the gang and clique members had run away from home in the year before being interviewed, and several of the older girls (in their late teens or early twenties) had permanently left home at a young age. Twenty-six percent of the sample had lived with other relatives or in foster care for at least some period of time, with about 10 percent bouncing back and forth between various arrangements. Although the reasons for leaving home varied, physical or sexual abuse was a primary cause. Approximately one-third of all clique and gang members interviewed (32 percent of current and former gang members and 36 percent of clique members) admitted they had experienced sexual or physical abuse at the hands of a family member or boyfriend. Tonya, one of the girls who joined a gang soon after leaving home, emphasized her need to get out of this household: If I didn’t get outta my house when I did I don’t know what would’ve happened. I was gettin’ to the point where I was like fantasizing about hurting him [a family member who sexually abused her] . . . ya know, like what it would be like to slice him up, make him feel that kinda pain. . . . I’m glad I left when I did, though.

Once out of their household, girls who ran away (and intended to stay away) were in the streets and immediately confronting a host of new challenges related to where and how to live on their own. For many of them, a gang was an available and attractive option for meeting their basic needs for food, shelter, and safety. Liz, an eighteen-year-old gang member who left home at sixteen after a violent encounter with her stepfather, explained, Where was I gonna go? I’m out there ’cuz I can’t go home . . . so I got nowhere to live, no money in my pocket, and nobody watchin’ my back. My girls [the gang she became involved in within a week of leaving home] took me in. . . . Everybody be sayin’ how a gang’s like a family and whatever. . . . I don’t think that’s always the truth, cuz some gangs be killing their own members and shit . . . but for me it was true actually. They took me in and treated me like blood. . . . They stepped up when I had nowhere else to go. . . . I’ll always remember that.

For displaced girls such as Liz, with few or no options, joining a gang was a means of survival. Under those circumstances, and relative to other options, joining a gang

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appeared to be an attractive solution; it offered security, economic opportunities, and the social support of members.

Study Findings The Thrill of Violence Sometimes it just feels so good to kick the shit out of someone. . . . I can’t really explain it. It just makes you feel so . . . powerful. (Kendra, a sixteen-year-old member of a female affiliate gang, explaining the rush of power and excitement she sometimes experiences when engaging in violence)

Much of the girls’ aggression and fighting in this study was connected to perceived or actual acts of disrespect (e.g., dirty looks, mad-dogging, name calling) against a girl or her group, but some girls described an urge to fight “for no good reason.” Angela, the leader of a girl gang, described her occasional desire to fight without cause: Yeah, we just go and look for trouble sometimes. . . . Sometimes it’s just like I wanna see blood! I just get the urge for it. I think I got Satan in me cuz I just wanna rip someone’s skin out and just really fight them. . . . Sometimes I’ll just pick someone off the streets.

Research on women offenders (both juvenile and adult) has consistently revealed that they are more likely to internalize their feelings of anger, frustration, and hostility and engage in acts of self-destruction (including self mutilation, such as cutting their wrists or arms or using drugs, as previously mentioned), whereas men are more likely to express such emotions externally through aggressive actions toward others. But clearly there are also girls who outwardly express negative emotions, at least some of the time. One of the themes that emerged from this research was that the girls who were most vocal in expressing their enthusiasm and excitement about participating in gang-related violence were the ones who had admitted to experiencing the most extensive, enduring, and traumatic sexual or physical violence victimization in their pasts. To further explore these issues, Emma, Jade, and Mary—the three young women to be profiled in this section—were selected because their experiences highlight the other types of violence (besides fighting about issues of respect) that some gang members engaged in and the nature of such acts, the sense of power and control they felt when committing such acts, and the reasons why such emotions may have been more important and satisfying for some young women than others. The interview data were collected by Nurge, and references to the research (written in first person in the following sections) are to her.

Emma and Jade: Sisters in Crime I met sisters Emma and Jade (and eventually a few of their siblings not discussed here) through a youth worker at the community center in which I volunteered and

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conducted fieldwork; I had no idea these girls were sisters until much later. Emma and Jade’s family had lived in these housing projects for many years and had a long history of gang involvement, beginning with a brother (Alberto) who had co-founded the neighborhood gang in the mid-1980s. When I interviewed Emma, she was officially out of this gang that her older brother had started, after having been a member for several years. When questioned about the best and worst aspects of gang membership, Emma explained that the worst thing about being in a gang was the shooting, but she went on to enthusiastically recount her gang-related gun experiences. She described how much she enjoyed the thrill of holding a gun, shooting it, and hearing gunfire. Emma noted how exciting all of this was to her during her membership and expressed mixed emotions about it at the time of our interview. She said she regretted her violent actions, yet she grew animated and wistful when discussing them. She went on to explain an incident in which she used a gun that she often carried: emma: Yeah, well, [it was] a drive-by. dana: Could you tell me about that? emma: Against . . . it was all about Beethoven Park [a rival gang]. We used to fight with them everyday. We’d just drive-by together [shoot at them from the car] where they used to hang. dana: Were you trying to shoot someone in particular? emma: Anybody, whoever’s at the park’s getting shot. dana: So did you hit anyone when you shot? emma: No. . . . I don’t know. . . . That was the only time I did it. But they usually would roll mostly every day. And bikes sometimes—they would go on their bikes. dana: How did you feel after you did that? emma: I wanted to go back and do it again! [enthusiastically exclaimed]. But they [the guys] didn’t want to.

Emma’s younger sister Jade joined a different mixed-sex gang during her teenage years and also participated in extensive violent behavior, some of which involved guns. Her criminal acts (drug sales, robberies, shootings) typically included several of the other young women in her group but not the guys. In describing her gang’s activities, Jade discussed her use of weapons to get what she wanted. dana: What [kind of weapon] did you usually carry? jade: I usually had the gun to myself. The other girls had a knife or a razor. If you know how to use the razor in your mouth, you had a razor in your mouth. If you know how to use a knife or whatever, pull it out. I used to always carry the gun for a whole week and then I’d give the gun to one of my girls that I know that would use it for the right sake, not for stupid sake. I’d give the gun up. But I usually mostly had the gun with me. dana: Did you ever pull it? jade: Well, when I needed to. If somebody ever came up to me like they was gonna do something to me. I never pulled it out on nobody for no reason. . . . We only use guns when someone’s gonna pull out a gun on us or whenever we’re gonna rob

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somebody, whenever we’re gonna raid somebody, whenever we’re gonna go out on a shootout or whatever, a drive by. dana: Who would you rob? jade: We’ll rob . . . all we do is just look at the person. If you’re walking down the street and you see us just chilling, a whole bunch of girls in baggy pants, you know, dressed like a gang, you know, have their scarf on or whatever. And we see you walking fast, she’s easy to run on, just like that. We go up behind you, we have on black jeans. . . . We usually rob you at night. We have on black sneakers, black jeans, we always have double clothes on in case 5–0, they try to identify us, we take off our hoodies, jeans, switch sneakers or whatever and, you know, walk right by the person. They can’t say it’s us. dana: Did you do it in your neighborhood, or did you go other places? jade: We’d go other places, we go to Jackson Park . . . we go to Horace Ave. Wherever we wanted to go. Wherever we think it was simple to rob somebody. dana: Would you usually use a gun? jade: We use a gun, we use a knife, whatever we had to . . . dana: And what would you take? jade: Take all their money. “Run your loot. You don’t run your loot, we’re taking you to a corner. We don’t want to hurt you . . . us girls.” I don’t know about the guys ’cause we never went to rob with the guys but us girls, we don’t want to hurt you, we don’t want to shoot you. If you don’t run your loot, we’re gonna beat your ass. We ain’t gonna shoot you, we’re just gonna beat you. . . . They usually gave us the money. . . . We picked people who woulda had some cash. . . . We just take their rings, we take their chains, we take their beeper, take their money or whatever. Stuff we needed. Some people we had to jump them, put them in a corner and jump them to give us the money. Not all the time.

Mary’s Gangs From approximately age twelve to eighteen, Mary was a member of two different girl gangs (at the same time), although she was locked up on an attempted murder conviction for at least two of those years. One of her gangs was a group of cousins who had their own drug sales business; the other was the earliest female component of the Maple Park gang (the same group Emma was in but during an earlier time period). During Mary’s membership years this was a highly independent female affiliate group whose members participated in myriad crimes, most of which did not involve their male counterparts. This group was unusually well organized, with girls being assigned specific positions and roles in the gang. Mary, who had shooting experience from her childhood (her stepdad had taken her to the firing range with him), explained her role as shooter in the latter group, beginning at age thirteen. When Mary was asked to engage in shootings, she was to shoot to maim or hurt but not to kill (another girl had that designated role). The whole time I was with them [3.5 years], I only shot like three people, ’cause after that I went to jail for two years so I couldn’t do anything. . . . But in jail I stabbed people.

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Like Jade’s affiliate gang, Mary’s group of young women also ran its own drug sales business and participated in violent crimes, including robberies and elaborately planned shootings, which were typically staged as sniper attacks from roofs. It should be noted that this group was involved in significantly more serious and frequent criminal activity than other female gangs studied and was much more deviant and organized than the typical girl gang. Mary explained that almost all of the fifteen girls in the group had a gun at all times, and these were immediately disposed of after use. The group interacted daily but also met formally once every weekend in order to plan subsequent criminal activities: [We’d meet] just to see how the organization was going, how the drugs were coming in, how the guns were . . . how our rep was being out there, if everybody knew who we were, and from there we would’ve made like a plan. Next time we had to do a certain hit, if we had to rob somebody, whatever, we would plan how we was going to do it—this person was gonna do this; make sure you do that. We would check out the area, make a map—each person knew where they were gonna be at so before we did anything we had it organized in a way to make sure this is your spot, that’s your spot. . . . The only time we would’ve been unorganized was if we were walking down the street and happened to see one of our enemies that is from another gang that we didn’t get along with. That’s the only way. So if we were gonna do something, we planned it before we do anything.

Before being admitted into this gang, Mary and the other prospective members had to undergo a three-month initiation test period during which they were required to commit a variety of crimes (gang males were not involved in any of these decisions or events). mary: We used to snatch old ladies’ pocketbooks; we used to sometimes beat other people that we didn’t like—we had to just go rush them, hit them with bats, hit them with whatever we wanted to hit them with; I had to break into people’s houses, take things, come back out. . . . I had to try to take cars—start it up and steal the car, and then I would go around and pick them up. . . . Other things like, “You need to go up there and hit somebody and then we’ll join you.” I’m like “OK,” so they gave me a bat. . . . It was a lot. I had to do a lot of things. dana: Did you have any second thoughts when you had to do all this stuff? mary: No, back in the day, I loved doing it. I loved actually doing everything that I was supposed to be doing. My mind was just like . . . it was a good thing for me. . . . It’s like I wanted to be there.

In addition to her participation in this gang and role as shooter, Mary also belonged to an all-girl gang of cousins. She explained that this group was formed largely to seek revenge against their parents, whom the girls felt had wronged them: Because the way my cousins was, we had a lot of problems, a lot of domestic violence around the area. We didn’t always get along with our parents. We wanted to get revenge at them so we wanted to do a lot of things just to get back at our parents, which we were

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accomplishing because we used to run away from home, used to stay out all night, you know, sell, shoplift if we needed something. And every time we would have got arrested, to be in the police station for like a day or two, our parents had to come and get us because we were still juvenile.

This gang of cousins was involved in much less violence than her other gang; their primary activities included selling and smoking marijuana and hanging out together and talking about family issues. Because this group was located across town and it was understood that they were her real relatives, Mary’s dual membership did not present a conflict of interest to her other gang. In fact, she spent the majority of time with the other gang but enjoyed this association with her cousins and the opportunity to vent with them about family problems.

Victims as Offenders In analyzing these girls’ descriptions of the violent acts they engaged in and considering each girl’s background characteristics, we found a link between their personal offending and victimization experiences. However, the connection was not the typical one offered, whereby girls engaged in violent crime only to avoid imminent personal victimization. Rather, the young women who engaged in the most violent crimes, did so the most frequently, and spoke with great enthusiasm about the feelings of power and control they experienced in doing so were the same ones who had suffered extensive sexual (and, less often, physical) abuse during childhood. Although their violent acts were not an immediate or direct response to their victimization, the excitement they expressed with regard to feeling in control and being in charge of a violent situation is understandable in light of their experiences as victims. In addition to Mary, Jade, and Emma, there were several other young women (roughly 25 percent of all the gang members in the sample) for whom this pattern emerged. Although not all the girls who reported being sexually (or physically) abused had engaged in violent acts or discussed the rush and pleasure of doing so, this connection was evident in enough cases to reveal a clear pattern. More than 80 percent of the young women in this sample who reported having perpetrated multiple violent acts (beyond just fighting) also admitted to having a history of sexual or physical abuse. A closer examination of Mary’s, Jade’s, and Emma’s background and victimization experiences helps to illuminate why their participation in gang violence may have felt satisfying and empowering.

Emma’s and Jade’s Family Background I interviewed Emma and Jade separately and was unaware that they were siblings until several months later, when I interviewed a third sister, Margaret, who played on the basketball team that I helped to coach and was also gang involved. Although their personal experiences at home and in their gangs varied, all three sisters spoke of multiple tensions and problems in their family of seven girls and two boys. Poverty was among the many family stressors; most of the family received supplemental security

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income because of health problems, and the 11-person family lived in a crowded public housing apartment. Jade explained her family’s household income: My mother gets SSI, my father gets SSI, I get SSI, my brother gets SSI, my sister gets SSI, my other sister gets SSI cause there’s four of us that have sickle cell anemia. My parents got diabetes and my two little sisters are on welfare.

Emma talked about the regularity of household violence. Her brother, a drug addict, used to attack and beat her and other family members “cuz the drugs got him so hyped up . . . he’d just hit on us. . . . Like at night he would just grab me by the neck and just snatch off my jewelry.” Although her parents tolerated her brother’s behavior because “he was a man, he could’ve done anything,” they were strict with her and her sisters, and beatdowns were frequently administered as punishment for their misbehavior. Jade discussed their father’s drunken aggression but explained that “he never hit my mother cuz he knew there were too many of us and we’d whoop his ass for laying a hand on her.” She also explained that “we all used to fight—there was always a fight in my house . . . and not just little kid stuff.” Margaret, the third sister I interviewed, described how one of her sisters had recently stabbed another one during a fight in the family’s apartment. Although they all emphasized different features of their household, the cumulative picture that emerged was that of a very crowded and turbulent home, with a multitude of family problems and challenges and a lack of peace, security, and safety. Jade left home at age fourteen to join and live with a female affiliate gang. In addition to the same family problems that her sisters Emma and Margaret identified, Jade discussed the sexual victimization she and one other sister (not Emma or Margaret) had experienced in their household and why she needed to leave: I never felt safe in my house. . . . Things happened to me there, with family . . . that’s why I left. My mother used to always cry, wish I was home. And I was like, if you wish I was home, you get the person that I want out of the house. I don’t like being in my house. . . . I got abused by both of my brothers, my cousin, and two uncles. That’s why I never liked staying there. It was going on for ten years, since I was five till fourteen. My mother didn’t know ’cuz I was scared of telling her ’cuz they used to threaten me saying that if you tell anybody, I’m gonna say you asked for it. So I thought my father—he was very strict—would beat me. . . . I used to think it was all my fault. . . . I was used. . . . It’s changed me a lot. I get scared over every little thing. If a guy comes up to me and I don’t know you and you try to push up on me I get scared. When I’m by myself, I start getting flashbacks, you see me crying a lot. I start thinking about everything that happened to me. And it’s not a very good feeling. It’s not. People be asking me what’s wrong. It’s hard to talk to them. Cause I’m the type . . . if I wasn’t the type who keeps things to myself, it’s fine. . . . I’ll sit . . . talk to you about what’s going on, why I feel depressed. But I’m the type who keeps things inside. It’s hard for me to talk to somebody else.

Jade’s descriptions (and facial expressions and body language) of her involvement in robberies, drive-bys, and other shootings conveyed the sense of empowerment she

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experienced through these violent acts. “My nickname was ‘Loco’ cuz I didn’t give a fuck at that time. . . . I just did whatever I wanted to. . . . It felt good.” Although her victimization experiences may not have directly caused her subsequent criminality, the link between them was apparent. After nine years of sexual abuse (and additional experiences of physical violence in her home) and utter powerlessness, gang involvement provided Jade with opportunities to dominate and control others and receive respect and status for doing so. Not surprisingly, this felt good; for once Jade felt loved, respected, in control, and able to do the things she wanted to do. The gang also provided her with a means to escape her violent home environment and offered her a sense of love and belonging. Jade explained the importance of the gang in her life: Being in a gang for me was like, they was my family. ’Cause my family was never there for me. They [the gang] were the ones feeding me. They were the ones giving me what I needed to survive out there or whatever. ’Cause I still . . . I’m not close with my real blood. I’m having problems with my blood, and the people out on the streets care more about me than they do. And no matter what, they still gonna be there for me even if we get into beef or whatever. I’ll never put my hands on them cause they were there for me when I really needed somebody.

Mary’s Family History Mary’s affiliate gang memberships began in a similar manner. After she had been raped (at age twelve) and her mother placed the blame for this on her (she was chastised for having been wearing a short skirt before the rape took place), Mary left home and became involved in the two different gangs. She explained why she was attracted to both gangs: I was in the streets. . . . I had a lot of problems with my family. They always considered me the black sheep, so I figured this way I have two families [the two gangs] that I know will be there for me no matter what happens. My mother and father weren’t there for me, so I didn’t consider them my family. I felt alone. A lot of things happened to me. When I was twelve I went into the gang, and before that I was also raped [by an ex-boyfriend]. . . . I told my mother it happened and she knew ’cuz I was bleeding and everything—she used to tell me it was my fault. She never really tried to help me out. . . . She’d say I was like provoking the guy who did it ’cuz I used to wear little miniskirts sometimes. So I was hating her for that, and I didn’t want to be home. . . . I was like mad at everybody, and I was like if I get into this I can do whatever I want and hurt all the people that need to be getting hurt. That’s how I was feeling.

Before this incident of rape, Mary had also been molested by a male cousin. Both Mary and Jade mentioned the ongoing flashbacks they experienced (a common symptom of PTSD) and the difficulties they had coping with their sexual abuse. The gang provided them with diversionary activities and excitement that could help them to temporarily divert their minds from these traumatic experiences and concomitantly presented opportunities (otherwise unknown to them) to feel powerful, strong, and

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dominant. Although Jade did not discuss her victimization with other gang members, Mary and her gang of cousins shared these experiences: Yeah we talked about this stuff together. I mean we really wanted to get back at them [their victimizers], but we left it alone. One of my cousins got molested, another one got raped, I got raped and I also got molested . . . it was a boy cousin. The other ones had other problems, but it wasn’t like that. . . . But I mean we just got back at our family [by being in a gang and getting into trouble], but it wasn’t hurting the people that did what they did to us. . . . We used to just like say how we felt and what we would have liked to done. We used to have like a punching bag so when we started feeling really, really angry we would just punch and kick that—just act like that was that person.

Coping with Victimization Through the Support of Gang Peers In addition to serving as a refuge and providing opportunities for girls to feel empowered (sometimes through participation in violence), some of the groups (including Mary’s gang of cousins) also served a therapeutic function, allowing young women to share their personal experiences of abuse and neglect with empathetic others. Most of the girls who discussed having been sexually or physically victimized before joining their gang noted that other girls in their groups had experienced similar problems. For example, Zanda, a fifteen-year-old clique member, had not been victimized herself, but many of her fellow clique members had been, and she considered this a primary reason why girls joined such groups: Half the girls in my clique were abused by somebody. . . . We all talk about it together. It’s sad sometimes, but after we talk about it we’re able to laugh and say that it’s in the past and behind us.

Zanda further noted that about half of the girls in her clique of twenty had been institutionalized at one time or another for depression, suicide attempts, or other mental health problems: Yeah, we all talk about it together, and they don’t be ashamed to talk about it. They just come straight forward and be like, “Well, when I was little . . . that’s why I was in such and such a place because my father, he used to touch me and stuff and I didn’t tell my mother, so I just tried to kill myself and they took me from my mother and I told them why,” and so I was like, “Oh that’s real sad,” and then we all just sit there quietly for a minute and [the girl] will be like, “What? Come on—I can laugh at it today.” And I’ll just sit there like, “I don’t think that’s something to laugh about,” and then we’ll all just start laughing.

An obvious important function of this clique (and certainly some of the other cliques and, especially, gangs studied) was to provide a supportive context in which girls could share their painful experiences. Although these young women probably could have benefited from professional counseling and therapy (which most did not receive), they

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were able to receive the support, advice, and empathy of peers who had experienced similar problems. Unfortunately, the peer group (gang) from whom they received this support typically also exposed them to further violence (and possibly victimization).

PPP Although not all sexually or physically abused girls become involved in delinquency or crime, this chapter summarized and highlighted evidence from a variety of studies that reveal that female offenders have higher rates of sexual and physical victimization than the general population of women and girls. Findings from this study of girl gang members in Boston illustrated some of the common pathways between childhood sexual and physical victimization experiences and subsequent violent offending. This research suggests that there was a link between some of the young women’s victimization experiences, their involvement in gangs, and their violent offending. A pattern emerged whereby girls who had suffered the most extensive abuse typically joined (and often lived with) a gang in order to get away from their abusive situation or enjoy the comfort, support, and familial benefits of the group; were exposed to and became involved in violent criminal behavior through their group membership; and found such behavior to be rewarding and empowering (at least for a certain period of time) because it allowed them to exert control and reap other benefits (e.g., monetary gains, status). Though certainly not the sole explanation, girls’ victimization experiences appear to play a contributing role in their gang membership and criminality. Some girls’ decisions to join gangs can be characterized as resistance to their victimization experiences. Unfortunately, the venue (gangs) through which they are escaping (and attempting to heal from) their abuse concomitantly exposes them to additional violent encounters, possibly exacerbating the effects of their previous trauma. Ideally, the refuge, support, and opportunities to feel strong and meaningful that these girls sought and found in a gang would be available through other outlets. In addition to their victimization experiences, the girls in this study experienced multiple forms of marginality (see Vigil 2002) before joining gangs. Although many of the sources of their marginality have existed throughout U.S. history, the recent and ongoing shifts in the labor market and increasingly inequitable distribution of income—as a result of globalization and the international outsourcing of our traditional living-wage jobs—has contributed to the problems of urban poverty, male joblessness (and related familial absenteeism), and youth hopelessness. Remedies to gangs and the violence associated with them must acknowledge the global and domestic market forces contributing to their proliferation. Gang members in the United States typically are portrayed as violent predators (indeed, much recent legislation calls them “urban terrorists”), devoid of humanity. Although such characterizations were historically limited to men, in recent years female “gangstas” have been labeled as equally dangerous and irredeemable. A close examination of the pathways by which gang members come to be involved in gang violence reveals that such caricatures not only are simplistic and lacking in context but also contribute to the public’s desire to “lock them up and throw away the key.” The notion of a gang serving as a support group for adolescent victims of abuse, neglect, or other types

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of physical or emotional harm is one that has received minimal attention (although see chapter 7, this volume, and various pieces in Kontos et al. 2003) and warrants further discussion. Reframing the “gang problem” into a broader discussion of members’ resistance to and recovery from the marginalization, victimization, and oppression they experience in their homes, communities, and schools is recommended as a means of shifting dialogue away from purely punitive approaches. References Acoca, L. 1999. Investing in girls: A 21st century strategy. In Juvenile Justice, Vol. VI. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. American Psychological Association. 1994. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, 4th ed. Washington, DC: APA. Bolton, F. G., J. W. Reich, and S. E. Gutierres. 1977. Delinquency patterns in maltreated children and siblings. Victimology, 2(2): 349–357. Boston Foundation. 2004. Boston Indicators Project: Summary Findings. Boston: Boston Foundation. Boston Redevelopment Authority. 2001. Boston’s unemployment is lowest ever measured. Boston: City of Boston. Braga, A. A., D. M. Kennedy, A. M. Piehl, and E. J. Waring. 2001. Reducing Gun Violence: The Boston Gun Project’s Operation Ceasefire. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice. Brotherton, D. C. and C. Salazar-Atias. 2003. Amor de Reina! The pushes and pulls of group membership among the Latin Queens. In L. Kontos, D. Brotherton, and L. Barrios, eds., Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspectives, 183–209. New York: Columbia University Press. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 1997. Sex Differences in Violent Victimization. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Campbell, A. 1991. The Girls in the Gang, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Cicchetti, D. and V. Carlson, eds. 1989. Child Maltreatment: Theory and Research on the Causes and Consequences of Child Abuse and Neglect. New York: Cambridge University Press. Duncan, R. D. 2000. Childhood maltreatment and college drop-out rates. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 15: 987–995. Dutton, D. G. 1995. The Domestic Assault of Women: Psychological and Criminal Justice Perspectives. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Farley, M., A. Cotton, J. Lynne, S. Zumbeck, F. Spiwak, M. E. Reyes, D. Alvarez, and U. Sezgin. 2003. Prostitution and trafficking in nine countries: An update on violence and posttraumatic stress disorder. In M. Farley, ed., Prostitution, Trafficking and Traumatic Stress, 33–74. Binghamton, NY: Haworth. Gorey, K. M. and D. R. Leslie. 1997. The prevalence of child sexual abuse: Integrative review adjustment for potential response and measurement biases. Child Abuse and Neglect, 21: 391–398. Hagan, J. and B. McCarthy. 1992. Streetlife and delinquency. British Journal of Sociology, 42: 533–561. Harlow, C. W. 1999. Prior Abuse Reported by Inmates and Probationers. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Inciardi, J., D. Lockwood, and A. E. Pottieger. 1993. Women and Crack Cocaine. Indianapolis: Macmillan.

Victimization, Resistance, and Violence Joe, K. A. and M. Chesney-Lind. 1995. Just every mother’s angel: An analysis of gender and ethnic variations in youth gang membership. Gender and Society, 9: 408–431. Katz, R. S. 2000. Explaining girls’ and women’s crime and desistance in the context of their victimization experiences. Violence Against Women, 6: 633–660. Kilpatrick, D. G., B. E. Saunders, L. J. Veronen, C. J. Best, and V. M. Von. 1987. Criminal victimization: Lifetime prevalence, reporting to police and psychological impact. Crime and Delinquency, 33: 479–489. Kontos, L., D. Brotherton, and L. Barrios, eds. 2003. Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press. Koss, M. P. and T. E. Dinero. 1988. A discriminant analysis of risk factors among a national sample of college women. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 57: 133–147. McArdle, N. 2003, April. Race, Place, and Opportunity (Boston). Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University. McCarthy, B. 1995. On the Streets: Youth in Vancouver. Report Prepared for the Ministry of Social Services, British Columbia. Michaud, M. 1988. Dead End: Homeless Teenagers, a Multi-Service Approach. Calgary: Detselig Enterprises. Miller, J. 1998. Gender and victimization risk among young women in gangs. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 35: 429–453. ——. 2001. One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs and Gender. New York: Oxford University Press. Moore, J. 1991. Going Down to the Barrio: Homeboys and Homegirls in Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mueller, E. and N. Silverman. 1989. Peer relations in maltreated children. In D. Cicchetti and V. Carlson, eds., Child Maltreatment: Theory and Research on the Causes and Consequences of Child Abuse and Neglect, 529–578. New York: Cambridge University Press. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). 2001. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Real Illness. Publication 00-4675. Bethesda, MD: NIMH. Norris, F. H. and K. Kaniasty. 1994. Psychological distress following criminal victimization in the general population: Cross-sectional, longitudinal, and prospective analyses. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 62(1): 111–123. Osgood, D. W., J. K. Wilson, P. M. O’Malley, J. G. Bachman, and L. D. Johnston. 1996. Routine activities and individual deviant behavior. American Sociological Review, 61: 635–655. Owen, B. and B. Bloom. 1995. Profiling women prisoners: Findings from national surveys and a California sample. The Prison Journal, 75: 165–185. Reiss, A. J. and D. P. Farrington. 1991. Advancing knowledge about co-offending: Results from a prospective longitudinal survey of London males. Journal of Law and Criminology, 82: 360–395. Resick, P. A. 1993. The psychological impact of rape. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 8(2): 223–255. Rutter, M. 1987. Psychosocial resilience and protective mechanisms. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 57: 316–331. Seng, M. J. 1989. Child sexual abuse and adolescent prostitution: A comparative analysis. Adolescence, 24: 665–675. Smith, C. and T. P. Thornberry. 1995. The relationship between childhood maltreatment and adolescent involvement in delinquency. Criminology, 33: 451–481. Spitzberg, B. H. 1999. An analysis of empirical estimates of sexual aggression victimization in perpetration. Violence and Victims, 14: 241–260.

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Part 4. Youth, Violence, and Subcultures of Whiteness

Randy Blazak

10. Ethnic Envy How Teens Construct Whiteness in Globalized America

We had a bit of a joke in my small Georgia town when I was a kid: “In the South there are only two ethnic groups, black and white.” It was a joke because in Stone Mountain, Georgia, in the late 1970s, there was one Jewish kid (Neil) and a few Catholic families (like the O’Briens). But if you wanted to go to a real Mexican restaurant, there was one over in Tucker, and for Chinese you had to go into Atlanta. There was a girl from Thailand in my school, or maybe it was Vietnam. The concept of diversity meant mainly which Protestant faith you belonged to. As a Presbyterian, I was a minority in a heavily Baptist Georgia. Something all those WASP kids had in common was the awareness that things were changing. Integration came slow to Dekalb County (too slow according to the 1992 Supreme Court ruling in Freeman v. Pitts), but there was an ad hoc bussing program called Minority to Majority Transfer, which allowed students to voluntarily transfer to schools where they would be in the minority. Of course, that meant that a lot of black kids transferred to the better-funded suburban white schools. There weren’t a lot of white kids transferring. In fact, the influx of new black students accelerated the white flight of paranoid white families back to the hills and newer edge cities just outside the metro suburbs. By the late 1980s, my predominantly white high school had become a black school. Part of the change was caused by the unchecked expansion of the city of Atlanta. My town went from the rural birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, to a subdivision-covered suburb of Atlanta, to “the city.” But the second change came from the makeup of the new residents. The Old South dichotomy of black and white had given way to a wide swath of new Georgians, including Cambodians, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Vietnamese, Ethiopians, and, in the 1990s, Russians and (Soviet) Georgians. Some of the whites who stayed behind were a bit freaked out. Their kids had to navigate a new cultural landscape that they knew little of themselves. Some youth embraced the change as exciting and new. It was a long-awaited break from the black and white choices of the past (after all, I had to go off to college to discover bagels and Central America). Others

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trembled in fear as the simplistic black and white world they knew so well faded away, and with it the comforting rules and expectations. In a kind of ethnic King of the Hill game, some of those kids discovered racist activism as a way to reclaim their spot on the top of the hill. I’ve been studying these kids since the late 1980s. In Analyzing Social Settings, Lofland and Lofland (1988) suggest that ethnographic researchers “start where they are” by choosing subjects in which they are somehow already involved. As a young graduate student who was watching the rise of hate crimes, I thought, as a white man, I had an opportunity to better understand the new wave of neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, and organized bigots who were coming from the same suburban schools that I had come from, not rural areas, as the stereotype dictated. Instead of vilifying them or turning them into cartoon characters (both of which the media were doing well at the time), I wanted to understand how they felt the changes in society had threatened their white identity. My work has followed the research of Mark S. Hamm, who also studied skinheads. Hamm’s perspective has been that ethnographic research of deviant groups allows the researcher to construct meanings from the perspectives of the subjects, not the researcher (Ferrell and Hamm 1998). One of the things I learned in my nearly eight-year undercover study of the skinhead subculture (Blazak 1995) was that young members of racist groups were not anomalies. They were just the most dramatic manifestation of feelings that many whites were having and continue to have about ethnic, gender, sexual, and economic changes in America. After my skinhead study was completed, I continued my research on racism and youth and kept an eye on the ever-changing world of organized hate. Although hate crimes don’t rank as high in the current news climate as they did a few years ago, they still continue to happen daily. Recently, many hate groups have moved away from the overt images of bigotry that garnered so much attention and scorn. By 2003, the leading hate groups, Aryan Nations, The National Alliance, and The World Church of the Creator (WOTC), had collapsed because of the death of leaders and successful lawsuits. WOTC leader Matt Hale and Klan icon David Duke were both in prison. Into this void, a “kinder, gentler” form of hate has emerged, using politically correct speech to avoid detection but also using coded language to attract white kids who are searching for a meaningful ethnic identity outside the black–white dichotomy.

Anomie and the Suburbs Emile Durkheim first introduced the concept of anomie in his 1897 study Le Suicide, which served as a starting point for the sociological endeavor. Durkheim defined anomie as a sense of normlessness or confusion over expectations, often caused by rapid social change. For Durkheim, anomie was a way of explaining the difference in suicide rates between different groups. For example, Protestants, who have a less rule-bound faith than most Catholics, had higher suicide rates in his research. Durkheim’s eighteenth-century notion that rapid social change and its impact on the social organism leads to aberrant social behavior could not have been more prophetic for the youth of the twenty-first century. The cliché that the only thing constant

Ethnic Envy

is change is life as usual for the high-tech kids of today. Besides the digital revolution, which has changed the way they listen to music, do schoolwork, and generally communicate, the pace of social change has been set by movements toward equality that are associated with previous generations. Gender changes have taken mom out of the kitchen and made her the primary breadwinner. Sexual liberation also brought gays and lesbians out of the closet and into prime time and the classroom. Immigration and racial changes have diversified the previously segregated schools beyond easy demographic classifications. These social changes have occurred at the same time as the economic changes of the global economy. A high school dropout can no longer count on a steady job at the factory because the factory is now in Vietnam, where the labor is cheap. Teens looking for summer jobs at fast-food places will find them taken by downsized adults who are still employed, but just barely. The anomie is evident in the rapidly transforming suburbs, which have become one of the front lines of globalization. On an economic level, the deindustrialization that decimated urban areas in the 1980s, while continuing into the 2000s, has been eclipsed by the growth of high-tech jobs in the outlying areas of metropolitan areas (Pastor 2000). Gentrification of urban areas brought higher-income residents into cities, pushing low-wage workers further from the urban core. The 2000 census reported that, except for Detroit and Philadelphia, major metro areas’ populations grew in the 1990s. In the information age, workers are more likely to work in front of a computer or a broom in a suburban office. Those who can afford it may commute from gentrified neighborhoods; those who can’t may live in the growing number of suburban apartment complexes stuck between strip malls that have rapidly changed the American landscape. However, it is not just the workforce of the suburbs that has been globalized. It is the faces of those living there. Once viewed as enclaves where whites escaped “urban problems” (i.e., minorities), now the suburbs and edge cities around them are increasingly diverse as the job base moves away from the city. Teenagers are on the front line of this demographic change. They are more ethnically diverse than their parents’ generation. Whereas 83.3 percent of those eighteen and older are white, only 79 percent of those ages fourteen to seventeen are white (U.S. Census 2001). Young people also are more likely to be biracial or multiracial. The 2000 census reported that the median age of those listing two or more races was nearly thirteen years younger than those reporting only one race. Whereas 24.3 percent of those identifying themselves as belonging to one race were under eighteen, 41.9 percent of those claiming two or more races were under eighteen. High schools such as mine that were divided into white and black camps now include multiple ethnicities and people who claim multiple identifications (nearly 7 million Americans claimed multiple identities in 2000; 47,868 claimed four or more racial and ethnic categories). The campus landscape changes with the increasing diversity as each group (new and old) jockeys for status on the teen ladder. One of the most visible manifestations of this is the presence of officially sanctioned ethnic clubs. Black student unions in the 1970s paved the way for other minority groups to form empowering clubs. Any nonrural high school will have a healthy list of ethnic clubs. Beverly Hills High School, made famous in the 1990s TV series Beverly Hills, 90210, is fairly representative of suburban school in terms of its racial makeup (figure 10.1).

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BHHS STUDENT ETHNIC DISTRIBUTION

White

77.2%

Asian

13.8%

Black

4.7%

Hispanic

3.6%

Other

.7%

Beverly Hills High School had seventy official clubs listed for the 2003–2004 school year, including the Art Club, the Model UN Club, and the Science Club. The list also includes the Black Student Union, the Chinese Culture Club, the Filipino Club, the Jewish Student Union, and the Korean Club. It is not surprising that there is no “Caucasian Club” (although it should be noted for later discussion that Beverly Hills High School has a Pagan Club).

Ethnic Envy Twenty-first-century ethnicity is truly a postmodern phenomenon. The lack of clear categories of membership has created a rootless and disembedded individual, trying to make sense out of the culturally valued concept of race. The result is the self-reflexive activity of identity construction (Bauman 1997). Young people use available resources to construct their own meaningful ethnicity, decentered from previous definitions of what it means to be white or other. It is not surprising that a nation as historically diverse as the United States holds many contradictions. The nature of our national values illustrates this: We value accumulation, but we also value generosity. When it comes to race and ethnicity, we are even more schizophrenic. We cling dearly to the ideas of assimilation and its exact opposite, pluralism. My “Introduction to Sociology” textbook from 1981 defines assimilation culturally and racially: “Cultural assimilation occurs when the minority group abandons its distinctive cultural traits and adopts those of the dominant culture; racial assimilation occurs when the physical differences between groups disappear as a result of interbreeding” (Robertson 1981:284). Pluralism is defined as “a situation in which different groups live in mutual respect while maintaining their own identities” (Robertson 1981:631). Essentially assimilation is our melting-pot ideal, and pluralism is our diversity ideal. Assimilation says this nation of immigrants gradually loses its ethnic diversity to become one common culture. Italian Americans, African Americans and Arab Americans become just Americans. The problem with assimilation is that it generally means minority groups are forced to become more white (e.g., changing

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their names, eye colors, holidays) to fit the image of the typical (dominant) American, which has been historically promoted as WASP. The assimilation of Native Americans was based on defeating their resistance, rooted in a policy of “kill the Indian but save the man” (Mills 2003:45). At the same time we tout pluralism, the idea of “honoring diversity” and enjoying the unique contributions of different groups (usually reduced to their cuisine: e.g., Mexican, Chinese, German). The problem with pluralism is that in order to maintain that uniqueness, groups need a little segregation and discrimination. If Chinese Americans successfully assimilate, there will be no more “Chinese Americans” or Chinatowns. My grandparents were really hoping I would end up with a nice Czech wife before I assimilated (or miscegenated) my ethnic identity away and my children became just ethnicityless American mutts. With these competing values you can see why America has such racial and ethnic postmodern confusion. It’s a mixed message. We are all equal, but some are more equal than others (Lewis 2003). On one hand, we are supposed to identify with the mainstream (read “WASP”) culture first; on the other hand, we are supposed to be proud of what makes us different from each other. You can see this unfold in immigrant families. The first generation reinforces pluralism by settling in familiar ethnic enclaves. The second generation casts off its stigmatizing immigrant identity by trying to assimilate as quickly as possible. (My grandparents refused to speak Czech when they were teens.) But after a few generations of assimilation, descendants realize they’ve lost what made them ethnically unique and swing back toward pluralism. This happened to me while I was in graduate school, when I took the Alex Haley route, going back to Prague to find my roots. I didn’t like being just another mutt. Assimilation to the WASP standard certainly has had negative effects on ethnic minorities who have traded in valuable cultural signifiers to become “more white.” Irish Catholic immigrants successfully “became whites” after decades of being seen as subhuman dogs (Gould 2000). Jews have had much success with American assimilation but have struggled not to lose their cultural identity. For example, Hanukkah is a minor Jewish holiday, but American Jews have had to elevate it into a major gift-giving holiday to exist alongside Christmas (Joselit 1994). Others lacking the physical characteristics needed to racially “melt in” learned how to “talk white” or “act white,” turning their backs on centuries of ethnic history. But assimilation has also affected whites who, with each generation, become less German, less Scottish, less Polish. There has been a decline of ethnic identities among whites, leading to an “identity vacuum” that has created certain hollowness among whites (Doane 2003). Researchers have seen this as part of a crisis of whiteness that has led to conservative and racist backlashes against civil rights, affirmative action, and multiculturalism (Omi and Winant 1986; Steinberg 1995). The history of white supremacy in America has accomplished many things, including promoting the idea that nonwhites should be ashamed of their difference. The civil rights movement and the “Black is beautiful” campaign of the early 1970s ushered in the wave of pride movements for oppressed people (e.g., black pride, brown pride, Native pride, gay pride). The dawn of multiculturalism brought those ignored voices to the American chorus and confronted the harsh realities of racism. But what is the new role of whites in the multicultural chorus? Discussions of diversity and multiculturalism

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usually are coded to mean “nonwhite,” just as the topic of gender is rarely about men. When whites are discussed it is in the role of slavemaster, bigot, and oppressor. How is a white mutt, in his or her identity vacuum, to navigate the new era of identity politics where “white” equals “racist”? The children of the global era confront the power of ethnic identity daily, with Black History Month, Chicano pride murals, Native American centers, Asian student clubs, heritage parades, and hip-hop music that promotes “Black Power” with the (formerly racist?) N-word. Teens who have the ability to see inequity at any level wonder, “Why can a black student say ‘nigger’ but a nonblack student can’t?” When I was in high school I wrote an editorial that asked, “If we have a Black History Month, why can’t we have a White History Month, and why does this question make me a racist?” It seemed like a perfectly fair question at the time. My journalism teacher should have made me get out my history book and acknowledge that every month was White History Month in our curriculum. At the time it was a simple desire to have something as cool as a history month of my own. Contemporary youth were born in the 1980s and 1990s, long after the front line civil rights battles. They have never seen forced segregation or forced integration. Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation (2002) reports about 8,000 hate crimes a year, they probably have never seen a lynching or a Klan cross burning. When they were born, the number-one family on TV was the Huxtables on The Cosby Show, a black family headed by parents who were doctors and lawyers. Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and even Rodney King are pages in a history book. I’ve had white students say to me, “Racism ended in the 1960s. Black people are just complaining now.” To many of these white youth, affirmative action, Black History Month, and any identity involving a hyphen seems unfair and unnecessary. But again, this is a nation of contradictions. I regularly speak to youths on these issues, both in my research and in my community presentations and volunteer work. They are interested that I grew up in a Klan town and now am an antiracist activist. I am interested in how their racial experience is similar to or different from mine, and in my skinhead subjects. One common theme is the desire among white youth for colorblindness. They live in a real-world Benetton ad. The typical white teen listens to hip-hop, eats burritos, bentos, and bagels, gets computer assistance from New Delhi, and downloads music from Brazil. He or she is more likely to go to school with an immigrant from Somalia than Sweden. There is a certain desire to see these influences in terms of their usefulness to youth culture, not of their racial or ethnic ranking. However, it must be made clear that colorblindness is a convenience for whites. It is a feelgood emotion that is a defense of the unequal status quo (Lewis 2003). The blindness begins to fade when it is time to bring nonwhite friends or lovers home. Employers and police certainly aren’t color blind. Minorities don’t have the luxury of being colorblind. And as soon as they finish the last chorus of “We Are the World,” most white youth aren’t either. Colorblindness belongs to the assimilationist who believes that everyone is basically the same. Multiculturalism belongs to the pluralist who enjoys the wide variety of color in the human race. This is where twenty-first-century white youth confront the issue of ethnic envy. For these kids, institutional racism is a historical artifact. Everywhere

Ethnic Envy

they look they see nonwhites in positions of economic, political, and cultural power, from rich rappers and athletes to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. They also see minorities celebrating their ethnicity in song, social movements, and art. High school curricula promote multiculturalism, which translates into minority-related events, and if minorities are (multi) cultural, then whites must be devoid of culture (Lewis 2003). It comes on like a one-two punch. Not only do whites not get a parade, a mural, or a month, but whites have nothing to be proud of, and if they start talking about “white pride” they will be accused of being neo-Nazi racists. Whites (outside Klan rallies) traditionally have had a hard time thinking of themselves as a coherent group. The very idea contradicts the WASP value of individualism. Assimilation of ethnic whites has also led to the miscegenation of many original ethnic identities. White Americans may report being “a quarter Italian” or “English on my mother’s side.” You often see people scrambling to find an Irish ancestor when St. Patrick’s Day approaches. Being a twenty-first-century white mutt seems somewhat rootless. And besides, everyone loves a parade. Of course, whether it is Gay Pride, St. Patrick’s Day, Martin Luther King Day, or any other minority-based event, the parade is viewed out of historical context. The years of violent oppression that came before the celebration are not seen. In many young white minds minorities unfairly benefit from multiculturalism; the plague of racism has been solved, and they get a parade. Not fair. The ethnic anomie that white youth feel has led some to become more engaged with minority groups in attempt to understand their experience. But it has also led to a certain level of ethnic envy. Ethnic envy is the belief that racial and ethnic minority groups are unfairly allowed to celebrate their cultural identity, whereas whites are not and are, in fact, lacking any meaningful ethnicity. Some students have responded by forming White Student Unions or European Clubs. In Georgia, a separate prom was held for white students of Taylor County High School in 2003. Some of that envy is based on a desire to experience the same joy of ethnic celebrations, but there is no white equivalent of Cinco de Mayo (although I argue that historically it has been called “the Fourth of July”). Much of the envy is based on ignorance of the history of oppression in America and how far racism reaches. Although a white student in 2008 has never owned a slave, there is a good chance he or she has belonged to a de facto white student group. But because whiteness is invisible to white students, they do not recognize their “normality.”

Racism and Globalized Identities Experimenting on Youth For the last half century the youth of America have been our guinea pigs in the great racial experiment. At least since September 23, 1957, when nine black students were escorted into Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, by armed police, adults have thrown children into integrated schools while they watched from their generally segregated world. What would happen? What we’ve seen over the last fifty years has been plenty

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of everything, from close interracial friendships to self-segregation (just view any high school lunchroom) and from (the feared by some) interracial romantic relationships to race riots (just view any high school parking lot). For the most part our integrated youth have not succeeded in killing each other or breeding each other out of existence. For both assimilationists and pluralists, that can be defined as success on some level. Perhaps the most compelling research on how youth navigate their racial anomie has been Pamela Perry’s book Shades of White (2002). Partly inspired by a news story about a southern California high school that started a European-American Club, Perry conducted a fascinating ethnographic study of two high schools, one a diverse urban school (Clavey High) and the other a predominantly white suburban school (Valley Grove High). After much observation and many interviews she found that race was not a static construction but a continual process. White students were creating and recreating definitions based on their personal realities. For the students at Valley Grove, race was intellectualized and removed, but for the Clavey students, race was immediate and dynamic. Clavey students had a better understanding of the reality of racism and racial politics but also of the dangers of discussing “white issues,” whereas the Valley Grove students disbelieved the problem of racism and saw minority issues as a vague threat to their natural status. The difference in the two schools was the fact that Clavey students lived in a multiethnic world that made the construction of whiteness more messy and situational. White Clavey students were aware of their role as oppressor and felt uncomfortable with it, using an affinity for rap, for example, music as a signifier of their identification with the oppressed. The white students at Valley Grove showed strong opposition to affirmative action and the Million Man March (which occurred in 1999, during Perry’s research). White Clavey students demonstrated an understanding of those things but resented always being viewed as racist because of the color of their skin. One frustrated Clavey student said, “I am sick and tired of hearing about slavery and how the white man abused the black man. OK! I got it! Can we talk about something else now?” (Perry 2002:163). But the Clavey students’ racial and ethnic interaction gave them a perspective that the Valley Grove students did not have. The following interaction between a black and white student during a classroom discussion about slavery illustrates the lived reality of race: black girl: Jeanie is my friend, but her ancestors enslaved mine, and I’m angry about that! white girl: What you talkin’ about? My ancestors never enslaved nobody! black girl: You know what I mean. I like you, you’re all right, but the white man oppressed my people and I’m angry about that. (Perry 2002:164)

What’s interesting about this dialogue is that both students are historically correct. Most black Americans can theoretically trace their ancestry in the United States to before 1808, when the U.S. Congress banned the importation of slaves. But most whites can trace their ancestry only to the waves of immigration that lasted from the 1880s to the 1930s (which, I feel, makes most blacks “more American” than most whites). Additionally, until slavery was finally abolished in 1865, only a minority of whites ever

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owned African slaves. It is not the history of slavery that mattered to the students but the legacy of slavery in the form of white privilege. Perry found that the Clavey students developed a “dual awareness” of white privilege. Although they separated themselves from the historical oppression, their experience of white privilege was too obvious to deny. The white students responded in several ways to this awareness: exasperation, a desire for sociopolitical change, guilt, fear of retribution, denial of certain privileges, and shifting of blame (Perry 2002:166). Those multiple responses can be found at the thousands of American high schools that are experiencing the same experiment in diversity as Clavey. My own work with youth has found similar results. I travel the state of Oregon talking to youth about the issues of racism. Sometimes the setting is a large school assembly; other dialogues follow more of a focus group format. As a “hate crime expert” I usually begin with stories from my research on skinheads or descriptions of regional hate groups. My interest lies in how the students themselves negotiate the issue of race and racism. I have had manly lively conversations with thoughtful and well-meaning students. Like Perry, I have found the students in more affluent white schools to be unaware of the reality of racism. They think racism and hate crimes are bad but feel threatened by the idea that they have anything to do with it. At one suburban school, a white boy told me, “We don’t have those problems here. Everyone is cool. We don’t even have to talk about race.” He and other students seemed upset by the fact that I was “playing the race card” and that their whiteness allowed them to deny that the problem may still be there, just in a different form. At more diverse schools, I have found white students who take on a more active antiracist identity but who are still frustrated by a perceived lack of respect. One student at an urban school told me, “The thing that sucks is that any time you say ‘white’ people think ‘racist,’ and I want to, like, talk about my identity, too. It’s like the racists have ruined being white.” The struggle to reconstruct a white identity separate from images of Klansmen and hate crimes manifests in tense settings. I was spending some time in a school that has historically been all-white but in the last five years has had a significant influx of Hispanic students, who now make up 33 percent of the student body. Many are the children of migrant workers who have settled permanently in the area because of the availability of better housing. This demographic shift has presented a challenge to the majority of non-Spanish-speaking white students. The school’s only ethnic club is MeCha (National Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), a Chicano and Chicana student group that some racist groups have promoted as being antiwhite or antiAmerican because of the preamble of its national constitution: Chicano and Chicana students of Aztlán must take upon themselves the responsibilities to promote Chicanismo within the community, politicizing our Raza with an emphasis on indigenous consciousness to continue the struggle for the self-determination of the Chicano people for the purpose of liberating Aztlán. (www.panam.edu / orgs / mecha / nt_ const.html)

The work done by MeCha in America’s high schools and universities has little to do with any type of revolutionary movement to “liberate Aztlán” (which members have

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told me means liberating themselves from an oppressed mentality) but more with the stated objectives to empower Hispanic students. At this particular high school, MeCha sponsored dialogues and parties with nonHispanic students. But this Oregon school began to see a new symbol appear after MeCha arrived, the Confederate battle flag. Being from Georgia, I know the Confederate battle flag has a public meaning (rebellion) and a somewhat private meaning (racism). In Europe you will see the flag used to signify a rock ’n’ roll type rebellion in the style of Elvis Presley. Its meaning is contested enough that it can be flown at a Klan rally and a Tom Petty concert. But Tom Petty is from Florida; these Oregon white kids are far removed from any Confederate legacy. So we talked about the use of the rebel flag. Many white students were opposed to it, well aware of its coded meaning and power to make nonwhites fearful, but some supporters said the following: “They’ve got their Mexican flag, so we’ve got ours. What’s wrong with that?” “It’s cool. We don’t mean anything by it.” “It is like the Civil War because our way of life is being taken away.” “Just because I eat tacos don’t mean I wanna speak Spanish.” “It’s not racist; it’s just a symbol of rebellion.”

Puzzled by the last comment, I asked, “What exactly are you rebelling against? Because I’m rebelling against racism.” The student had no reply. What the rebel flag meant to these youth was clear: It was an effort to construct a white identity in the face of the nonwhite world coming to their doorstep. They had to go back to the 1860s to do it because there was no more recent symbol of white identity separate from an ideology of white supremacy. Not long after that I spent an afternoon at a much more ethnically diverse suburban high school to talk to a group of students about race and the challenges of being white in the twenty-first century. Their social studies classroom was covered with posters of JFK, MLK, and Malcolm X. The white students in the group wore punk and hipster fashions and expressed disdain for the preppy white kids at the school. Like the Clavey students in Perry’s study, they were aware of their white privilege but not sure what to do with it. One girl said, “Like, I feel really bad about racism and stuff. I know it sucks even if I don’t experience it. But I also feel helpless about it.” Several students expressed weariness at trying to speak up when peers made racist comments. Additionally, some of the students, who were neither black nor white, seemed confused at where they fit on the racial ladder. One Pakistani boy, caught between assimilation and pluralism, said, “The whole race thing bores me. I’m not black but I get treated like it sometimes. Most of my friends are mixed, so they don’t know where to go. I wish the whole thing would go away and people would grow up.” I spent some time talking to the white students about ethnic envy. The first comment that arose was the perception of double standards around language. Many were confused as to why black students could use the word nigger and not be racist (another student mentioned parallels with the words bitch and queer). This led to a discussion

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about the appeal of hip-hop and the racialization of rap music. A student said, “I really love rap, but it’s never about me. I’m not from the ghetto. It’s so good but there are very few white rappers that really rap about how we (white kids) feel. That’s why Eminem is so popular.” The students referred to rap as “real,” unlike other music forms, because it dealt with real issues, just not their issues. We also discussed the groups on their campus and what that meant for white students. They were aware that most of the nonethnic groups were, in fact, “white groups,” such as the Christian Club and the Pep Squad, but that those groups were boring and not dealing with meaningful student issues. One student said, “I think it’s funny when someone says we need a white student union, because until my sophomore year, this school has only had a white student union.” These same students also expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of forums to talk about their (lack of ) ethnicity, whereas other groups seemed to foster those discussions only among themselves. Comments included the following: “Don’t take it the wrong way, but those (ethnic) clubs seem like a lot of fun. They are always making food.” “What would a white club do? Square dance? There really is no one white culture. At least not one I am interested in.” “It just seems like it would be nice to talk about being white without being a racist, but the only students that start white clubs are racist.” “It’s pointless to talk about it. We’re the bad guys in history.” “We have Irish groups and Russian groups. That’s about as close as it gets.”

The white students said their ways of dealing with their racial issues were in groups that organized around styles (such as punk) or activities (such as skateboarding) that weren’t overtly about race but were racially homogenous. A recent mural painted by Hispanic students also brought up conflicted issues. The students were aware that there were plenty of “white heroes” on murals in high schools (Lewis and Clark are on the walls of most Oregon schools) but none that had been painted by their peers. Again, the minority activities were seen as fun and not connected to the historical oppression the created the need for responses such as murals. One boy had perhaps a more refined notion of ethnic envy when he said, “You know who has it the best here? The Russians and Ukrainians. They get to have their own little group and language. They get to say that they are a ‘minority,’ but no one really bothers them because they are white.”

White Youth and Global Identities The white students at all the schools I have visited are struggling with the ethnic anomie associated with the rapid social change and the shift in the economy. Being a “race” is different from being an “ethnicity.” Race is a physical distinction, and ethnicity is about culture, and culture can be fun. To be stripped of culture is to be removed

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from fun. Of course, it is easily argued that white culture is American culture, but youth, in their subordinate social position, tend not to see themselves as connected to mainstream culture. Like the Beat poets of the 1950s (whom Norman Mailer called “white Negroes”), youth identify with other subordinate, disenfranchised groups. The long history of rock music is rooted in the history of white kids wanting to (pretend to be) black, from Elvis to Eminem (what racists call being a “wigger”). The minority voice is one of resistance, a theme any white teen can identify with. America’s economic needs will increase the presence of those minority voices, from the recruiting of hightech workers from India to President Bush’s 2004 plan to provide temporary residence for undocumented immigrants. In the process, white teens will have more themes of resistance to either relate to or compete with. Just as Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga created the holiday of Kwanzaa in 1966 to preserve African values in the face of American assimilation, many young whites have begun to invent their own ethnic rituals. The growing popularity of Celtic Highland games are attracting not only those with Scottish and Irish roots but those who want to experience northern European cultural events. Similarly, the growth of paganism reflects a desire to connect with a (pre–melting pot) European culture. The most popular form of paganism is Wicca, the pre-Christian nature-based religion that is rooted in Irish and Scottish culture and allow youth an ethnic means to rebel against the dominant Judeo-Christian culture. The Internet provides a wealth of information for those who can’t make it to Druid rites at Stonehenge. Yahoo! Groups list nearly five thousand paganism discussion groups from around the world, such as Valley of the Einheria, a Nova Scotia–based group. One of the forms of paganism that has a special appeal to white youth struggling with racial issues is Odinism (sometimes called Asatrú). Odinism is best described as a modernized Scandinavian Viking religion based on ancestor worship. Odinism’s northern European focus and its heroic warrior gods stand in stark contrast to the more passive values of mainstream religions. Whereas the scriptures of Christianity, for example, ask followers to love their enemies, Odinism demands that followers “smite their enemies with the hammer of Thor.” A popular Odinist group, the Asatru Folk Assembly, states its mission as “to call the sons and daughters of Europe back to their native spirituality and to the tribes which are their birthright” (Asatru Folk Assembly 2003). Odinism has increasingly become attractive to white supremacists who have become disenchanted with racialized Christianity (a Middle Eastern faith rooted in Judaism). Although much of the Asatrú community has tried to distance itself from racist activists, the fact remains that Odinism is the fastest-growing trend in the white supremacist community (Blazak 2003). This is most notable in America’s prisons, where Odinist groups now compete alongside Muslims and Native Americans for the same First Amendment rights. Although a minority of Odinists are criminals or affiliated with the racist radical right, there is a growing concern over organizing for Rahowa, or racial holy war, a movement that includes several well-known Odinists. Racist Odinists are also reaching out to white youth who are struggling with racial issues. A Vancouver, Washington, group, Sigrdrifa, promotes Leif Erickson Day on October 9, asking why the Italian Columbus is celebrated when a Viking made the

Ethnic Envy

journey nearly five hundred years earlier. (Could it be a Jewish conspiracy?) Web sites such as the Pagan Front and the Vinlandic Embassy use Odinism as an entry in to discussion about the destruction of white culture and the issues of those “struggling to discard the amnesia foreign paths have forced on to Europa’s children” (heathenrepublic .net / , 2004). The white supremacist movement has seen a trend in moving away from the virulent images of hate. Swastikas and cross burnings are being replaced by “heritage groups” and European culture discussion groups, such as Euro-Knowledge. Students surfing the Web for information about paganism or Europe may not even be aware they are on a racist Web site. One of the most successful of these groups is Volksfront, an Oregon-based “pro-white” group. Volksfront’s public front is a “kinder, gentler” racist group, carefully distancing itself from the (post–Patriot Act) red flags of calls to violence. On the “Ideals & Beliefs” page of their Web site the following is posted: Volksfront believes all races have the inherent right to exist in freedom. We believe that culture and heritage are worth preservation. We seek not to enslave or impose tyranny on any people. We acknowledge the inherent differences in each race and embrace those differences as valuable and worth preserving. We feel miscegenation (race-mixing) will lead to the death of our culture and create a world of identical zombies in a one world state without culture, heritage, or beauty. We believe all people should honor their ancestors and the sacrifices made by them to ensure their posterity’s success. (www .volksfront-usa.org / ideals.shtml)

Yet the group also presents events such as Aryanfest 2004, featuring Nazi skinhead bands such as Max Resist and featuring speeches by famous racist separatists Tom Metzger (of the White Aryan Resistance), Billy Roper (of the National Alliance), and the late Richard Butler (of Aryan Nations). I recently asked Volksfront’s primary organizer (they don’t have “leaders”) what he thought of the identity vacuum many white youth face: I think kids want something to call their own and to be proud of whether it means kicking someone’s ass or not. The standard line about “white privilege” doesn’t apply to most White children today and may have been applicable fifty years ago but today White children are dispossessed and have no common unifying factors such as class, nation or culture; all have been replaced by multi-culturalism. This same multi-culturalism creates a White guilt-ridden underclass where Whites are vilified and any form of White ethnic pride is ruthlessly destroyed as being racist. (Personal communication, January 8, 2004)

His point stands on two important ideas. First, the discussion of white privilege is a hard sell to teenagers who see minority success all around them and “minority privileges.” Often it isn’t until college that some students confront the depth of white privilege in America. Second, the frustration leading to a “resort to violence” is inherently appealing to young males who see masculinity defined in terms of violence (just look at the films and video games that are marketed to boys). Their masculinity has been

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threatened on multiple fronts: by feminists and political correctness, by new challenges from minority peers, and by an economy that has replaced the macho factory job with the feminized low-wage service sector job. White boys’ world has been turned upside down, and the appeal of Viking pagan warriors is a fantasy world devoid of ambiguity. Although all youth have a right to explore their ethnic identity, white supremacist groups often increase the levels of white anomie by promoting the idea that there are organized forces (usually Jews) who work to destroy white culture. In July 1999 a follower of the World Church of the Creator, Benjamin Smith, went on a two-state killing spree. In three days the twenty-one-year-old avowed racist killed a black man and a Korean man, shooting both in the back, and wounded nine others, Jews, Asians, and African Americans. Smith killed himself when cornered by the police. Smith’s racism made waves before his string of hate crimes. A year earlier, while a student at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, he distributed thousands of leaflets advertising the World Church of the Creator and the White Nationalist Party. He wrote a long letter to the student newspaper opposing the university’s affirmative action policy and the presence of nonwhite student clubs, such as the Black Student Union. “But where do white people go to discuss their issues and concerns?” Smith wrote. “There is no White Student Union established to help white students organize and react to the problems our people face” (Dedman 1999:A3). The occurrence of hate crimes has become largely a suburban phenomenon. “Edge cities are where hate crimes happen,” says Jack Levin, a hate crime expert at Northeastern University. “There are more hate crimes in the suburbs than the city and it’s much more likely to happen where there is an influx of minorities” (Brecht 2000:1). As minorities and immigrants follow the job base, suburbs are less likely to be white areas. Donald Green, professor of political science and director of the Institute for Social Policy Studies at Yale University, says, “When addressing ethnically based hate crimes, the highest rate of crime occurs when non-whites rapidly move into previously all-white enclaves. It’s not just how white the neighborhood is but also how rapid the changes are” (Mjoseth 1998:1).

Toward a White Ethnicity Youth of the twenty-first century live in a truly global society their parents never imagined. On one hand, the Internet has linked youth who are dealing with similar issues regardless of regional boundaries. On the other hand, deindustrialization, job outsourcing, and multinational corporations have transformed their economy of scale. The new global community is both exciting and frightening because the challenge is to adapt without sacrificing the comfort of the past. For white youth, there are new opportunities to explore ethnicity, but the challenge often is portrayed as a contest in which there are only winners and losers. Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings’s (1996) research found that racial alienation is not just a minority phenomenon when people feel their racial group is threatened. The research found that subjects tended to think about racial competition in zero-sum terms. In other words, those who followed stereotypical beliefs about an ethnic group

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saw that group’s success as based on their own group’s failure. “Perceptions of group competition tend to be based on a mix of racial alienation, prejudice, stratification of beliefs, and self-interest” (Bobo and Hutchings 1996:956). Importantly for whites, structural thinking about race relations tended to reduce perceptions of minority economic threats. But whites who thought in more typical individualist terms saw minorities as a greater threat. This fear was largely reserved for Asians and Hispanics because of their recent immigration status (Bobo and Hutchings 1996:957). Many white youths on the front line of the globalized economy experience both threat and confusion. Their desire for an ethnicity to celebrate, like that of their minority peers, is shut down as inherently racist. One student posted the following concern on the Web: A group of young white students felt they never had the opportunity in a public school system to celebrate their culture or share it with others. Other student organized clubs such as the Black Student Union, Jew Krew, MECHA, and ASIAN PACIFIC are all established on our campus. . . . Are white children being denied their true identity? What so wrong with being white and saying it? Are the descendents of the founders of this country being oppressed in their own country? Are minorities favored over majorities? How will this idea of the socially inappropriate word “white” affect the future actions of our white youth who are next to lead the world? (www.disinfo.com/ site / printarticle768.html)

If these young people’s issues are not addressed by peers and adults who can reasonably discuss histories of privilege and oppression, they will find their answers in a global community that cares very much about this issue: white supremacists, racist Odinists, and pan-European neo-Nazis. Fortunately, contrary to hate groups’ propaganda, there is a growing discussion of white identity in academic circles. Research such as Pamela Perry’s, college courses and conference panels on whiteness, and texts such as Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror (Delgado and Stefanic 1997) are exploring the evolution of a white identity. Talking about the problems of being white no longer belongs to Klansmen. Unfortunately, academic dialogue often is far removed from the real lives of youth. High school youth who live under constant surveillance and may or may not be eligible for minority scholarships are looking for both empowerment and guidance. In a fragile economy, many teachers resist confronting controversial issues such as racism and white privilege for fear of losing their jobs. The solution lies somewhere between creating a secure economic setting where youth don’t feel as if they are competing with each other based on group membership and creating a structural understanding of the nature of oppression that doesn’t blame white students. The trick is to not allow multiculturalism (also known as the real world) to cause them to feel guilty but instead use it to empower them. References Asatru Folk Assembly. 2003. www.runestone.org. Bauman, Z. 1997. Postmodernity and Its Discontents. New York: New York University Press.

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Randy Blazak Blazak, R. 1995. The Suburbanization of Hate: The Evolution of Racist Youth Subcultures. Atlanta: Emory University. ——. 2003. Prison Odinism and Hate Crimes: Using Religion to Do Gender. Presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Nov. 18–22, Denver, California. Bobo, L. and V. L. Hutchings. 1996. Perceptions of racial group competition: Extending Blumer’s theory of group position to a multiracial social context. American Sociological Review, 61(6): 951–973. Brecht, T. 2000. SPLC says hate crimes prevalent in Quad-Cities. QConline. www.qconline .com / progress2000 / hate.shtml. Dedman, B. 1999, July 5. Midwest gunman who shot 11 had engaged in acts of racism at 2 universities. New York Times, p. A3. Delgado, R. and J. Stefanic. 1997. Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror. Tempe, AZ: Tempe University Press. Doane, W. 2003. Rethinking whiteness studies. In A. W. Doane and E. Bonilla-Silva, eds., White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, 1–27. New York: Routledge. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2002. Hate crime statistics. In The Uniform Crime Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Ferrell, J. and M. S. Hamm. 1998. Ethnography at the Edge: Crime, Deviance, and Field Research. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Gould, L. A. 2000. White male privilege and the construction of crime. In Investigating Difference: The Criminal Justice Collective of Northern Arizona University. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Joselit, J. W. 1994. The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950. Collingdale, PA: Farrar Straus & Giroux. Lewis, A. E. 2003. Some are more equal than others: Lessons on whiteness from school. In A. W. Doane and E. Bonilla-Silva, eds., White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, 159–172. New York: Routledge. Lofland, J. and L. H. Lofland. 1988. Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Mills, C. W. 2003. White supremacy as sociopolitical system: A philosophical perspective. In A. W. Doane and E. Bonilla-Silva, eds., White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, 35–48. New York: Routledge. Mjoseth, J. 1998. Psychologists call for an assault on hate crimes. The APA Monitor, 29(1). Omi, M. and H. Winant. 1986. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge. Pastor, M. 2000. Regions That Work: How Cities and Suburbs Can Grow Together. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Perry, P. 2002. Shades of White: White Kids and Racial Identities in High School. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Robertson, I. 1981. Sociology. New York: Worth. Steinberg, S. 1995. Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy. Boston: Beacon. U.S. Census Bureau. 2001. Census 2000 Brief: Age 2000. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau.

Pete Simi and Barbara Brents

11. An Extreme Response to Globalization The Case of Racist Skinhead Youth

Globalization (the increasing oneness of culture) has bred a retrenchment of local identity and nationalist rhetoric everywhere it has touched, and the rise and trajectory of racist skinheads is one example of such phenomena. Emerging in Britain in the late 1960s and in Western Europe and the United States in the late 1970s, skinheads became one of the more violent youth reactions against the economic (i.e., highly mobile capital) and cultural changes (i.e., increasing “nonwhite” migration) endemic to a globalizing world. Skinheads embody what Castells (1997:61) calls territorial identity prevalent among new urban social movements: “Suddenly defenseless against a global whirlwind, people stuck to themselves: whatever they had, and whatever they were, became their identity.” In a rapidly changing world where traditional boundaries are increasingly obsolete, skinhead youth have embraced race as a fixed, unshakable marker. Race became their barrio, allowing them a higher level of mobility compared with traditional street gangs. Yet, while reacting to the same trends, the adult white power movement (WPM) has increasingly drawn on an identity that is global in scale, seeking to forge international linkages and build a transnational network of “Aryan activists.” Is this same trend happening to the youth wing of the WPM? This chapter examines the global dimensions of the origins and development of skinheads. Instead of looking at microlevel motivations for skinhead involvement, we draw on the social movement literature to examine the trajectory of the skinheads. Rather than thinking of globalization as an inevitable and unidirectional process, we examine the specific interconnections and organizations behind of the spread of skinhead culture. In this chapter we argue that a global dissemination of the skinhead style allowed local youth across the United States (and in various other countries) to adopt what was originally a British youth subculture. Thus the spread of skinhead style was a product of globalization; however, the formation of skinhead organizations in countries beyond Great Britain was independent and uncoordinated. Even within the same country (e.g.,

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the United States) skinheads formed local urban and suburban street organizations responding to neighborhood tensions surrounding racial and ethnic conflict, which in many ways resembled the tradition of street gang emergence (Brotherton and Barrios 2004; Hagedorn 1988; Schneider 1999; Suttles 1968; Thrasher 1927). The tensions that catalyzed skinhead formation were related to globalizing trends (e.g., immigration, economic transformations). Yet over time the very globalizing processes that at first generated uncoordinated skinhead grievances provided the resources that helped construct an international Aryan identity complete with global linkages between organizations and transnational communication networks.¹ In other words, the skinhead movement is becoming increasingly globalized, both in identity and in its participation in specific transnational networks. Although skinhead origins were uncoordinated reactions to globalizing trends, the subsequent growth of the skinhead movement was fostered by specific and conscious actions on the part of skinhead activists to global technologies in order to grow the movement. By the late 1980s, the skinheads had become one of America’s newest and most menacing “social problems,” earning them a “folk devil” status (Cohen 1980).² Skinheads gained notoriety in the 1980s as the first American youth movement to espouse a Nazi ideology,³ receiving widespread media attention, yet there has been little academic research because of the difficulty gaining entrée into skinhead groups. Hamm (1993), Moore (1993), and Wooden and Blazak (2001) are important exceptions, and they provide a useful starting point, but these studies are limited by an overly broad approach and offer few details about skinheads at the “ground-level of social action” (Denora 2000:x).⁴ We concur with Dobratz and Shanks-Meile (1997:73), whose study of the WPM led them to conclude, “In trying to understand the skinheads, one must be aware that social scientists seem to know very little about the skinheads, and some of what social scientists think they know is contradictory or at least not very consistent.”

Globalization and the WPM Research analyzing the growth of the adult WPM has already begun focusing on the effects of globalization (Kaplan and Bjorgo 1998).⁵ Globalization involves economic, technological, and cultural changes resulting from increasing flows of goods, capital, people, information, images, and risks across national borders. Economic globalization has had dramatic effects at local levels. With the increasing mobility of capital, processes of deindustrialization have accelerated in Western economies. Cultural globalization resulting from information technologies, mass communication, tourism, and commodity trade has increased flows of information, images, and ideas across national borders. Increased migration has changed the context of neighborhoods while facilitating cultural exchange with home countries. This global integration throws into question traditional notions of territory, nation-states, and political institutions, arguably producing a “new understanding of culture, nationality, the self in the world, what it is to be a foreigner, what it is to be a citizen, how people become politically engaged, and many other aspects of social life” (Nash 2000:53).

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Globalization has played a significant role in stimulating the growth of the WPM. Kaplan and Bjorgo (1998) argue that recently the movement has been simultaneously advocating nationalism as a reaction against globalization and consciously constructing an international “new order” that takes advantage of globalization. They argue that the American WPM was successful in directly exporting repertoires, strategies, ideologies, and organization to Europe, including the Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG) discourse,⁶ many of its symbols (robes and Confederate flags), and specific organizations including the Ku Klux Klan, the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), and the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC). That former Rahowa (racial holy war) lead singer and Resistance editor George Eric Hawthorne declared “the color of our skin becomes our uniform of WAR” (Kaplan and Bjorgo 1988:x) was evidence of the possibility of a postnational imagined identity shared by U.S. and European activists. To better understand the impact of globalization on the rise of skinhead youth, we draw on ideas put forth by scholars examining other global social movements. Analysts of global social movements argue that there are two major effects of globalization on movement organizations. First, movements increasingly rely on international and transnational organizational structures and linkages. Second, social movements mobilize in relation to global problems or challenge processes of globalization (Imig and Tarrow 2001; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Nash 2000; Smith and Johnston 2002). Weinberg (1998) uses the concepts of convergence and linkage in explaining the recent revival of adult right-wing extremism in Western Europe and the United States. Convergence is defined as the process whereby groups independently move toward some shared idea as a result of larger structural changes. He argues that convergence explains the WPM’s growth in that the structural processes of globalization, including changes in mass communication, deindustrialization, the decline of unionism, and other structural changes in the economy, have spurred the conditions for the revival of right-wing extremism. Convergence is the process whereby these groups independently identify globalization or any of its consequences as a mobilizing idea. Linkage is defined as conscious communication that stimulates mobilization or organization. Linkages can be accomplished in two ways: emulation and penetration. Emulation involves a group or organization in one country copying the name, style, strategies, and structure of an organization in another country. No direct communication need take place. Examples of emulation include neo-Nazi, skinhead, Ku Klux Klan, and Christian Identity groups existing outside their respective countries of origin. Penetration involves direct contact between members of groups from different countries. In his study of right-wing organizations in Western Europe, Weinberg found that 50 percent emulated some foreign group. Around 30 percent of Western Europe’s 188 extreme right-wing groups have personal interactive relations across national borders. Weinberg’s concepts of convergence and linkages can be used to examine the U.S. skinheads as well. These concepts are important in that they allow us to look more closely at the process that stimulated the mobilization and organization of skinhead youth. Instead of viewing the emergence of skinheads through an individualist psychological lens, we can examine the impact of globalization as a structural process. Globalization stimulates both convergence and specific linkages (both emulation and penetration).

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We believe it is useful to draw on the insights of these more structural examinations of the WPM and social movements in general in order to better understand the trajectory of the skinhead movement. Do skinheads have a similar trajectory to the WPM? Is there a development of a white Aryan international identity? What is the relationship between the skinhead movement and globalization? This chapter has two major goals: to examine the historical emergence of skinheads in southern California in order to assess the extent to which skinheads articulated grievances related to globalizing processes and to describe the process of an emerging “international Aryan identity” using the case of the Hammerskin Nation (HSN). To examine these questions, we draw from the social movement literature to find evidence of convergence and linkages (specifically emulation and penetration) in the skinhead movement.

Method We conducted an in-depth case study of the development of skinheads in the United States. We chose to focus, in part, on Los Angeles because it is reported to contain the largest number of skinheads in the country (Simi 2003). The data combine structured and unstructured interviewing, participant observation, and archival research. The analysis is grounded in 127 primary interviews conducted with a variety of racist skinheads and law enforcement officers between 1999 and 2004.⁷ We also interviewed “nonskinhead” WPM leaders (e.g., Tom Metzger and Richard Butler), who were among the first to promote the importance of the skinheads to the white supremacist movement. The sample included active or previously active skinheads in seventeen different skinhead gangs. The skinhead subjects included both key leaders, who were essential in the initial formation of various skinhead gangs, and rank-and-file members. Most of the skinhead interviewees were male, which is not surprising because the skinhead subculture is a predominantly male one (Blee 2002). In terms of social class, no clear patterns existed among the skinheads we interviewed, which is also not surprising considering the cross-section of social classes represented in the larger skinhead subculture (Anderson 1987; Hamm 1993). We also conducted archival research, including the analysis of watchdog organizations’ official reports, newspaper accounts, court documents, and various types of documentary evidence that law enforcement officials provided (e.g., letters written by skinheads, videotaped interviews of skinheads conducted by law enforcement personnel). We performed a content analysis of skinhead texts such as newsletters, Web sites, Internet discussion groups, and radio broadcasts. In addition, we collected information about skinhead gangs from public authorities such as interest groups (e.g., AntiDefamation League, Southern Poverty Law Center) and both print and broadcast media (i.e., newspaper articles and television segments).⁸ We analyzed these data to gain a better understanding of the emergence of the skinheads and their development. We analyzed secondary sources for evidence that would either corroborate or contradict insights about skinheads gleaned through primary interview data. This multimethod approach allowed triangulation across an array of data (Denzin 1978).

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Origins of the Skinheads Cultural and economic globalization framed the environment in which skinheads arose. The skinheads were one of several working-class youth subcultures to emerge in Great Britain in the post–World War II era, including the “teddys,” “rockers,” “mods,” and “punks” (Hebdige 1979). All of these groups were subcultural reactions to globalization, attempting to reclaim “lost” identities. The first wave of skinheads came of age in 1969 when gay liberation, feminism, and other middle-class social movements were at their height globally. Economically, deindustrialization was hitting the British industrial towns hard, and it was in these working-class districts in south and east London from which the skinheads first emerged. Their reaction to these structural processes was extremely local in their attempt to “magically retrieve the sense of community that the parent working-class culture had lost” (Clarke 1976:99). Early skinhead culture was characterized by two maxims, “the recovery of Englishness / Britishness and the preservation of authenticity” (Ware and Back 2002:100). Ware and Back argue that skinheads adopted a burlesque version of white working-class imagery: tight blue jeans, cropped hairstyles, and Doc Marten boots (Ware and Back 2002:99). The skinheads were most noted for their short hairstyle, which was partly a reaction to the longer-haired, more middle-class hippies (Brake 1974). These early skinheads were extremely territorial, class conscious, and hypermasculine. Although the first-wave skinheads did not explicitly associate themselves with Nazism, they were ardently nationalist in political orientation and fervently opposed to foreign immigration. Among the skinheads’ favorite pastimes were “Paki” bashing and gay bashing (Hebdige 1979; Knight 1982). A large part of their cultural aesthetic was the music scene and dance clubs. They were driven by working-class problems (e.g., lack of economic opportunity, poor housing, neighborhood deterioration, and increased immigration), but there was little in their rhetoric that identified the global dimensions of these processes as a cause of their discontent. They were responding to global issues at a more immediate level, in their local neighborhoods; in other words, there was a level of remove between the source of skinhead grievances (global processes) and the target of their grievances (local context) (Imig and Tarrow 2001). In the early 1970s, the skinheads temporarily receded from British cultural scene as other youth subcultures ascended in popularity. By the mid-1970s, the British punks had emerged in response to economic stagnation and declining employment opportunities, but without the hypermasculine posture of the skinheads and with a decidedly more anarchistic overtone. Bands such as the infamous Sex Pistols sang about “Anarchy in the UK” as part of an assault on middle-class conventional values and an expression of deep frustration with a world that increasingly offered no hope for the future. The working-class British punks who sported Mohawk hairstyles, with safety pins in their cheeks, articulated this consciousness using style as a form of political resistance (Hebdige 1979). The punk movement spurred the reemergence of the skinheads in the late 1970s (Knight 1982). In many ways, skinheads arose as a reaction against punk anarchism. This time political opportunities and a very specific linkage allowed the skinheads to develop an important organizational affiliation that helped solidify the centrality of

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their racist rhetoric. The British National Front (NF), an extreme right-wing political party, saw the utility of drawing disaffected youth from the skinheads into their ranks. During the 1977 British elections, the NF actively recruited skinheads to assist as security officers for NF candidates (Anderson 1987). This recruitment was one of the most important moments in politicizing skinhead nationalism and anti-immigrant rhetoric; from this point forward, skinheads solidified a right-wing political ideology. Just as important, they also developed an organizational affiliation that provided the foundation for the spread of the movement. With the NF’s encouragement, skinhead music became decidedly more political and began to represent an identity based on racism. The British band Skrewdriver, whose lead singer was active in the NF, veered away from punk anarchism to racist politics and a heavy metal hard rock sound, becoming the premier skinhead white power band (Ware and Back 2002:106).

Punks in California: The Subcultural Foundations of Skinheads Around the same time as the British skinheads were reemerging and connecting with the NF, skinheads began to appear in the United States. Was this appearance the result of convergence or linkages and direct attempts on the part of the British skinheads to internationalize their movement? Previous research has indicated that U.S. youths who eventually became skinheads first emerged from the punk rock music scene (Anderson 1987; Hamm 1993; Moore 1993). According to Moore, punk rock provided the subcultural foundation for the development of skinheads (1993:40). Our research shows that most of the skinhead gangs that emerged in southern California in the 1980s were previously active in the punk scene, yet the rise of the skinhead movement was also related to direct and indirect linkages with the British NF’s efforts to recruit disaffected youth. Whereas British punks and skinheads appealed primarily to segments of working-class youth, because of the more diffuse class system existing in the United States, when punks and skinheads spread to North America these subcultural styles appealed to youth from a wider range of class backgrounds (Moore 1993). In southern California, some punks were concerned about economic stagnation and declining opportunities. Punk bands such as southern California’s Black Flag expressed anxiety about changing demographics with their song “White Minority,” illustrating an immediate awareness of these global issues, which they expressed through localized anger; however, there is little sense of larger global processes as the catalyst generating these demographic shifts. The extent of punkers’ self-conscious adoption of a racist political identity is subject to debate. Historians of the punk subculture argue that although “punkers” became fascinated with the symbols of Nazi Germany, they never adopted the Nazi ideology (Dancis 1978; Hebdige 1979; Laing 1985). Hebdige explains the punks’ interest with Nazism in the following statement: “The signifier (swastika) had been willfully detached from the concept (Nazism). . . . [The swastika] was exploited as an empty effect” (1979:117). Hebdige and others strongly emphasize the distinction between the appropriation of symbols as a means to articulate a shock value (i.e., the punk ideology of “fuckyouism”) and an actual ideological and political engagement with Nazism. The

An Extreme Response to Globalization

skinheads who originated in the punk scene had to undergo a “subcultural disengagement” and break from the punk scene before establishing more racially oriented skinhead organizations (Anderson 1987; Hamm 1993; Moore 1993). Our research shows that in southern California, although some punks detached the racist significance from the swastika, using it for shock value, there were aspects of the punk subculture where a sincere affinity existed for Nazism. In fact, we have found skinheads who became affiliated with the politics of Nazism as punks long before they ever became skinheads. Tom Metzger, founder of the WAR and one of the first to see the potential skinhead youths could provide to the white power movement, claims the “punk rock scene was important for providing a racial perspective—racialist punk rockers pre-dated skinheads in L.A.” (Tom Metzger interview, January 29, 1999). In southern California, in the 1970s and 1980s there were various punk gangs (e.g., the League, Circle One, Fight for Freedom). Some members of these gangs adopted Nazi symbols in part as an act of defiance but also to express a rejection of liberal, multicultural rhetoric that was becoming increasingly popular in the mainstream of American political culture. Other than their racist orientation, they were not involved in traditional forms of political activism and were much more ganglike in their activities (Morash 1983). They were engaged in a significant level of conflict with police and other gangs; however, membership was highly transitory, and organizational structures dissolved quickly. What is important about their role in southern California is not the process of subcultural disengagement, as various observers contend, but the process of individual racist punkers solidifying their orientation into the formation of skinhead gangs. In other words, the white supremacist political orientation that developed later among many racist skinheads was not truly a break with punk but resulted in part from the opportunity punk provided to experiment with these ideas, styles, and symbols. The political organization of racist punks was minimal, but they were extremely important as a subcultural space for exposure, experimentation, and indoctrination. The punk scene was important not simply as a point of departure but as a site of political socialization. In this sense, the punk scene acted as a sort of cultural laboratory for the skinheads (Melucci 1989, 1996). According to a long-time Nazi punk who associated with the League and Circle One and later became a racist skinhead, “A lot of these [punk] gangs were about survival too because a lot of these people were street people. They totally rejected society and they ended up on the streets of L.A. so they all banded together like a family” (independent skinhead interview, July 13, 1999). Some of these punk gangs in Los Angeles were located in Hollywood, which has historically attracted a large number of runaways whom punk gangs often befriended, helping them survive on the streets (Ruddick 1994). By the late 1970s and early 1980s, individual skinheads were just beginning to appear on the American landscape (Moore 1993), yet these youths were submerged in the punk rock scene, and a skinhead collective identity had yet to coalesce.

Localized Skinhead Gangs and Stylistic Emulation Our data indicate that skinheads first appeared in the L.A. punk scene in the late 1970s, and the first skinhead gang, the Northside Firm, formed around 1981. Other

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southern California skinhead gangs quickly followed. All of the southern California skinheads in one form or another came out of a splintering punk rock scene. The first skinhead gangs emerged from the desire to defend symbolic and actual turf from local punk gangs (who were predominantly white) and minority gangs. Eventually skinhead organization was aided by members of international racist parties such as the British NF and U.S. adult white power activists. One of the larger punk gangs, the League, splintered into several youth organizations around 1981 after the stabbing death of one of the League’s primary leaders. The splintering of the League helped produce the Northside Firm, the first Los Angeles skinhead gang that became extremely important in the development of skinhead organizations. The Northside Firm eventually produced a stable group of racist activists with a longterm commitment to the movement. Many of these people went on to develop the first branch of the well-organized Western Hammerskins almost ten years later. As skinhead gangs became distinct from the punks, they began to critique the punk movement for being effeminate, hedonistic, and drug using. Skinheads distinguished themselves by consciously modeling themselves after the British skinhead movement, which was growing increasingly political. The Northside Firm and another early skinhead group in southern California, the American Firm, even copied their names, the Firm, from English skinheads. U.S. skinheads were responding to the racial conflict festering in urban and suburban areas and against the increasing immigration that was affecting California’s demographics. Initially the response to this was mostly territorial and motivated by situational transgressions: “We used to hang around Hollywood and fucking niggers would start shit and they usually had numbers on us so we had to run like hell. You know getting chased around by these jungle-bunnies just because we’re white kids. So when we had a fair fight we used to throw down and beat those fuckers” (Boot Boys interview, June 28, 2000). Similarly, in Orange County, a member of the Order Skins discusses the importance of neighborhood conflicts with local Hispanic gangs in the early 1980s: Yeah, there was some Mexican gangs around Fullerton where a lot of us [Order Skins] lived, and we’d get in fights over at Buena Park, where we both used to tag. . . . One time these Mexican gangbangers mugged this little old lady who used to always walk to the store the same time every evening, and when that happened we definitely took care of business, we really planned that attack. (Order Skin interview, August 27, 2002).

Skinhead grievances and participation in racial and ethnic conflict were reinforced by their efforts at constructing a territorial imperative that was reflected in their choice of names (e.g., Huntington Beach Skins, Chino Hills Skins, South Bay Skins, Norwalk Skins). They also attempted to claim specific locations, such as parks, for their gangs with graffiti. For example, consider the following description of neighborhood turf and treatment of perceived outsiders by a Huntington Beach Skinhead: i: Do these names signify a territory there are claiming or just a name they are claiming?

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r: Yeah, South Bay, that’s over in L.A., Huntington, that’s over in Huntington, Chino Hills, that’s over in Chino . . . i: In regards to territory, if someone from a rival gang comes into that territory, do they protect that territory, and how would they do that? r: They tell ’em to leave, only they wouldn’t do it that kindly; they’d usually beat that person up, you know, if it was someone from a gang we didn’t like. Say if a LAD (Los Angeles Death Squad) member came into the territory in Huntington Beach, that LAD would get jumped. (Huntington Beach skinhead, September 23, 1989, referring to the early and mid-1980s)

However, claiming territory was not as central a feature of skinhead organization as it has been for some street gangs, where sentiments attached to turf may extend two or three generations. Turf also became less relevant as many skinhead gangs in the mid1980s became increasingly political.⁹

International Organization and Penetration Around 1984, another skinhead gang began to organize in Los Angeles County, known as the American Front (AF). Recruiters from Britain’s National Front Party and the organizer of San Francisco’s AF, Bob Heick, visited local youths who were just beginning to experiment with the skinhead style, encouraging them to organize a southern California–based AF (American Front Skin interview, July 12, 1999). After a party in West Covina sponsored by the British NF, about twenty of the youths began holding regular meetings and adopting uniforms to identify their newfound organizational affiliation. Not completely original, the AF in L.A. began wearing brown shirts to mark their presence. Early organizers of the AF indicate that a rapid increase in “nonwhite” populations, including Hispanics via immigration and African Americans via school busing programs, devastated what was previously a predominantly white working- and middle-class enclave. According to these accounts, these changes led to a proliferation in “nonwhite” gangs and other social problems, leaving little choice for white youth but to organize themselves as prototypical vigilantes committed to “cleaning up their community.”

Domestic Ties and Indirect International Links Although we did not find a significant amount of direct international links that were evident before the late 1980s, there were many instances of indirect penetration. That is, domestic WPM organizations such as the WAR, which was pivotal in nurturing U.S. skinheads, were also in regular contact with European activists. Around 1986 skinheads began to organize themselves with the direct assistance of the larger adult white racist organization, the southern California–based WAR.¹⁰ They called themselves the WAR Skins and were based primarily around the cities of Orange, Fullerton,

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and Anaheim, although branches were formed in San Bernardino, Riverside, and Los Angeles counties as well. Tom Metzger, leader of the WAR, became involved with the skinheads around 1985. Friends working with the National Front Party in the U.K. convinced Metzger and other adult white power activists that skinheads were a youth movement ripe for organizing. The associations with the NF led Metzger to correspond with British skinheads via mail. Aided by TV appearances, a computer bulletin, word of mouth, and his phone message, which had been active since the 1970s, U.S. skinheads increasingly became aware of Metzger in the mid-1980s. This resulted in Metzger receiving letters and phone calls “from kids whose parents wouldn’t listen—they would tell their kids to just get along—We told them the only thing you can do is organize, defend yourself ” (Tom Metzger interview, February 26, 1999). Metzger says the largest number of contacts came in the late 1980s from “kids who came from middle- and working-class backgrounds and were getting the hell beaten out of ’em at school, where they had become the minority” (Tom Metzger interview, February 26, 1999). The WAR Skins formed around 1986 as an official offshoot of the WAR. They were most active between 1986 and 1989, when they regularly distributed white power leaflets in various areas of Orange County, including Disneyland (Simi 2003). The formation of the WAR Skins marked two changes in the skinhead movement. They were much less territorial and not as tied to specific geographic areas as other skinhead gangs were. Skinheads also began to incorporate a rhetoric that was supralocal, a rhetoric called the ZOG discourse. The increasing predominance of the ZOG discourse in the WPM helped skinheads develop a greater awareness of globalizing patterns. The ZOG discourse became a powerful tool that could easily unite people in disparate locations with vastly different experiences by providing a common language with an easy villain to identify. Between 1986 and 1990, other skinhead gangs associated closely with the WAR Skins, and in some cases the WAR Skins consolidated smaller skinhead organizations. The American Firm (with approximately fifty or sixty members) associated with the WAR Skins, helping them pass out flyers and set up WAR hotlines, as did other gangs such as the Confederate Front Skins, the Huntington Beach Skins, and the Reich Skins, and these gangs also adopted the ZOG discourse to varying degrees. At their peak in 1987–88, the WAR Skins alone numbered as many as two hundred youths; however, rapid growth undermined their organizational structure and authority. A long-time skinhead in Orange County says that eventually gangs such as the WAR Skins became more concerned with the quality of membership and less concerned with quantity. As this occurred the core members began to more heavily scrutinize new recruits. With the WAR Skins developing “higher standards,” numbers began to decrease slowly. Additionally, once a new recruit realized the challenges that accompanied the life of a skinhead, many drifted away to less demanding subcultures. In 1989, when Tom Metzger and WAR came under scrutiny for a racially motivated murder in Portland, Oregon, the WAR Skins changed their name to Aryan White Separatists (AWS), but eventually they abandoned an official organizational title, opting for less visible forms of affiliation, yet as we will discuss shortly, some of the most

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active WAR Skins helped develop another organizational skinhead front that is still active today.

In the Name of Race: Skinheads Develop an “International Aryan Identity” Throughout the 1980s, skinheads moved toward greater organization, increasing linkages to older white supremacist groups such as the WAR, Aryan Nations, WCOTC, and various branches of the Ku Klux Klan. These trends marked the diminishing salience of local territorialized identities and the attempt to infuse a truly international identity into the racist skinhead subculture. Two factors especially important to this were the organization of the HSN and the recent flourishing of the white power music industry (see Futrell et al. 2004). Inspired by Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a pair of criss-crossed hammers began to represent a new trend in the skinhead subculture. The first Hammerskin group, the Confederate Hammerskins, formed in Dallas, Texas in 1988 (from www.hammerskins.net, July 30, 2007). Throughout the 1990s HSN made strides toward growing their “nation” by opening more branches, including the Eastern Hammerskins, the Northern Hammerskins, and the Western Hammerskins, helping coordinate movement events such as the Aryan Fest and sponsoring white power music bands. These gangs have been united under the umbrella of the HSN for more than a decade. In the last several years HSN efforts increased with the creation of the annual Hammerfest. In 1999, the HSN sponsored its first annual Hammerfest in Bremen, Georgia, featuring seven bands with some two hundred people in attendance. In December 1999 the Hammerskins hosted the white power bands Plunder & Pillage, Angry Aryans, and Max Resist outside Detroit. A few months later, in March 2000, the HSN organized the Vinland Tour 2000, which featured the Swedish group Pluton Svea, who played music shows in Detroit, Michigan, and Cleveland, Texas. The next October around three hundred people attended the second annual Hammerfest, also held near Bremen, Georgia, which was a virtual Woodstock of white power rock featuring fourteen bands, including Brutal Attack, Extreme Hatred, Code of Violence, and Hatecrime. Since 2001 Hammerfests have attracted two hundred to four hundred attendees and an international collection of music bands. The HSN boasts five regional chapters across America and chapters in Canada, England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany (Hammerskin interview, July 16, 2002). What is distinctive about the Hammerskins is their explicit attempt to bridge international barriers and their greater level of organization. Early founders of the HSN describe the international nature of their organization. According to imprisoned Hammerskin Jimmy Matchette, international unity is an important Hammerskin goal: “Our mission has drawn all of us from the four corners of the earth. The winds of destiny have drawn us and have carried us across geographical boundaries and from various ethnic branches of the White Aryan race to graft us into one Nation” (downloaded from www.adl.org, March 22, 2000). The

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HSN’s involvement in the white power music industry has been critical in their efforts at creating international networks. Whereas early skinhead gangs tended to be loosely organized, with frequent changes in leadership, Hammerskins have sought to develop a more traditional organizational structure with clearly delineated goals and responsibilities. Tom Metzger, who has maintained close contact with Hammerskins since their emergence, stated, “They [Hammerskins] have more or less elected leaders, post-office boxes, websites, and newsletters” (Metzger interview, January 29, 1999). Additionally, HSN branches typically screen applicants and place new members on a probation period during which their participation is highly monitored. And as opposed to the ritual of “jump-ins” used for initiating new members in some gangs, Hammerskins use a form of hazing that resembles that of the military or a fraternal organization (e.g., prolonged periods of physical exercise). By the early 1990s, the organizational structure of the largest skinhead gangs in southern California, such as the WAR Skins, the American Firm, and the AF, had largely dissolved. However, many skinheads from these formerly distinct groups came together to organize a Hammerskin chapter in southern California: the Western Hammerskins. According to one of the founders of this organization, the creation of the Western Hammers brought previously divided factions of skins together and helped encourage a global outlook, increasing international ties with skinheads from multiple nations: Oh yeah, after we organized the Hammers our contact with skinheads from all over southern California and even other countries definitely increased; we had contact before, but being part of the Hammers helped us in the direction of seeing other skinheads as international brothers fighting for the same cause. . . . We didn’t really have e-mail back then, but we would telephone and fax and they would come over to visit especially during events like “Aryan Fest.” (former skinhead interview, March 13, 2002)

White Power Music, the Internet, and International Network Linkages Arguably, the most important factor in understanding the development of an international Aryan identity among skinheads is the white power music industry. Although not new, white power music has recently met with increasing success, helping generate revenues and providing symbolic and concrete linkages across the globe (Futrell et al. 2006). The white power music industry has steadily developed national and global production and distribution networks in the past decade. The growth of white power music was supported by several WPM organizations that developed sophisticated media enterprises for the production and distribution of racist and anti-Semitic music. Consequently, the amount and availability of white power music and related propaganda have increased dramatically. In North America alone more than 40 companies claim a share of this burgeoning market (Center for New Community, n.d.). They range in size from two- or three-person mail-order outlets that stock and distribute Aryan music to

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larger, independent labels that sign bands, produce recordings, sell merchandise, and organize live concerts, festivals, and tours. Resistance Records and Free Your Mind Productions (formerly Panzerfaust Records) are the major U.S. labels in the white power music scene. They command national and international production and distribution networks, making white power CDs and merchandise widely available. Founded in 1993 by WCOTC member George Burdi and later sold to former National Alliance leader William Pierce (deceased July 2002) in 1999, Resistance Records bills itself as “the soundtrack for the white revolution.” The company is now run by Pierce’s protégé, Erich Gliebe. Resistance’s 718 music titles include a variety of genres. Resistance Records reportedly receives about 50 orders per day, many of which come via the Resistance Web site. The site also features a range of articles and “Resistance Radio,” with twenty-four-hour streaming of white power music. The label produces Resistance Magazine, a cross between a music fanzine and white power propaganda. Themes of violence and racist hatred aimed at blacks, Jews, Asians, and immigrants are articulated in the bands’ names, such as Fueled by Hate, Aryan Terrorism, Brutal Attack, Blue-Eyed Devils, Angry Aryans, Racist Redneck Rebels, and Rahowa. Panzerfaust Records was established in September 1998 and has been closely linked to the largest racist skinhead group, the HSN. Referring to a Nazi-era antitank weapon, Panzerfaust can be literally translated as “armored fist,” a concept members use to communicate the idea that white power music is “the audio ordnance that’s needed by our comrades on the front lines of today’s racial struggle” (Futrell et al. 2006). After an internal dispute with owner Anthony Pierpoint, Panzerfaust was reorganized in early 2005 as Free Your Mind Productions (Futrell et al. 2006). Free Your Mind Productions and Resistance mirror one another in several ways. Free Your Mind Productions offers more than 580 selections of white power music across several genres. Some music selections overlap (e.g., Brutal Attack recordings are offered by both labels), and others are exclusive to each company. Free Your Mind Productions also has a ’zine that reports on the music scene and other WPM developments; its Web site also provides links to other white power pages, a chat room for activists, photo galleries of bands and shows, and an extensive catalog of movement paraphernalia (Futrell et al. 2006). WPM activists are increasingly aware of music’s potential to recruit new participants and raise much-needed revue. For instance, one WPM activist claimed, I’m totally convinced that the music is the best way to awaken the young. . . . In the music of White Power, we have a force that can grow to an undreamed strength. . . . The fact that more and more record stores around the world have begun to sell our products means that we are constantly reaching new listeners. (quoted in Loow 1998:126)

White power music allows scattered skinheads (and other racists) to feel connected to a much larger project spanning almost every section of the world. The music has also supported activities and provided cultural spaces for otherwise geographically disconnected skinheads to “gather as one.” White power concerts serve as ritual events that are often scheduled to correspond with dates of significant symbolic importance (e.g., Rudolf Hess’s birthday, the anniversary of Robert Mathew’s death) (Loow 1998).¹¹

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The prospect of German skinheads honoring an American white power “martyr” such as Robert Mathews and U.S. skinheads paying homage to Rudolf Hess aids in the fertilization of an international sense of collective identity and memory by bridging specific cultural gaps and appealing to broader commonalities that traverse national boundaries. Thus we see European bands touring the states and U.S. bands making it to the “fatherland.” The lead singer from the Detroit-based band Max Resist reveals how music expands cognitive frameworks specifically related to the realm of what is possible for future social action: I’m a working-class white kid from the Detroit area—I never expected I’d have enough scratch to get to travel over seas—although it wasn’t really my dream to start a band to get to go over seas—I’d always kind of fantasized—my skinhead rock ’n’ roll fantasy would be to go to the Fatherland and get to play in front of white power skinheads. . . . Nordland arranged a four-city tour—we started in Hungary and we played in Budapest. . . . I mean, our Hungarian comrades, they really took care of us. . . . My first day there I saw over two hundred skinheads out in front of my window—I thought I was in Valhalla—so we get to the gig and seven hundred skinheads—more skinheads than I’ve ever seen in my life are there. (Hammerskin musician interview, September 1, 2001)

White power music is not just important for encouraging network linkages across national borders; it also provides what McAdam (1982) calls “indigenous leadership.” Over time the white power music industry is becoming a quasi-institution where veteran skinheads socialize younger ones. who are expected to apply the skills and knowledge learned in the music industry to other political endeavors related to white power politics. Simultaneously, veteran musicians such as those in the bands Max Resist or Brutal Attack who have been activists for fifteen to twenty years occupy a leadership role in the music scene as white power celebrities, thus providing tangible role models for the younger skinheads. Consider the comments made by the lead singer of Youngland regarding the role of musicians in the larger movement: I am a musician, and I’m using my talent for a specific movement, and I still have that naïve feeling of being involved with something as a whole . . . and even though I know the whole world is against me, I can pop in a Max Resist CD and listen to it. . . . There are people who have the same CD that forms a community and gives us strength. (Aryan musician, September 1, 2001)

In many ways the WPM music industry and the Internet are linked in their role in nurturing an international collective identity. The Internet plays a significant role in the marketing and distribution of white power music. White power Web sites also advertise music events and offer logistical coordination. Several scholars have addressed the role of the Internet in the WPM. Burris et al. (2000) have explored networks of WPM activists and organizations through the Internet. Others have focused on the Internet as a recruiting tool (Anti-Defamation League 2001; Burghart 1996; Hoffman 1996) and as a space for “virtual activism” (Back et al. 1998); however, observers seem divided

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on the viability of the Internet as an effective recruitment tool. Whereas Burghart (1996) argues that the Web cannot effectively substitute for face-to-face interaction and doubts that it adds significantly to WPM propaganda channels, Hoffman (1996) and the Anti-Defamation League see the Internet as a new and more effective channel for reaching potential recruits (Burris et al. 2000). We consider the latter interpretation as most accurate, especially when considering the issue from our conceptual standpoint regarding efforts at building an international identity. The Internet appears to have enabled a wide range of white power groups and activists to create dense interorganizational connections through which information about the movement is passed (Burris et al. 2000). Additionally, several sites provide key informational links offering assistance in the planning of movement events, allowing organizers and activists to arrange transportation, selection of sites, maps, lodging, and other logistical issues. The music industry helps structure international networks and facilitates lines of communication between skinheads across the globe, who increasingly recognize their shared interests revolving around the “race struggle.”

PPP The U.S. skinhead movement has received a lot of attention over the last twenty years, but it is understudied by social scientists. It is a youth movement that has arisen with particular voracity in a climate of increasing globalization and interethnic conflict. Most research examining the U.S. skinhead movement has been overly broad and paid little attention to the development and trajectory of the skinhead phenomenon. We examined the emergence of skinheads and placed it in the context of larger globalizing changes. Furthermore, we explored the relationship between skinheads and the adult white supremacist movement. Is there evidence of convergence (groups independently mobilizing as a result of structural global changes) and linkages (global intercommunication through emulation, or copying of other groups, or through penetration, or direct contacts between groups) in the skinhead movement that approximate the adult white supremacist movement? We found two trends in the skinhead movement. Through both convergence and mostly through linkages (both emulation and penetration), some skinhead groups are evolving into a global movement with a global identity. Critical to this spread has been the evolving sophistication of music industry organizations, which in turn has been aided by the Internet. Although U.S. skinheads began as local gang organizations that were responding independently to social change related to globalizing processes, skinheads began developing an international Aryan identity as a result of direct linkages through emulation or copying movements and through penetration via direct contacts. At first, skinheads represented Castells’s (1997) notion of a “territorial identity,” which is prevalent among new urban social movements, yet over time skinheads expanded their notion of territory and began embracing a global Aryan identity. In this sense skinheads have begun constructing an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) that is built on racial ties and loyalty commitments to racist goals (Blee 2004). The importance of constructed geographic boundaries (e.g., nation-states) is secondary to

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the constructed boundaries of skin color and racial loyalty. This vision is summarized by the following frequently uttered phrases: “My race is my nation,” “My race is my religion,” and “My race is my uniform.” Notes 1. For examinations of transnational movements see Smith and Johnston (2002) and Keck and Sikkink (1998). 2. This chapter focuses on racist or white power skinheads; however, there are other factions of skinheads who are antiracist (e.g., Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) and others whose racial views are more ambivalent, sometimes called “Traditional” skinheads or, less favorably, “fencesitters.” In this chapter when we refer to skinheads, unless otherwise noted, we are referring to racist skinheads. 3. Not all white power or racist skinheads espouse Nazism; for further discussion of the diversity among racist skinheads, see Simi (2003). 4. Interestingly, whereas U.S. skinheads remain understudied, European scholars have begun developing a large and rich literature examining skinheads in various European countries. 5. The Kaplan and Bjorgo volume includes discussion of European skinheads, but little time is spent examining U.S. skinheads. 6. The WPM uses ZOG to refer to a supposed conspiratorial web of interlocking agents working toward a one-world government controlled by “international Jews.” To achieve such an end, the internationalists use a language of “multicultural integration” and “race mixing” in order to perpetuate the “genocide of the white race.” Once the races have become “mongrelized,” the international Jews will have nothing left to stop them from world domination. According to WPM activists, ZOG’s influence is evident in everything from U.S. domestic policy regarding illegal immigration to affirmative action to the liberal promotion of abortion that is disproportionately used against white babies. 7. This approach departs from previous studies of skinheads in that we combine law enforcement data with primary skinhead interviews. Hamm (1993) did not conduct law enforcement interviews, and his interviews of skinheads were more akin to survey questionnaires, which are not well suited to obtaining historical data. Other researchers claim that because of the difficulty accessing skinheads it is necessary to rely primarily on secondary sources in order to compile a history of skinheads (Blee 2002). 8. Newspaper articles on the skinheads were drawn primarily from the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Weekly, and the San Bernardino Tribune. We selected these articles through a structured, exhaustive search of the Lexus–Nexus database and microfilm indexes of the Los Angeles Times to 1980 using the search terms skinhead, neo-Nazi, white supremacy, white power, and hate (e.g., hate crime and hate group). 9. But other groups, such as Public Enemy Number One Skins and the Nazi Low Riders, although retaining a racist ideology, continue to resemble traditional street gangs in terms of participating in activities such as garden-variety crime as well as the drug trade (Simi 2003). 10. Various other WPM organizations also actively recruited skinheads, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, White Workers Party, National Socialist Movement, and Populist Party; however, our discussion centers on the role of WAR because this organization seemed to have the greatest influence on skinheads, as evidenced by the creation of WAR Skins. 11. Robert Mathews formed the American white supremacist terrorist group the Bruder Schweigen (also widely known as the Order), who murdered Alan Berg, a Jewish radio talk show host in

An Extreme Response to Globalization Denver, Colorado, in 1984 and then a month later robbed a Brinks armored truck in Ukiah, California, of $3.6 million (Flynn and Gerhardt 1995).

References Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, E. 1987. Skinheads: From Britain to San Francisco via Punk Rock. M.A. thesis, Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA. Anti-Defamation League. 2000. Hammerskin Nation. Retrieved March 22, 2000, from www.adl .org / learn. ——. 2001. Racist Groups Using Computer Gaming to Promote Violence Against Blacks, Latinos, and Jews. Retrieved Feb. 2, 2002, from www.adl.org / videogames / default.asp. Back, L., M. Keith, and J. Solomos. 1998. Racism on the Internet: Mapping the neo-fascist subcultures in “cyberspace.” In J. Kaplan and T. Bjorgo, eds., Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture, 73–101. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Blee, K. 2002. Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 2004. The geography of racial activism: Defining whiteness at multiple scales. In C. Flint, ed., Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in the U.S.A., 49–68. New York: Routledge. Brake, M. 1974. The skinheads: An English working class subculture. Youth and Society, 6: 179–199. Brotherton, D. and L. Barrios. 2004. The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang. New York: Columbia University Press. Burghart, D. 1996. Cyberh@te: A reappraisal. Dignity Report, 3: 12–16. Burris, V., E. Smith, and A. Strahm. 2000. White supremacist networks on the Internet. Sociological Focus, 33: 215–234. Castells, M. 1997. The Power of Identity. Boston: Blackwell. Center for New Community. No date. Soundtracks to the White Revolution: White Supremacists Assaults on Youth Music Subcultures. Retrieved February 13, 2003, from www .turnitdown.com. Clarke, J. 1976. The skinheads and the magical recovery of community. In S. Hall and T. Jefferson, eds., Resistance Through Rituals, 99–102. London: Hutchinson. Cohen, S. 1980. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: Macgibbon and Kee. Dancis, B. 1978. Safety pins and class struggle: Punk rock and the left. Socialist Review, 8: 58–83. Denora, T. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Denzin, N. 1978. The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods. New York: McGraw-Hill. Dobratz, B. A. and S. L. Shanks-Meile. 1997. White Power, White Pride!: The White Separatist Movement in the United States. New York: Twayne. Flynn, K. and G. Gerhardt. 1995. The Silent Brotherhood: The Chilling Inside Story of America’s Anti-Government Militia Movement. New York: Penguin. Futrell, R., P. Simi, and S. Gottschalk. 2006. Music scene and collective identity in the U.S. white power movement. Sociological Quarterly, 47(2): 275–304. Hagedorn, J. 1988. People and Folks: Gangs, Crime, and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City. Chicago: Lakeview.

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Pete Simi and Barbara Brents Hamm, M. S. 1993. American Skinheads. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Hammerskin Nation. 2007. HSN History. Retrieved July 16, 2007, from hammerskins.net. Hebdige, D. 1979. Subculture, the Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Hoffman, D. S. 1996. High-Tech Hate: Extremists Use of the Internet. New York: Anti-Defamation League. Imig, D. and S. Tarrow. 2001. Contentious Europeans: Protest and Politics in an Emerging Polity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kaplan, J. and T. Bjorgo. 1998. Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Keck, M. E. and K. Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Knight, N. 1982. Skinhead. London: Omnibus Press. Laing, D. 1985. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press. Loow, H. 1998. The cult of violence: The Swedish racist counterculture. In J. Kaplan and T. Bjorgo, eds., Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture, 126–147. Boston: Northeastern University Press. McAdam, D. 1982. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Melucci, A. 1989. Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in the Contemporary Society. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ——. 1996. Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, J. B. 1993. Skinheads Shaved for Battle: A Cultural History of American Skinheads. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Morash, M. 1983, Oct. Gangs, groups, and delinquency. British Journal of Criminology, 23(4): 309–335. Nash, K. 2000. Contemporary Political Sociology: Globalization, Politics and Power. Boston: Blackwell. Ruddick, A. 1994. Young and Homeless in Hollywood: Mapping Social Identities. New York: Routledge. Schneider, E. 1999. Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Simi, P. 2003. Rage in the City of Angels: The Historical Development of Los Angeles Skinheads. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Smith, J. and H. Johnston. 2002. Globalization and Resistance: Transnational Dimensions of Social Movements. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Suttles, G. 1968. The Social Order of the Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thrasher, F. M. 1927. The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ware, V. and L. Back. 2002. Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weinberg, L. 1998. An overview of right-wing extremism in the Western world: A study of convergence, linkage, and identity. In J. Kaplan and T. Bjorgo, eds., Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture, 3–33. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Wooden, W. S. and R. Blazak. 2001. Renegade Kids, Suburban Outlaws: From Youth Culture to Delinquency, 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Ralph W. Larkin

12. Columbine The School Shooting as a Postmodern Phenomenon

The attack on Columbine High School by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold was unprecedented in its ferocity, death toll, and conception. Just as Charles Manson planned and executed several high-profile killings in the late 1960s, including that of Sharon Tate, actress and wife of director Roman Polanski, in an effort to jumpstart a racial war by attributing their horrific crimes to African Americans, Harris and Klebold conceived of their assault as the opening battle in a revolt of oppressed young people against the depredations their higher-status peers who bullied, harassed, and humiliated them. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Americans witnessed an increasing number of deadly assaults on middle and high school campuses by disaffected white male students. The most notorious of these were fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel in Springfield, Oregon, in May 1998, who killed his parents and then went to his high school’s cafeteria, where he killed one student and wounded nineteen others; Michael Carneil, who killed three students while they were praying in their high school hallway in West Paducah, Kentucky, in December 1997; and eleven-year-old Andrew Golden, steeped in gun culture, and thirteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson, with a troubled past, who opened fire in what seemed like a military assault at students who filed out of Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, after the boys set off a fire alarm in March 1998. Such actions in earlier decades would have been unthinkable. In what we now call postmodern culture, structural features incite a form of cultural terrorism that is engaged in primarily by white males who have been marginalized and who take out their frustrations through the use of deadly force on their perceived oppressors. In the case of Columbine, the oppressors were athletes who bullied and harassed Harris and Klebold and Christian evangelical students who told them that they would go to hell if they did not become born-again Christians. In this chapter I outline the aspects of postmodernism that influenced the actions of Harris and Klebold in their assault on Columbine High. In order to provide a better understanding of postmodernism, I briefly review the movements of the 1960s and their outcomes.

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The 1960s: The Post-Scarcity Vision The 1960s issued in a cultural revolution. Modernism, with its emphasis on the values of production, rationality, scientism, cultural monism, and traditional gender roles, was attacked by African Americans, white middle-class youth, feminists, and gays in tandem (Foss and Larkin 1976). After the civil rights phase of the black movement of the 1960s, blacks engaged in a period of nationalism, asserting Afrocentric culture as an alternative to assimilation to white society. White middle-class youth attacked the work ethic, the capitalistic notion that the ultimate goal in life was the accumulation of material goods, the intrinsic value of the status struggle, and the barrier between the personal and political. Feminists attacked traditional gender roles and the patriarchal power structure and enlarged on the concept of personal politics originally espoused by white middle-class youth. Gays also attacked traditional gender roles, extending the critique to sexual orientation. Within the social movements of the 1960s, cultural revolutionaries saw their efforts at attacking bourgeois modernist culture as an act of liberation whereby those excluded from the dominant culture were able to reclaim space in society on their own terms. By the mid-1970s, the United States was experiencing a dramatic cultural crisis. President Jimmy Carter felt the need to declaim the “cultural malaise.” Dissidents in the 1960s rebelled against interpersonal competition as a form of oppression. The middle-class youth movement began in the mid-1960s with young people dropping out of the competitive struggle, leaving their comfortable suburban homes to live in squalor in urban hippie enclaves such as the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco and the East Village of New York City (Cavan 1972). Hippies were the archetypal social category of the middle-class youth movement between 1964 and 1966. They lived without visible means of support, collected furniture from the trash, gathered food from supermarket refuse, and often made ends meet by begging for spare change. With the exceptions of stereo systems and guitars, they were aggressively antimaterialistic. Many dropped out of school because they saw schooling as sacrificing the present for participation in an oppressive competitive struggle to secure a meaningless job in a corporation whose goal it was to make money regardless of the social costs (Foss 1972). Competition was viewed as a deadly game of pointless effort that enervated the experience of the present. The watchword of the times was Timothy Leary’s “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

Postmodern Culture and the Cult of Celebrity Capitalism has an insatiable ability to appropriate liberated aspects of culture and realienate them by turning them into commodities that are sold for profit in the marketplace (Foss and Larkin, 1986). The reimposition of the competitive struggle in the post-1960s era has led to intensified interpersonal competition. In the land of plenty, success has been redefined such that material wealth is necessary but not sufficient. Somatic norm images have been redrawn to exclude most of the population for the

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purposes of selling diets, gym memberships and equipment, and new clothing lines. They have also been extended from women to both genders. In the counterculture of the 1960s, beauty ranged from Twiggy at one extreme to Mama Cass at the other. The dominant mode of today is sophisticated urban hipness. Increasingly, brand-name images have emerged as talismans of appropriate buying habits. Today, it is absolutely necessary for adolescents to be dressed in clothes that have appropriate name brands: North Face, Nike (Just do it!), Reebok, Adidas, Polo, and Abercrombie & Fitch (these are subject to rapid change). Only in postmodern society would young people kill to steal a piece of clothing for its brand name. The realienation of the liberated sensibilities of the 1960s gave rise to postmodern culture, which emphasizes multiculturalism, feminism, tolerance of cultural differences, subjectivist notions of reality, and contingent identity. Postmodern culture is urbane, hip, permissive, and sophisticated. Not surprisingly, postmodern culture has generated a backlash among large segments of the American population who are defined in postmodern culture as rural, unhip, and unsophisticated, or worse, “losers.” From the American hinterlands have emerged a militant Christian fundamentalism, reassertion of patriarchal norms, cultural monism, and advocacy of puritanical sexual behaviors (Dyer 1998; Stern 1997). Fundamentalists view postmodern culture as the playground of the devil. Postmodern culture is also characterized by the infusion of capitalist social relations into the production of cultural artifacts. Although such industries as motion pictures, publishing, and tourism predated postmodernism, it was not until the early 1970s that the majority of American workers were employed in the creation, recording, and transmission of information. Moreover, as Gamson (1994) notes, cultural reproduction has been penetrated by capitalist social relations. What was once left to institutions outside the marketplace, such as communities, subcultures, education, and religion, has been taken over by corporate-dominated media institutions directed at making a profit. One of the hallmarks of contemporary postmodern culture is the rise of an intense competitive struggle within the cultural realm that can be distinguished from economic and political competition. Sitting at the top of this competitive struggle is the celebrity. Celebrity status is a modern phenomenon to be distinguished from fame in the following ways (Gamson 1994; Giles 2000; Marshall 1998): It is more ephemeral and fleeting, with some personages rising from nobodies to celebrities and falling to has-been status in a matter of months; it has little to do with character or with extraordinary feats, skills, or talents; and it is merely the phenomenon of being known (Boorstein 1962). One of the major cultural emphases of postmodernism is the cult of celebrity. Modern society obviously had its sports figures, movie stars, and radio and TV celebrities, but they were not as important as celebrity in postmodern culture. Celebrities are the royalty of the postmodern era. They are the ones people fawn over, read about, and want to touch for magical reasons (Marshall 1998). They are not allowed private lives because the eyes of the media are always on them. They are the staple of talk shows, TV insider reports, celebrity “news” shows, and gossip columns. Web sites monitor their every move, communicating their whereabouts to an eager audience. Celebrities must be protected from the public; their houses must have sophisticated security systems,

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and they must appear in public with bodyguards (Gamson 1994). They are accorded special privileges in society, from exemptions from obeying laws to access to unearned wealth. Faludi (1999:35), referring to postmodernism as “ornamental culture,” describes it as “constructed around celebrity and image, glamour and entertainment, marketing and consumerism, it is a ceremonial gateway to nowhere. Its essence is not just the selling act but the act of selling the self.” In contemporary postmodern culture, the new class system can be categorized as celebrities, nobodies, and has-beens. The culture of the modern high school reflects that same stratification in the microcosm (Milner 2006). The jocks, the “soches,” and the school celebrities are the privileged minority. In the culture of the school and the peer group, everybody else is a nobody.

Who’s Going to Make My Movie? The Killers and Celebrity Status One can be a celebrity because of talent, beauty, athleticism, or personal achievements. Sports figures, movie stars, and luminaries in various fields of endeavor fit into this category. One can also become a celebrity by being in the right place at the right time (Gamson 1994). All one has to do is be in the eye of the camera at a critical moment. However, there is a third way to become a celebrity, and that is to do something so outrageous that one becomes notorious. For nobodies, this is the one sure route to celebrity; this is the road Harris and Klebold took. After sifting through all the data, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) concluded that the boys engaged in their rampage in order to gain notoriety. Gibbs and Roche (1999:1) note, Why, if their motive was rage at the athletes who taunted them, didn’t they take their guns and bombs to the locker room? Because retaliation against specific people was not the point. Because this may have been about celebrity as much as cruelty. “They wanted to be famous,” concludes FBI agent Mark Holstlaw. “And they are. They’re infamous.” It used to be said that living well is the best revenge; for these two, it was to kill and die in spectacular fashion.

In the videotapes Harris and Klebold made in the weeks leading up to the shootings, they revealed that they understood that the acts they were about to commit would simultaneously avenge their humiliations and elevate them to celebrity status. According to Gibbs and Roche (1999), two of the few members of the media who viewed the videotapes, Because they were steeped in violence and drained of mercy, they could accomplish everything at once: payback to those who hurt them, and glory, the creation of a cult, for all those who have suffered and been cast out. They wanted movies made of their story, which they had carefully laced with “a lot of foreshadowing and dramatic irony,” as Harris put it. There was that poem he wrote, imagining himself as a bullet. “Directors will be fighting over this story,” Klebold said—and the boys chewed over which could be trusted with the script: Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino. “You have two

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individuals who wanted to immortalize themselves,” says Holstlaw. “They wanted to be martyrs and to document everything they were doing.”

If their intent was to become celebrities, they were hugely successful. They commandeered the attention of all Americans, including the president of the United States, every high school principal in the land, researchers such as this writer, pundits, the clergy, and every kid in America over the age of 10. Harris and Klebold speculated that their act would generate a revolution. Harris was quoted in one of the videotapes as saying, “We’re going to kick-start a revolution” among the dispossessed and despised students of the world. Although they did not engender a revolution, their acts resonated among students who had been bullied and humiliated by their peers. In the weeks after the Columbine High School shootings, schools across the country experienced thousands of bomb scares, scores of attempted bombings, and several attempted copycat killings (Emergency Net 1999), partially achieving their apocalyptical vision of a nationwide revolt. The most serious incident occurred in Taber, a farming community of seventy-two hundred people located about 110 miles southeast of Calgary, Alberta, on Wednesday, April 21, when a student opened fire with a sawed-off .22-caliber rifle at W. R. Myers High School, killing one youth and seriously wounding another. Since then, several actual school shootings consciously mimicking Columbine have occurred, such as the massacres at Red Lake, Minnesota, in 2005 and at Virginia Tech University in 2007. Numerous potential attempts modeled after Columbine have been thwarted (Butterfield 2001). The Columbine shootings were and continue to be media driven. Harris and Klebold, especially Harris, had strong media savvy. They videotaped themselves before the shootings; Harris set up the Trenchcoat Mafia Web page on America Online, in which he advertised his xenophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic beliefs and told of his intentions to blow up the school and kill his fellow students; and the boys were skilled in the use of video games. When they made their videotapes before the massacre, Eric Harris sat in a chair swigging a bottle of Jack Daniels and carrying a sawed-off shotgun in his lap, which he named Arlene, after a favorite character in the Doom video game (Gibbs and Roche, 1999).

Columbine and Postmodern Kulturkampf There may be good reasons why the most violent episode in the history of American education occurred in bucolic southern Jefferson County rather than somewhere else. In the wake of the 1960s the United States has as its fundamental cultural contradiction those who embrace postmodern culture and those who reject it vehemently. The culture war between the urbanized cultural left and the rural religious right is played out in numerous issues: abortion and women’s rights, race relations, censorship, gun control, social welfare, the relationship between church and state, states’ rights, and language policy, to name the most obvious. The suburbs south of Denver where Columbine High School is located are hotbeds of antipostmodern charismatic Christian sects. Evangelical Christianity has cultural

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hegemony in southern Jefferson County, where Columbine High School is situated. An informant who lived there stated that real estate agents steer evangelical Christians to that area. Colorado Springs, fifty miles to the south of Columbine, is the very heart of the Christian right, headquarters of Focus on the Family and housing one of the largest chapters of the Christian Coalition in the country (Cooper 1995). The informant, herself a member of a liberal Protestant sect, chafed at the “sanctimonious atmosphere” among the evangelicals and their viciousness if anyone crossed them. Evangelicals tend to think of southern Jefferson County as their territory. Zoba (2000) notes that the memorial service for the dead and wounded students and their families was taken over by evangelical pastors and turned into a revival, complete with hellfire and brimstone. The service was supposed to be nondenominational and inclusive of educational and political leaders. Vice President Al Gore was there, representing the Clinton administration. On the dais and participating in the services were General Colin Powell, William Owens, the governor of Colorado, the superintendent of the Jefferson County school district, and Frank DeAngelis, the principal of Columbine High School. The service included a rabbi, even though there are not enough Jews in the Columbine–Littleton area to form a congregation. The rabbi was offended by antiSemitic remarks by one of the pastors, who claimed that Christians had a better chance to survive the Holocaust than Jews because of their faith in Jesus. Zoba (2000:140) observes, “The consensus was that it was not inclusive to all the communities,” said the Rev. Michael Carrier, president of the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado and pastor of Calvary Presbyterian Church in Littleton. “I felt like [Franklin Graham, son of evangelical preacher Billy Graham] was trying to terrorize us into heaven instead of loving us into heaven. The service was supposed to be for all people of Colorado and the nation to find solace, not an evangelical Christian service.”

Members of evangelical community defended the service as representative of the Columbine community. Some evangelical leaders admitted that the service was heavily evangelical. Zoba (2000:141) quotes an evangelical pastor who said, “I understand where the [critics] were coming from. I didn’t disagree with anything that was said or represented at the service, but I might have disagreed with the timing.” The tensions between the evangelicals and the liberal Protestant sects are based on the assumptions by the evangelicals of their own moral superiority and their lack of tolerance and acceptance of the beliefs and practices of liberal Protestants, much less Catholics, Jews, Muslims, or atheists. Their fundamentalist views and literalist interpretations of the Bible lead them to assume that their way is the One True Way and all others are erroneous, if not manifestations of the devil. It is this sanctimoniousness that seems to have enraged Harris and Klebold. Harris apparently reconfigured the video game Doom so that when victims were killed, they cried out, “Lord, why is this happening to me?” (Hubbard 1999). In the videotapes they made in the days before the shootings, they indicated that they were very proud of their hatred of evangelical Christians, along with everybody else (Gibbs

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and Roche 1999). Zoba (2000:131–132) recounts the following conversation between Klebold and Harris, contained on one of the tapes they made before their rampage: harris: If we have a fucking religious war. . . . We need to get a chain reaction going here. . . . Shut the fuck up, Nick [an apparent reference to a classmate]. And those two girls sitting next to you, they probably want you to shut up, too. Rachel and Jen and whatever. klebold: Stuck up little bitches, you fucking little Christianity, Godly whores. harris: Yeah, “I love Jesus, I love Jesus.” Shut the fuck up! klebold: “What would Jesus do?” What would I do? Boosh! [He points his finger as if it were a gun at the camera.] [NB: “What Would Jesus Do?” refers to bracelets that evangelical Christian girls wore with the initials WWJD engraved on them as a reminder to behave as Jesus would in any given situation.] harris: I would shoot you in the motherfucking head! Go Romans—thank God they crucified that asshole. both: Go Romans! Yeah!

Ironically, Harris and Klebold saw themselves as morally superior to mere mortals in an almost Nietzschean way. In the videotapes made by the boys before their rampage, Klebold stated the following (Zoba 2000:131–132): I know were gonna have followers because we’re so fucking godlike. We’re not exactly human—we have human bodies but we’ve evolved into one step above you fucking shit. We have fucking self-awareness.

Apart from the megalomania, it seems as if Klebold had taken the self-righteousness and moral superiority of the evangelicals and turned it on its head. Harris and Klebold had apparently convinced themselves of their evolution into superhumans who could sit in judgment and execute that judgment against others. Although this sense of moral superiority shares commonality with evangelical Christianity, it has more in common with paramilitary culture. How and why did two suburban boys become involved with paramilitary culture?

Globalization and the Columbine Shootings In their classic study Small Town in Mass Society, Vidich and Bensman (1960) examined how a small town was influenced by external political and economic structures over which they had no control. Although the rural community they studied viewed itself as autonomous, the reality of the situation was that the town was highly dependent on state policies and expenditures. Similarly, life in Columbine is determined by forces outside its control. Although capitalism has been global from its mercantilist beginnings, in the latter half of the twentieth century a qualitative change took place. The world economy is

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dominated by a small number of multinational corporations, primarily of American origin. With revolutions in communication and transport systems, it is possible for companies to move commodities around the world with great speed. This has allowed corporations to establish factories anywhere in the world, creating a situation whereby an international labor market exists in which wage competition can pit workers against each other anywhere on the planet (Reich 1991). Globalization, or “the New World Order,” has generated a contradiction in America between cultural and economic reproduction. The New World Order can be seen as an extension of the power of the West over the rest of the world. That is, as globalization spreads, combining the corporate and state power of Western society, increasingly organizations that are run by white men from America and Europe are controlling forces over the lives of nonwhite populations. In the United States, at an unconscious level, such expansion of Western power is viewed as natural and inevitable. Globalization can be conceptualized as an extension of white privilege, although not many would admit as much. Ironically, in the United States globalization has disprivileged marginal white males. The so-called Reagan revolution of the 1980s can be viewed as a successful attack on the social contract between American corporations and their unionized workers (Lekachman 1982). By generating a sharp recession in 1981, the Reagan administration provided corporate America with an excuse for closing up obsolete facilities that employed a unionized labor force and moving production facilities to the Third World, where they could employ cheaper labor, speeding up a process that had begun in the wake of World War II. Widespread layoffs occurred, and union membership declined dramatically. Although business interests have always had the lion’s share of power in American politics, the ascendancy of the Reagan administration signaled a sea change in American politics whereby corporate elites had unfettered access to the political process, and the power of other organized minorities declined. Along with the decline in unionism, from more than one-third of the labor force in the 1950s to slightly more than 15 percent in the late 1990s, was a concomitant corporatization of rural America (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2001). Family farmers could no longer compete with large multinational agricultural companies such as Cargill and ConAgra, who also owned processing plants and who could squeeze the profit margins of small competitors (Dyer 1998).

The Revolt of the Angry White Male: 1992–1996 The legacy of the globalization of American corporations has been that young white men who used to be entitled to a union job or a plot of land to farm that would provide them with a living wage so they could get married, have a family, and establish roots in an ongoing community have been left without futures (Dyer 1998). The union job is gone, as it was for Timothy McVeigh, and the family farm was sold for taxes, as in the case of Terry Nichols; McVeigh and Nichols were convicted of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Unlike the labor crises of the late 19th century, which led to progressive politics and popular leaders such as Robert LaFollette and Eugene

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Debs, the marginalization of white men has led to racial hatred and xenophobia (Faludi 1999; Niewart 1999; Stern 1997). It is clear that Harris and Klebold, being white males who viewed themselves as oppressed in the context of their school and community, latched onto these right-wing views. Beginning in August 1992 with the shootout between federal agents and right-wing racial separatist Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and ending in May 1996 with the surrender of the Montana Freemen to the FBI, America experienced a social movement that was a reaction against postmodern culture. The major events of the movement, beginning with Ruby Ridge, were the attack on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993 by federal marshals, the establishment of the Militia of Montana by John Trochman and the Michigan Militia by Mark Koernke in 1994, the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, and the Freemen standoff in 1996 (Dyer 1998). The constituency of the movement was primarily rural, male, and white. It consisted of dispossessed farmers, ranchers protesting limitations on their grazing rights on federal land, racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, Second Amendment absolutists, and economically marginal white males such as Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols (Dyer 1998). The movement was the revolt of the angry white male; its youth component was skinheads (Ridgeway 1995). The core of the movement adopted “leaderless resistance” as its organizing principle (Niewart 1999). That is, they were organized as semiautonomous cells loosely confederated as militias (e.g., the Texas Constitutional Militia), underground terrorist organizations (e.g., the Ku Klux Klan), or Christian identity sects (e.g., the Order) linked together by faxes, e-mail, and shortwave radio. At the height of the movement, at the time of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, there was at least one militia group in nearly every state in the union (Stern 1997). Harris and Klebold adopted the mythos of the right-wing leaderless paramilitary terrorist squad, and they attacked the government institution they knew best: their school. In their own words, they conducted a “strategic military assault” (Gibbs and Roche 1999). They apparently learned their techniques from Internet sources, attendance at gun shows, and the video games Doom and Quake. They understood that their rampage would actualize their mythical status as they died in a blaze of glory.

Rambo Goes to School The boys adopted postmodern antihero identities of post–Vietnam War paramilitary agents portrayed in the media by the A-Team and Rambo. In his Web site, Harris lauded the video game Doom and claimed that he played it whenever he could. Doom is a combat game in which the player is a Marine on Mars whose buddies have been killed by strange life-forms and whose mission is to rid the planet of evil life-forms as he progresses through labyrinths by picking up weaponry and killing them. The art form is Gothic, reminiscent of comic book superheroes with an Aryan cast; the evil monsters are portrayed as subhuman, and the heroes wear combat fatigues. Apparently Harris and Klebold took the subtext of Doom seriously, viewing themselves as superior humans whose mission it was to destroy lesser beings.

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Paramilitary culture is based on revenge for past wrongs. Central to the mythology of paramilitary culture is the loss of the war in Vietnam (Gibson 1994). The iconic figure is John Rambo, the character brought to life by Sylvester Stallone. The Rambo movies were so popular in the mid- to late 1980s that the original, First Blood, was followed by two sequels. The character of Rambo was modeled after Bo Gritz, a former colonel in the Green Berets who ran for the presidency in 1992 in the Populist Party, which promulgated a racist and anti-Semitic campaign and who was a leading light of the militia movement in the mid-1990s (Stern 1997). The mythos of paramilitary culture is, first, that the primordial male role is that of warrior, which must be distinguished from that of a soldier. Unlike soldiers, warriors are not subject to control by military bureaucracy. They operate alone or in small teams or squads outside the command structure. They view themselves as autonomous beings beyond the control of conventional society. Second, they are hypermasculine. Women are viewed as threats to military discipline, bodies to be exploited, and potential betrayers to the enemy (Faludi 1999). Third, paramilitary culture has as its fundamental ethic “death before dishonor.” Paramilitary culture subsumes a survivalist strain that contains a paranoid notion of the righteous individual or team against a polluted and compromised world. Central to the paramilitary ethic is the concept of dying in a blaze of glory. Fourth, paramilitary culture is xenophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic; paramilitaries often view themselves as defending white culture against the pollution of alien cultures (Ridgeway 1995). It is actualized in violently racist and anti-Semitic organizations that include the Aryan Nation, Phineas Priests, the Order, Posse Comitatus, and various neo-Nazi and skinhead organizations. Fifth, paramilitary culture glorifies the gun. Paramilitaries have a special affinity to semiautomatic and automatic weapons, such as Tech-9s, Uzis, M16s, and AK-47s, and heavy-duty handguns such as the Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum, Colt .45, and .357 Magnum (Gibson 1994). Harris and Klebold were armed with a Springfield 9-mm carbine rifle, a Tech-9 semiautomatic pistol, two sawed-off shotguns—one double barreled and the other a single-barreled pump gun that fired five rounds before having to be reloaded—several knives, CO₂ cartridges, and pipe bombs. Harris and Klebold were particularly enamored of paramilitary culture, especially the notion of dying in a blaze of glory and taking as many people with them as possible (Gibson 1994). The Trenchcoat Mafia Web site is replete with allusions to paramilitary culture. The site contained a litany of anti-Semitic, anti–foreign born, and racist statements. At the top of the Web site is this statement “Hello and Heil Hitler! . . . . I hate jocks, Jews and jiggaboos. I loathe wops, spics and blood-engorged ticks.” In the security videotapes of the cafeteria of Columbine High School, Harris and Klebold are clearly shown. Harris is wearing combat boots and pants with suspenders; he is wearing a T-shirt on which is written “Natural Selection,” which refers to the social Darwinistic ideology to which he adheres. Although not wearing military fatigues, he is dressed in paramilitary style. Klebold is dressed in black cargo pants and black T-shirt that states “Wrath.” Both are carrying weapons. The assault on Columbine High School clearly aped a paramilitary mission. The boys claimed that they had been planning the attack for more than a year. They developed a plan of execution and carried it out in a coordinated effort. They had the foresight to plant their large bombs

Columbine

in the cafeteria before the armed attack. It was sheer dumb luck that the bombs did not explode. Because they were underage at the time, they had a friend purchase the Tech-9 for them at a gun show. They accumulated an arsenal of weapons over a period of several months, during which they made bombs and hid them in Eric Harris’s bedroom (Gibbs and Roche 1999). They even planted a bomb in a park near the school to explode at the beginning of their attack in order to create a diversion.

Why Columbine? We now return to the question, “Why Columbine?” In the school and the community, Harris and Klebold were doubly stigmatized as social outcasts and moral inferiors. They were at the low end of the student hierarchy; the so-called Trenchcoat Mafia was viewed by students as a collection of losers, dopers, and slackers (Kurtz 1999). Although Harris designed the Trenchcoat Mafia Web site, he and Klebold were only loosely affiliated with that group. In addition, their families were nominally Christian in a community dominated by evangelicals. As a response to their degraded status and continued subjection to rituals of humiliation, they adopted the identity of a white supremacist paramilitary terrorist underground organization and acted out their fantasies of retribution by attacking the school and killing their fellow students. They perceived this last act as a form of liberation and a message to other students who felt similar forms of oppression to rise up against their social superiors. In the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the social category “youth” emerged as a dissident collectivity. In the postmodern world, the dissidence of young people has only been partially pacified. Although the majority either willingly or grudgingly participate in various competitive struggles, there still resonates in a significant minority an antipathy against contemporary culture, whether it be postmodern or antipostmodern. This antipathy can be seen in a variety of cultural and political trends among youth since the 1960s, including punk, skinhead and neo-Nazi, heavy metal, slacker, and rap subcultures, the continuing normative use of illegal drugs, especially marijuana, selfmutilation and suicide, and assaults on schools (Finnigan 1998; Gaines 1993; Wooden and Blazak 2001). In a world where the voice of the left is a mere whisper and the social movements of the 1960s are history in a culture that has historical amnesia, Harris and Klebold adopted their model of resistance from the recently insurgent paramilitary right, with devastating results. They were products of a media-saturated postmodern culture who adopted antipostmodern postmodern antiheroes as their exemplars. Although it might seem gratuitous to suggest that Harris and Klebold were oppressed, the fact is that they were. They may not have suffered materially, as do young people of color from poor urban neighborhoods; they were affluent white males. They were not politically oppressed in the overt sense. They did not live in territory occupied by a foreign army, nor were they treated abusively by the local police. As a matter of fact, when they were apprehended by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department for breaking into a truck and stealing equipment from it, they were placed in a diversion program and released early. They were not abused by their parents; by the standards of contemporary society, their parents were caring and supportive, although they seemed

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to be only tangentially involved in their adolescent sons’ lives. However, alienation between adolescents and their parents is the norm in American society (Hersch 1998). So what kind of oppression did they experience? They were experiencing the degradation of everyday life in postmodern culture. They lived in a suburb in which there is no cultural diversity. This meant that there was a fairly unified cultural mode that you either fit in or you did not. They did not. Because they were outsiders, they were treated by their peers as second-class citizens, deserving of predation and humiliation. The fundamental contradiction of their lives was that because they were white upper-middle-class males, they were entitled to a certain level of social privilege. However, their lives in the crucible of Columbine were experienced as oppressive and degraded. Herein lies the parallel between Klebold and Harris and the angry white males of the mid-1990s. There exists in this society an assumption that if you are white and male, you are entitled to a certain amount of deference and respect, which they did not receive. In a culture as saturated with images of “winners” and “losers,” it is quite clear that they were the latter, even though they fit into all the right social categories. They fended off boredom with long bouts of playing video games, especially Doom and Quake, and the apparent joy of plotting the destruction of their own high school and the killing and maiming of their peers. Their humiliation and harassment at the hands of the athletes and the assumption of their moral inferiority on the part of evangelicals were at odds with their own, perhaps inflated, sense of who they ought to be. They perceived themselves as righteous avengers in a world that treated them unfairly. At some incoherent and unarticulated level, they understood that the indignity they experienced was a widespread phenomenon. They came to realize that by attacking and destroying their school, they would elevate themselves from a couple of picked-upon nerds to celebrities. The writing of this chapter and all the media attention on the Columbine shootings seem to confirm their status as “somebodies,” even if they are notorious. Almost every subsequent planned or actual attack by students on their schools has had Columbine as its reference. Klebold and Harris live on in the consciousness of alienated students across the globe. References Boorstein, D. 1962. The Image. New York: Atheneum. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2001, March. Union Members in 2000. Retrieved November 3, 2001, from www.bls.gov / news.release / union2.nr0.htm. Butterfield, F. 2001, Feb. 10. Students, mindful of Columbine, break silence to report threats. The New York Times, pp. 1ff. Cavan, S. 1972. Hippies of the Haight. St. Louis, MO: New Critics Press. Cooper, M. 1995, Jan. 2. God and man in Colorado Springs. The Nation, pp. 9–12. Dyer, J. 1998. Harvest of Rage. Boulder, CO: Westview. Emergency Net. 1999. Summary of real-time reports concerning a shooting at the Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. ERRI Emergency Services Report, 3. Faludi, S. 1999. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: William Morrow. Finnigan, W. 1998. Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country. New York: Random House.

Columbine Foss, D. A. 1972. Freak Culture: Lifestyle and Politics. New York: E. P. Dutton. —— and R. W. Larkin. 1976. From “The Gates of Eden” to “Day of the Locust”: An analysis of the dissident youth movement of the 1960s and its heirs in the 1970s—The post-movement groups. Theory and Society, 3: 45–64. —— and ——. 1986. Beyond Revolution: A New Theory of Social Movements. South Hadley, MA: Bergen & Garvey. Gaines, D. 1993. Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead-End Kids. New York: HarperCollins. Gamson, J. 1994. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gibbs, N., and T. Roche. 1999, Dec. 20. The Columbine tapes. Time Magazine, pp. 4ff. Gibson, J. W. 1994. Warrior Dreams. New York: Hill & Wang. Giles, D. 2000. Illusions of Immortality: A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hersch, P. 1998. A Tribe Apart. New York: Ballantine. Hubbard, B. 1999. Researchers say Harris reconfigured video game. Denver Rocky Mountain News. Kurtz, H. 1999, July 25. Columbine like a hologram: Life at school depends on angle of one’s view. Denver Rocky Mountain News, p. 4A. Lekachman, R. 1982. Greed Is Not Enough: Reaganomics. New York: Pantheon. Marshall, P. D. 1998. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Milner, M. Jr. 2006. Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids: American Teenagers, Schools, and the Culture of Consumption. New York: Routledge. Niewart, D. A. 1999. In God’s Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest. Pullman: Washington State University Press. Reich, R. B. 1991. The Work of Nations. New York: Vintage. Ridgeway, J. 1995. Blood in the Face, 2nd ed. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Stern, K. 1997. A Force upon the Plain. Norman: University of Oklahoma. Vidich, A. J. and J. Bensman. 1960. Small Town in Mass Society. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Wooden, W. S. and R. Blazak. 2001. Renegade Kids, Suburban Outlaws. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Zoba, W. M. 2000. Day of Reckoning: Columbine and the Search for America’s Soul. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos.

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13. ’Cause Fightin’ Is Just Fightin’ Caucasian Youth, Violence, and Social Exclusion in a Globalized Age

Afterwards I felt like I was ten feet tall. Like I was like, you know, nothing could stop me! Because we took on seven guys and I almost killed a guy. I almost killed a guy getting him thrown in front of a bus, you know, I hurt this kid real bad. I felt like such an adrenalin rush. I mean for weeks after that, I felt like, you know—if I wanted to I could climb Mount Everest. We still talk about it today. We still talk about it, how great it was. We call it the Bay Parkway Incident, it’s like thank God nobody got hurt or whatever, but it was like one of the coolest things that ever happened to us. ’Cause somebody fucked with us and we basically, like, you know, fucked them up ten times worse than they ever imagined. So it was like a really great feeling. I mean, you know I don’t want to sound barbaric or any thing like that, but to tell you the truth, you know, you know it’s kind of like we shoved it in their faces. You go to their face and you basically hurt them really bad, you know it kinda puts a little excitement in your life, you know? It’s normally like the work, and you know, family shit, you know and girlfriends and just general life, where it’s kind of like, blah, where it can be kinda blah, at times. And this kinda puts like a real excitement in your life, you know? (Tony, aged twenty-four) I caught him. I turned him ’round and he went into the shelf and I hit him, I punched him. Hard. In his cheek. You know I just, he just turned around and I just hooked him, and them I heard the loudspeaker say, you know, “Security, come to the second floor for an accident” or something like that, you know. And you know, I just—he was just like sittin’ there like this and I just said, you know, “Hey, fuck you. I’m goin’!” I didn’t say nothin’, I just—I left. I went back and got my gloves ’cause my friend had them, and I just left. If I had stayed I would have probably kicked him a lot. A lot. Kicked him to hurt him. I was looking to hurt him. That’s what I was lookin’ to do. Then I went to my sister’s house I put, ah my gloves, you know on her stove because she was cookin’ something, so I got them dried off. You know I just felt like laughin’, you

’Cause Fightin’ Is Just Fightin’

know? You know, just laughed—after I have a fight I laugh. I felt good. I had a sense of relief, you know, like maybe, it was just, it got crap out of me. I don’t know. You know, like I’m not a nut case or anything, but it just felt good punching. Like my fist felt good and I was relaxed. You know, I just laid back and said, “Hey, that was good! You know, that was good what I just did.” . . . I didn’t have no regrets, no worries. I was just really happy. That’s all, because of how I just performed, cause fightin’ is just fightin.’ (Carl, aged nineteen)

Tony and Carl are nowhere close to being hardmen. The delight they express, a naked delight derived from thrashing their opponents, may lead you to believe so, but they are not. They neither sought nor provoked the violent encounters described in the opening quotes. They are not pacifists, either: Tony earned a black belt in karate, and Carl admits to being fascinated with violence, but they’ve forsworn engaging in predatory and preemptive violence. In fact, if you chanced across Tony on the street in the neighborhood or in your workplace lunchroom, you would think the boy was a bit adrift, could benefit from a touch of refinement and confidence, but you would swear to his fundamental decency. A diamond in the rough—isn’t that the cliché? It would only be an impression, of course, nothing that would hold up in court, but an impression you would value. And if you were leaving on a trip and needed someone to collect the mail, walk and feed the dog, water the indoor plants, you’d think nothing of giving him the house keys. With Carl you would be more cautious. Whereas Tony’s heavy metal T-shirt was ironed and tucked into clean blue jeans, his sneakers clean, his hair washed and civil servant short, Carl’s hair was headbanger unkempt, the left sleeve of his Megadeth tee ripped along the underside seam, his black jeans torn at the knees, tucked midcalf into black and unlaced Doc Martens. On the street Tony would acknowledge you with a smile and a greeting; Carl would limit his salutation to a head nod. Still, after time, you’d understand that his attempts at menace and indifference were theatrical and protective rather than characteristic and considering him more disagreeable than dangerous, you would soften a bit toward him. You might ask him to collect your mail, but the house keys would stay in your pocket, and the dog would sleep at the kennel. I interviewed Tony and Carl for an interview-based psychological research project seeking individuals’ descriptions of their lived experience of being violent in a public setting. They responded to flyers offering $25 to Caucasian men, aged eighteen to twenty-four, willing to discuss an experience of being violent in a public setting; I ended up meeting with them on three separate occasions. I conducted unstructured, depth-oriented psychological interviews with ten men and began each interview by asking the young man to recount an experience in which he was violent. When the young man was satisfied with the fullness of his account (I also used nondirective questions to round out the accounts), I asked questions designed to elicit biographical material, questions about the young man’s family history (including experiences with violence), educational and employment experiences, and drug and alcohol consumption. Drawing on my training in client-centered, collaborative interviewing, I assured each interviewee that my intention was neither to diagnose nor categorize his experiences and that the interviews would never be used in any profiling effort.

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Carl and Tony were born and raised in a Bay Ridge, a working-class Italian American neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Bay Ridge is in no way a blighted area, and for many it possesses a certain charm. The sidewalks are kept, people on the street are polite and sometimes friendly, the houses are well maintained, and the shops and businesses are owned and operated by local men and women. It is not unusual for motion picture location scouts to suggest filming in this areas for scenes needing an authentic New York “feel.” However, it is not trendy in any way; although rents and home prices have increased during the most recent real estate boom, Bay Ridge seems to have been bypassed by the march of gentrification and certainly is never mentioned in articles on New York’s up-and-coming neighborhoods. Bay Ridge lacks the galleries, specialty stores, restaurants, museums, community centers, and nightclubs that make a neighborhood desirable to the “creative class” but also add a vitality and vibrancy to the neighborhood that benefits most of the residents. Many of the adult locals say they prefer it this way, but a lot of the youth feel that they have missed out on an important social transformation. Growing up, Tony and Carl were spared living in economic precariousness. Tony grew up in comfortable economic circumstances, Carl reports that his family was “OK.” Tony’s father worked his way to a midlevel managerial position in a major international bank, and his mother stayed at home, whereas Carl’s stepfather was a construction worker, and his mother worked in the cafeteria at a local high school. At the time of the interviews both men were still living at home, Tony with his parents and two siblings, Carl with his mother, stepfather, and three siblings. Both young men, Tony especially, found this situation restrictive and longed to have their own homes, but neither had been able to achieve economic self-sufficiency. Carl’s parents didn’t seem to mind his lack of autonomy, but Tony’s father was perplexed and frustrated: I live at home. I’m twenty-four. I’m out of work, and he has this mentality, “Yeah when I was your age I was out fightin’ Charlie in Vietnam and I got out and got a job!” So it’s like humorous, and at the same time it’s not humorous. He’s trying to put me down but in a humorous way. He would try and embarrass me to get me to do things, not to the point where it was earth shattering, but every once in a while he goes over the line.

Both considered their time in elementary and secondary school horrible. Carl found the structure authoritarian (“It was like being in a fuckin’ jail”), and Tony was often bullied by older kids and frequently bored. Neither young man felt that the teachers or school administrators were concerned with their students’ intellectual development or general welfare. Despite these difficulties Tony not only graduated from high school (“I was like a C, maybe B student”) but earned an associate degree in hotel and restaurant management from a local community college. Carl dropped out in his junior year (“The kids liked me, I was voted something like ‘Most Entertaining,’ but I couldn’t stand it anymore”) and then passed the General Educational Development exam “on my first try, and I didn’t even study.” Their work experiences had been similarly unedifying. Both had suffered through a series of jobs at fast-food restaurants and retail chain stores. As employees in these establishments they deplored the mindless, inane nature of their duties, the spiritlessness

’Cause Fightin’ Is Just Fightin’

of the work environment, the lack of opportunities for advancement, their supervisors’ arbitrary and often sadistic displays of power, and a low wage that didn’t allow them entry into the society of consumers—an empty society, perhaps, but one providing certain pleasures and status. Nor were their experiences in “good jobs” much better. Carl found his work in construction boring, and Tony chafed under the demeaning treatment of his supervisor while working as a security guard and hospital orderly. Carl and Tony were different from the other young men participating in the study. Some of the difference could be attributed to facts of birth: the other participants had been raised in far more affluent circumstances, with fathers, mothers, grandmothers, and grandfathers with college degrees and white-collar professional positions who sent their children to the best private and public elementary schools, vacationed in Europe, called in professional and social debts in order to get their children challenging summer jobs and internships, and secured the tuition required by liberal arts colleges and universities. Some of the difference was a matter of spirit. I’ve mentioned some of the Tony and Carl’s hardships for the purpose of exposition, not definition. These young men were neither tuned out nor alienated in any classic sense; they were critical of some aspects of society but weren’t about to renounce their membership. They were interested in spiritual and artistic questions. Tony had a voracious appetite for metaphysical books (New Age, not Kantian) and seriously considered entering the Catholic seminary. A skilled cartoonist and sketch artist, Carl was more earthbound. Both were lay historians of rock and roll, with a specialty in heavy metal and grunge and a growing appreciation of rap.

I Like it or not, argue the economists, the sociologists, the political pundits—and just about everyone else who believes themselves to be members of the educated classes— the planet is a globalized entity. There is disagreement as to the newness of the phenomenon, but few doubt its existence; it is more than a trope, more than a symbol, and human life today can’t be understood outside the context of its countless flows, exchanges, and upheavals. Globalization’s enthusiasts and boosters contend that it is an inevitable and irreversible economic, social, and ideological process (Steger 2005:35). The dependence on these adjectives is neither accidental nor innocent; understood in these terms globalization acquires a requisiteness and substantiality that is historical, even elemental. But what rational person would want to counter, or resist, so natural, “benign,” salubrious, and emancipatory a process (Bhagwati 2004:32)? Globalization’s beauty and rectitude, some argue, lie in its liberalization and integration of global markets, an ideological ethos that is pluralistic, not fundamentalist or totalitarian, and its insistent promotion of the principles and practices of liberalism and democracy, which result in ever-expanding opportunities for economic and cultural advancement and individual autonomy (Steger 2005). And this is only a partial list. Opponents and critics have a less generous perspective. Some view it as a decidedly inhuman phenomenon, one with catastrophic, even apocalyptic consequences. Theresa Brennan argues, “Globalization attacks all conditions of life. . . . The priorities of global capital privilege

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profit over life,” and others decry the loss of local control and deliberation (Brennan 2003:4). But most do not deny the transformational nature of our times, one marked by an unprecedented intensification, expansion, and acceleration of social exchanges and activities (Steger 2005). The superiority of the globalized world, say the boosters, resides largely in the quality and dimension of human relations now possible. To no group are these “truths” more aggressively marketed than youth; it is they, not the corporate titans, who are globalization’s primary beneficiaries. Boundaries, if they exist at all, are permeable, pliable, and transcendable. No longer are people, especially the poor and dispossessed, condemned to the vagaries of local systems of knowledge and selfhood. And for many youth crushed or suppressed by ever-expanding zones of fundamentalism, neoliberalism, militarism, and chauvinism—zones that are ideological as well as territorial—the ability to entertain alternative models of identity and power, of human possibility, and to form associations, friendships, and even spiritual kinships with young men and women living in other times zones or cultures may provide the primary reason to exist. Yet everything isn’t peachy for youth. Globalization’s boosters and foes agree that the social world is being redrawn and remade at a dizzying speed and that “relations between public and private, between local and global, between structure and movement, between self and the other” are being “redefined” (Macdonald 1999:25). It is a harum-scarum, follow-the-everlasting-bubble, the-bubble-has-burst-and-you-are-aloser world, and many youth, told they are fortunate to be living in the most creative and dynamic age in human history, are suffering badly. To Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most eloquent scholars of the human consequences of globalization, it is quite clear that young men and women of Tony and Carl’s generation, Generation X, are afflicted with “ailments of which older generations were unaware; not necessarily more ailments, or ailments that are more acute, distressing and mortifying, but ones that are distinctly different, novel” (2004:7). Bauman doesn’t fetishize or exaggerate the existential challenges faced by contemporary youth, especially Caucasian youth residing in the West, yet also he refuses to whitewash the difficulties confronting young men and women. Today’s youth have “novel reasons to feel ruffled, disturbed and often aggrieved”; they face a predicament “peculiar in the fact that an unusually large part has gone by the board, has been left behind. Peculiar is the widespread feeling of confusion, puzzlement and perplexity” (Bauman 2004:8). And even the most ardent boosters concede, reluctantly, that globalization is not a casualty-free process, that it contains a powerful exclusionary and sundering function. When one looks at the disparities between the “winners” and “losers,” this is readily visible on a global level, but even countries benefiting from the “most technically advanced economies” are home to a substantial increase in “social inequality, polarization, poverty and misery” and the creation of a “sharp divide between valuable and non-valuable people and locales” (Castells 1998:145). The boosters contend that this is a temporary problem, one that will be overcome with time and the growing sophistication of the “electronic herd.” Others see “this move from a society whose accent was on assimilation and incorporation to one that separates and excludes” as an essential and permanent attribute of our globalized world (Young 1999:24).

’Cause Fightin’ Is Just Fightin’

According to Jock Young, this “exclusive society” is not simply eliminatory: “It is a society where both inclusion and exclusion occur concurrently—a bulimic society where massive cultural inclusion is accompanied by systematic structural exclusion—it absorbs and rejects” (1999:45). Young’s metaphor is evocative. It suggests a social and economic body that is sound, even healthy, in appearance. Unlike the anorexic, the bulimic disguises its self-disgust, hatred of the ordinary, and desire for nonbeing; acts of noncompliance or refusal are performed secretly, allowing those around to be honest in their claims of obliviousness. Young’s metaphor contains a hopeful element, possibly one of false hope. It offers the possibility of reinstatement—that which has been disgorged can be reclaimed and integrated back into the body—yet many bulimics flush their waste as they vomit.

II Unlike their European counterparts, American social scientists and psychologists interested in “youth problems” and “youth deviance” rarely mention social exclusion in their analysis. Delinquent youth, gang members, high school dropouts, and the chronically unemployed are “alienated,” “troubled,” “disadvantaged,” or even “socially disconnected”—not excluded. In contrast, social exclusion, defined by Manuel Castells (2003:115) as “the process by which certain individuals and groups are systematically barred from access to positions them to an autonomous livelihood within the social standards framed by institutions and values in a given context,” rings with a far harsher tone. Social exclusion offends the mythopoeic core of America as the keeper of the meritocratic urge and inclusion, of equal opportunity, of just rewards for effort and hard work. Certain groups or individuals are systematically barred? That’s not our style. It is impossible to entertain the notion of social exclusion without considering questions of human volition and agency. The term implies not only class conflict but also bad faith on the part of those wielding political and social capital. And, as with humiliation, with which it has blood ties, social exclusion can exist without conscious intent or malice but not independently of human decision making and action. It is not an autonomic process or a spontaneous outgrowth. This is important to note because it contradicts the insistence of the boosters that globalization’s ethical superiority lies in its ahuman qualities—its transcendence of human agency. In fact, as Zygmunt Bauman argues, in the contemporary globalized world, the “elites have chosen isolation and pay for it lavishly and willingly. The rest of the population finds itself cut off and forced to pay the heavy cultural, psychological, and political price of their new isolation” (2000:36). This American reticence can’t be attributed solely to psychological or ideological factors. In America the commitment to openness, inclusion, and social and economic equality hasn’t been restricted to myth and principle. It has been actual and lived—imperfectly, but practically and seriously. “The genius of the American Economy,” argues Godfrey Hodgson, “has not lain in the ruthlessness in which the few were allowed to

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trample the many, but in the generosity in which the many were allowed to share in the common prosperity” (2004:141). The fathers of both Tony and Carl, and many men of their generation with working-class roots, were certainly beneficiaries of this “breadth of benevolence.” Both men stopped attending school after high school yet were able to secure a middle-class existence. Hodgson makes it quite clear that this generosity and openness is of the past; the last twenty-five years have been years of economic and societal constriction, years in which inequality has grown and social mobility has decreased; they have been, “for most Americans, years of disappointment and denial” (2004:5; see also Finnegan 1999). To be fair, psychology’s neglect of social exclusion hasn’t been total. Over the past several years Jean Twenge and her colleagues have conducted a series of experimental studies on the phenomenon. Using the language of drive and need, they define social exclusion as the contravention of the “need to belong and to be accepted by others” (Twenge et al. 2003). In one study research subjects were informed, based on the results of a bogus personality test, that they faced a future that would either be barren of all but the most superficial human relationships, blessed with an abundant and vital network of interpersonal relationships, or thick with misfortune but deep with human connections. In other research trials selected individuals were informed that they had been rejected as partners by every member in the subject pool. The subjects perceiving of themselves as forsaken and rebuffed were far more likely to strike out aggressively against fellow research subjects and make “unhealthy choices, procrastinate and take ill advised risks.” Drawing from these studies, the researchers contend that social exclusion is “not just another type of misfortune.” Social exclusion can cause a “deconstructed psychological state,” a state similar to that afflicting the suicidal (Twenge et al. 2003). In this condition the individual is oriented to the past rather than the future and suffers from confused time perception, meaninglessness, chronic passivity and lethargy, emotional numbing, and avoidance of self-awareness. This state greatly impedes the individual’s ability to create and maintain a sense of ontological meaning: “Socially rejected people don’t put up much resistance to the statement that life is meaningless” (Twenge et al. 2003:412). Researchers and social scientists concerned with social exclusion should welcome these findings. The articles stress the seriousness of the phenomenon, that it should not be catalogued as yet another social problem. But when socially excluded individuals are represented as afflicted with such extreme aggressivity and psychological disorganization—as quasi-suicidal—those who are socially excluded join the ranks of the dangerous. I am sure the researchers did not intend to stigmatize or pathologize socially excluded people, yet emphasizing their kinship with the suicidal positions them as suitable, even necessary objects of surveillance, and creates a de facto suicide watch supervised by a cadre of well-intentioned but misguided mental health and law enforcement professionals. In my clinical work with homeless women and children, male and female sex offenders, and juvenile delinquents, all members of groups easily classified as socially excluded, I have rarely encountered the “deconstructed psychological state” posited by Twenge and her colleagues. These people surely experience despair, rage, confusion, and periods of passivity and apathy, and even actively consider suicide, but their

’Cause Fightin’ Is Just Fightin’

emotional and cognitive lives are far more complex and their resilience far greater than these researchers suggest. Social exclusion rarely entails the loss of the capacity for symbolization. In my experience it is resilience and the capacity for hope, which cannot exist outside the “temptation to despair” (Marcel 1965:34), that are far more characteristic. I will use Tony’s comments to illustrate: I would say pretty much, I would say that I’m the type of person—I feel like over time I’ve developed so much and in certain ways I haven’t developed at all, certainly socially. But mentally, you know, and even like emotionally and spiritually I feel like I’m pretty—I feel like I’ve developed a lot. I feel like I’ve a long way to go, but that’s life. . . . I feel like I’m going the right way, I’ve got road blocks, been gettin’ screwed, you know, not working or whatever, but that’ll be overcomed in time. Oh yeah, I’m not gonna lie. There have been times I’ve said like, “Is it really worth it? Should kill myself?” But then you can’t have that attitude. Yeah, sometimes I just sit there on curbs. I mean I know it’s almost like a ridiculous thing. I sit there and like—I ponder things on the curb and I just kinda think about it. You know, it’s like, “What’s going on?” You ever hear that thing like they say, “Even this shall pass”? I mean, I hear they use that in those four-step programs and all those ridiculous things, but I can relate to that. It’s like everything is ever changing. Everything is ever changing, of course.

This isn’t a simplistic stocktaking. There are no signs of emotional flatness or cognitive impairment but rather a clear-eyed assessment of one’s deficiencies and attributes and courageous confrontation of the possibility of meaninglessness and nonbeing. Tony could be accused of possessing a naïve American optimism, an unexamined confidence in the individual’s ability to overcome adversity, and a faith in the continually evolving, progressive, and benevolent nature of the cosmos, but certainly not nihilism. There is no doubt that a great deal of social exclusion’s malignant power is rooted in the contravention of fundamental human needs. But which need or needs? Twenge and her colleagues identify belongingness as the need denied; Castells argues that it is autonomy. Few would dispute the existence of the need to belong to a group; the problem lies in that fact that those belonging to socially excluded groups usually have a strong network of familial and social connections; in fact, people in these communities often live with a far more intense and sustaining sense of human connectedness than those blessed with affluence. It is not that the socially excluded exist with a feeling that they don’t belong; it is that they belong as second- or third-class citizens only, prohibited from acquiring full and unfettered access to the resources, social networks, and institutions that make the development of autonomy possible. Twenge and her colleagues also represent social exclusion as an individual rather than group or collective affliction; in doing so they participate in the familiar psychological practice of individualizing what is essentially social. This results in no less than a fundamental misrepresentation of the phenomenon as it is lived outside the walls of the laboratory. Social exclusion, Jock Young (1999:57) argues, must be understood as a “social not an individual problem. [This] contrasts with earlier post-war notions which viewed marginality as a problem of isolated dysfunctional individuals. Rather it is a collective phenomenon, hence its association with a posited underclass.”

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III When I reread their interviews, I am struck by Carl and Tony’s struggle against redundancy. It was a struggle from which the others participating in study were excused. Although the other men worried about finding a good job, the complexities of establishing and maintaining intimate relationships, and the difficulties of creating a meaningful life, they never once even hinted at being haunted by the possibility of redundancy; all assumed that they would be essential to their generation’s economic and existential projects. Although it is another term rarely used by American social scientists, Bauman identifies redundancy as one of the most significant threats facing working-class and lower middle-class youth: To be redundant means to be supernumerary, unneeded, of no use—whatever the needs and uses are that set up the standard of usefulness and indispensability. The others do no need you; they can do as well, and better without you. There is no self-evident reason for your being around and no obvious justification for your claim to the right to stay around. To be declared redundant means to have been disposed of because of being disposable—just like the empty and non-refundable plastic bottle or the once used syringe, an unattractive commodity with no buyers, or a substandard or stained product without use thrown off the assembly line by the quality inspectors. . . . Redundancy shares its semantic space with “rejects,” “wastrels,” “refuse”—with waste. (Bauman 2004:7)

Redundancy is not a natural condition. It isn’t essential to capitalism proper or novel to the age of globalized capital, although the ranks of the redundant have certainly swelled during its ascendancy. No one is born genetically predisposed to redundancy, nor is it a state to which even the most depressed or discouraged aspire—people have to be rendered redundant, and this always entails social exclusion. Tony and Carl were engaged in a struggle to establish an existential residence in a social category in which the attainment of autonomy didn’t require divine intervention or a winning lottery ticket, a struggle against internalizing a sense of oneself as redundant. Because it was simultaneously internal and external, their resistance was truly psychosocial. Given Young’s insistence on the collective nature of social exclusion, my decision to concentrate on the engagements of two youth might seem inconsistent. Yet it would be pointless to assume that the opposition must duplicate the offense. As documented in many fine studies, resistance to social exclusion and the other consequences of globalization often is effected collectively (see Brotherton and Barrios 2004; Castells 2003), but it also occurs on an individual level, and this has received far less attention. It is also important to note that “although human agency may be frail, especially among those with little power, it happens daily and mundanely . . . and it deserves our attention” (Holland et al. 2001). When I interviewed Tony and Carl they were occupied with critical identity work. If identity is understood in narrative terms, they were engaged in “telling” themselves and others “who they are . . . and then attempting to act as though they are who they say they are” (Holland et al. 2001:45). They were also involved in informing themselves and others who and what they were not and would not be. This self-authoring was performed

’Cause Fightin’ Is Just Fightin’

in a social and political context that was “a contested space, a space of struggle” (Holland et al. 2001:156). This self-narrative, with all its expungements, improvisations, and accretions, was certainly bound to cultural and historical meanings but was also founded in an essential desire. Ernest Becker may be guilty of exaggerating the ontological claim of narcissism when he states that one is compelled to “justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe . . . [to] show that he counts more than anyone or anyone else,” but his insistence that the “urge to heroism is natural” is most important (Becker 1973:7). Redundancy doesn’t obviate this urge, but it does ensure its perversion. Tony’s engagement with redundancy was exhaustive and, at times, exhausting: I pretty much know there’s more to me than I’m being told by the people around me. . . . I’m not trying to make like I’m an egomaniac or I’m better than everyone else, ’cause I’m not. But I try to think of people as equals to me, if possible. I feel like . . . maybe I’m as good as everybody else. I’ve never really liked most of my jobs. I was working security for a while. It was all right, I guess, I come in and do my eight hours, I get my money and walk out. Before that I worked in the hospital and hated that. I knew it wasn’t for me, and the pay was good. There was benefits, so my family kept pushin’ me to stay on the job. I was like, “I don’t like this job.” I was movin’ dead bodies and cleanin’ old women’s turds and it was like a really demoralizing job—and I went to college, and I went to two years of college. You know, and granted, at Kingsboro you’re not going to get like a great job getting out of Kingsboro, but you know, this job was just like too much for 11-something an hour, which I was getting. You’re trying to work in the system. You’re trying to do what you gotta do, but at the same time you don’t want to feel like, you know, you’re a cog. I mean I’m that type of person, I like to work, I like to go do these things, but I also like, you know—I like to have a little individuality. It’s not that it’s not possible. It’s just unfortunately; I have to deal with people who don’t accept that. I mean I know it’s possible. I definitely know it’s possible.

In these statements there is a mixture of ambivalence and pride, doggedness and doubt, that both rends and animates the heart. The first statement can be interpreted as reflecting a lack of self-esteem. Read in this way, it becomes a statement attesting to an internal deficiency, a deficiency that weakens the structure of his character, one that provides an important clue to understanding his inability to achieve functional young adulthood. The remedy, greater ego strength, becomes his personal responsibility. The statement can also be interpreted as a statement of resistance against the claims of redundancy, a refusal to enter or to be placed into an external social category populated by the useless. This is not to dismiss the issue of self-esteem. Tony’s struggle against redundancy was a struggle to feel a sense of essential and social worthwhileness, an aboveground, walkaround, look-at-the-man-talking-to-you sense of self, and this requires employment that extends at least the possibility of entry into mainstream society. His “11-something an hour” sounds like a fairly good wage, and it might be tempting to argue that Tony’s refusal to persist in a job is evidence of an impulsive, spoiled character structure. Yet,

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given the economic realities in New York, this is barely a living wage. But Tony didn’t quit because of wage concerns. Employment isn’t necessarily the antidote to redundancy, and in fact certain positions may secure the condition. For Tony the association with waste and death was just too much to bear; remaining in a position where he was consigned to “movin’ dead bodies and cleanin’ old women’s turds” would constitute an agreement to his expendability. It didn’t have to be this way. Had he been born a generation earlier, a generation in which youth was lived as a project defined in terms of the future, not as a terminal condition, he probably would have seen the handling of old women’s “turds” as a necessary and temporary condition of his employment, a duty common to the majority of young men entering the institution, a trial providing an opportunity to display his mettle, a rite of passage necessary for achieving a more estimable and meaningful work and status, and he probably would have been willing to hold his nose and endure the “demoralizing” nature of the task. In such a context the work might have even lost its power to mortify. In much of the contemporary “youth troubles” or “troubled youth” talk there is an obsession with deficiencies. Today’s youth, it is said, lack historical consciousness, a democratic sensibility, respect for custom and tradition, self discipline, a work ethic— and much, much more—and it is these deficiencies that are responsible for the impulsive yet apathetic, hedonistic, self-centered creatures populating our urban centers and suburban malls. Given these serious absences and pathological tendencies, who but a sadomasochist or a saint—or a sadomasochistic saint—would associate with, let alone employ, such a creature? It is a discourse in which the structural obstacles to autonomy faced by youth go unidentified. Framing the problem this way is certainly convenient; it is also unconscionable in its steadfast refusal to confront the systematic failures of generativity. But the situation gets even worse. Many youth, particularly those living on the losing side of globalization’s valuable–nonvaluable divide, are being told to have very few expectations and to be suitably grateful for any small opportunities proffered. These young men and women “are recommended to be flexible, and not particularly choosy, not to expect too much from jobs, to take jobs as they come without asking too many questions, and to treat them as an opportunity to be enjoyed on the spot rather than as an introductory chapter in a ‘life project,’ a matter of self-esteem and self-definition” (Bauman 2004:10). Youth are being told to make the most out what is untenable for the project of autonomy and internalize the blame once the crash comes, and the message is presented absent any promise to at least attempt to reverse this order of things. Tony wasn’t a grandiose fool; he was keenly aware that his A.A. degree and pedigree imposed real limits, and he knew that he couldn’t rank as even a candidate for the positions he most desired, but he was unwilling to accept the terms that would almost surely mandate his redundancy. His decision to hold out entailed real risks and his father’s continual disapproval, even derision (“every once in a while he goes over the line”), but it was necessary to his project of remaining relevant. Carl seemed to share none of his friend’s urgency. At nineteen he was comfortable living at home with his mother, stepfather, and siblings, and although he didn’t particularly enjoy the work or the scene, the short stints spent on construction sites with his stepfather funded his main project of “hangin’ out” and “partying.” During the

’Cause Fightin’ Is Just Fightin’

interviews it took fifteen minutes for Tony to abandon any pretense to equanimity, but Carl’s project of relaxed insouciance survived throughout our meetings. He wasn’t foolish enough to contend that existence in general, and his existence in particular, was devoid of hardship, but he also made clear that he appreciated the license provided by the moratorium that is still extended to Caucasian youth. Spared the down-to-thewire quality of Tony’s struggle, Carl was free to temporize, and Hell Patrol, a loosely organized group of twenty-five to thirty young men, was his most formidable creation. Many psychologists would argue that there is nothing autochthonous to the globalized condition in Carl’s involvement with Hell Patrol, that he is simply engaging in a timehonored practice central to adolescent identity formation, and their argument carries some weight. Yet one doesn’t have to claim its originality to regard Carl’s engagement as something more than a simple youth moratorium project, to understand it as an act of resistance against social exclusion and redundancy: I started the “Hell Patrol.” We named it that cause it sounds bad. . . . We aren’t white supremacists or nothing like that. We got Hispanics, no blacks because there is no blacks in the neighborhood. . . . We don’t let in any punk off the street—we’re a group, not a gang. I got the applications here with me. There’s a screening process ’cause we won’t let punks in—we want to know if you have a criminal record, we only let okay guys in. You don’t have to kick someone’s ass or draw blood to be in the group. That’s ridiculous. What the hell you got to get hurt to be in a group for? We hang out in parks or houses. . . . It’s just a bunch of people that get together and have fun. You know, we’re decent, we’re decent, we’re no bunch of hooligans, you know. We don’t do graffiti, nothing like that; we basically try and stop bad stuff. There’s two kids who are going to get their asses kicked because they’ve been robbin’ a coupla houses in my neighborhood.

I find these passages quite remarkable. First, given this article’s interest in social exclusion, Carl’s insistence on inclusion is quite impressive. It is all the more remarkable because the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn is not known for possessing an ethos of toleration. His own ethnic mongrelization may be a central factor in his insistence on inclusion, but Tony, a “pure-bred” Italian American, also enthusiastically supported the practice. It isn’t that Hell Patrol had an open-door policy—applicants were screened and denied membership if they failed to meet the established criterion for decency— but any decision to reject the applicant could not be based on a person’s race or ethnicity. They could be excluded only on the basis of character or past behavior, not on what was external or immediately visible. Carl’s insistence on the group’s “decency” may seem incongruous; the group’s roughness, in name and deed, seemingly place it outside even the most permissive definitions of good taste and propriety, but decency can also be understood as the refusal to engage in acts of humiliation, and exclusion based on race and social class certainly qualifies as humiliation (Margalit 1998). This is not an attempt to romanticize the group. Hell Patrol is neither a peace group nor an antiglobalization group working toward social change. Their principal activities and stated ambitions were limited to “hanging out” and “partying.” Carl and the other group members believe that violence is necessary to the project of remaining socially

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relevant and psychically integrated. As they see it, the neighborhood’s social balance rests in part on their project of vigilante and retributive violence. And violence can be downright invigorating: Fighting intrigues me a little. It intrigues me. It’s fascinating a little. It almost is fascinating because you do stuff without thinking about it, you just react without thinking. And it’s like wow! look at that . . . look at what I just did. When that kid threw a swing at me and I ducked under his swing and I grabbed him, it was like I didn’t even try to do that. It just happened. I didn’t try to duck under him. I don’t duck punches, and I don’t really duck. So I just ducked and I was like, “Holy shit, look at that!” That’s all really. Like I said, I don’t really start fights. If there’s a problem I’m not gonna wait for the problem to hit me; I’m gonna go to the problem and talk about it. If it can’t be talked about, then that’s the only way.

This may sound ominous, but Hell Patrol’s mission was not one of destruction and mayhem (see Katz 1990). Hell Patrol was not formed to amplify Carl’s ability to distribute dread but to serve as a substantial and sustaining institution in a world of increasing arbitrariness and uncertainty, where friendships and human connections between youth are increasingly ephemeral and fragile (Macdonald 1999:26). For Carl and the other members, the group is profoundly important, a serious matter. Carl formed a committee to draw up membership forms and a charter, presides over regularly scheduled meetings, and even advised a group of neighborhood girls on how to form their own auxiliary organization. These may seen like minor, even pathetic achievements to many, but for Carl they constitute a heroic effort to secure and establish himself as a subject, an actor, engaged in his own history (Macdonald 1999:24). And, perhaps even more importantly for the young men and women of Bay Ridge, Hell Patrol provides an experience of solidarity and worth in an age made profane by the creed of neoliberal individualism, an age where a growing number of perfectly suitable and capable young people feel a crippling sense of “social homelessness” (Bauman 2004:10) and “pushed out of the flows of people, pleasure, and money that constitute urban life” (Macdonald 1999:36). Seen in this light, Hell Patrol becomes an identity service organization and Carl a cultural worker.

IV And so back to the violence, specifically the unalloyed delight expressed in the opening quotes. But first a confession. I found Tony and Carl far more compelling than the other young men I interviewed in the study. All the young men were extremely likable (at least to me), and it wasn’t that the other young men had lived lives free of disappointment or familial upheaval or even ostracism. Yet they had no doubt as to where they stood in terms of the valuable-nonvaluable people divide. They lived each day certain of their significance and confident that their accomplishments in the years and decades ahead would far outdistance their failures. This certainty and confidence were regularly ratified by family members, neighbors, schoolmates, friends, teachers,

’Cause Fightin’ Is Just Fightin’

guidance counselors, and even employers. Tony and Carl had been consistently denied these benefits and this confidence, yet they refused to capitulate. The opening passages offer a temptation. Such delight, derived not only from countering but humiliating and hurting another human being, even one with hostile intent, surely demonstrates the collapse of spiritual and moral character of youth many academics and pundits have been proclaiming for years. William Bennett and his coauthors (1996) surely had poor African American and Hispanic youth in mind when they formulated their unpardonable “superpredator” model, but these passages might provide the evidence that the moral rot they identified has leached into the Caucasian stock. This would be a great mistake. As Robert Jay Lifton argues, “invoking psychopathology or aberrant character structure to explain violence can be misleading or even falsifying” (1979:236). Categorizing Carl or Tony as antisocial would constitute such a falsification. In the interviews (and in informal, nontaped conversations) they detailed their martial skills with warm-blooded pride but were equally intent on presenting themselves as fundamentally decent human beings with deep and abiding emotional connections to family, friends, and community. They related incidents in which they felt equally proud of resolving conflictual situations without resorting to violence, and they expressed remorse about occasions where the intensity of their response was disproportional to the threat posed by their opponents. It was almost as if they had an unconscious need to demonstrate that they were not afflicted with Bennett and company’s “moral poverty” (because I wasn’t operating in any forensic capacity, the need surely wasn’t instrumental). Despite Lifton’s important caution, the majority of psychological research on youth violence is performed in the service of identifying internal deformations, imbalances, or absences responsible for the behavior. Although far too many resources have been expended for research dedicated to establishing abnormality, I can see a place for research seeking to identify certain absences—not the absence of some essential human capacity common to all law-abiding, upright citizens but missing or retarded in wayward youth (e.g., empathy or impulse control, to invoke Bennett and company, or even self-esteem, a favorite of more humanistically inclined psychologists) but the absence of experiences that generate feelings of vitality, significance, efficacy, and adroitness. As with all “ordinary” behavior, violence is learned and culturally countenanced, yet because exigent conditions serve as its most fertile ground (this may explain why the profiteers of violence are so skilled at crisis production), it is also exotic. Violence is also a form of communication, one directed at multiple audiences and intending both conscious and unconscious meanings. When listening to Carl and Tony’s accounts of their violent and ordinary experiences and encounters, I was struck by the absence of feelings of power and delight in the everyday and the abundance, even surplus, of these feelings in the violent. This fixation on internal factors is central to the individualizing project of American psychology, a project that apprehends violence as a discrete, private, rather than structural phenomenon. The important criticisms of C. A. J. Coady (1986) aside, there is something very important in Johann Galtung and Jamil Salmi’s project of expanding the definition of violence to include social exclusion, racism, and unemployment. Tony and Carl, and the young men and women of Generation X, are hardly the first to face

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unemployment and other forms of structural violence that prohibit the realization of “higher [human] rights such as the right to emotional, cultural or intellectual growth” (Salmi 1993:14). However, Bauman is quite clear that redundancy is not simply a new label attached by social scientists to a perennial social problem: The prefix “un” suggests anomaly; “unemployment” is a name for a manifestly temporary and abnormal condition and so the nature of the complaint is patently transient and curable. . . . There is no such suggestion in the notion of “redundancy,” no inkling of abnormality, anomaly, spell of ill-health, or momentary slip. “Redundancy” whispers permanence and hints at the ordinariness of the condition. It names a condition without offering a ready-to-use antonym. It suggests a new shape of current normality, the shape of things that are imminent and bound to stay as they are.

And this, to me, is far more disturbing than the delight.

References Bauman, Z. 2000. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. ——. 2004. Wasted Lives. London: Polity. Becker, E. 1973. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press. Bennett, W., J. Diiullio, and J. Walters. 1996. Body Count: Moral Poverty . . . And How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bhagwati, J. 2004. In Defense of Globalization. New York: Oxford University Press. Brennan, T. 2003. Globalization and Its Terrors: Daily Life in the West. New York: Routledge. Brotherton, D. and L. Barrios. 2004. The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang. New York: Columbia University Press. Castells, M. 1998. End of Millennium. Malden, MA: Blackwell. ——. 2003. The Power of Identity. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Coady, C. A. J. 1986. The idea of violence. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 3: 3–19. Finnegan, W. 1999. Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country. New York: Modern Library. Hodgson, G. 2004. More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Holland, D., W. Lanchiotte, D. Skinner, and C. Cain. 2001. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Katz, J. 1990. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil. New York: Basic. Lifton, R. J. 1979. The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. New York: Basic Books. Macdonald, K. 1999. Struggles for Subjectivity: Identity, Action, and Youth Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marcel, G. 1965. Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope. New York. Harper & Row. Margalit, A. 1998. The Decent Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Salmi, J. 1993. Violence and Democratic Society: New Approaches to Human Rights. London: Zed. Steger, M. 2005. Globalization: Market Ideology Meets Terrorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

’Cause Fightin’ Is Just Fightin’ Twenge, J. M., K. R. Catanese, and R. F. Baumeister. 2003. Social exclusion and the deconstructed state: Time perception, meaninglessness, lethargy, lack of emotion, and self-awareness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85: 409–423. Young, J. 1999. The Exclusive Society: Social Exclusion, Crime, and Difference in Late Modernity. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

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Part 5. Innovative Interventions and Youth in Crises

Jean Scandlyn, Suzanne Discenza, and James Van Leeuwen

14. Integrating Interventions Outreach and Research Among Street Youth in the Rockies

The household or family, however constituted, is the primary economic unit through which any person encounters the forces of the local, national, and global political economy. In households, wages are redistributed to care for the young and the old, and members learn the social and practical skills of daily life. Ideally, families also provide emotional support and care to their members, buffering them from vicissitudes in the larger society. The processes of globalization have restructured the labor market and the access of families to sources of income (Sassen 1991). Whereas some families achieve vast wealth and prosperity, many more must piece together a livelihood from multiple jobs with few or no benefits in the form of healthcare, pensions, or earned leisure (Newman 1999). Global processes have also restructured the public sector, eroding the safety net for families and cutting investments in human capital through public education, healthcare, and job training programs (Castells 1989). In the past decade this disinvestment, coupled with welfare reform and the loss of subsidized housing units throughout the country (National Coalition for the Homeless 2002), has contributed to an increase in the number of children and young people living in extreme poverty and often without permanent housing (Mickelson 2000). In a world where the family is increasingly the sole source of support, what drives any young person to leave home while still legally and economically dependent on his or her parents? Studies demonstrate a complex interplay of factors, including family dysfunction, changes in household composition, and characteristics of the young person (Fest 1998; Kryder-Coe et al. 1991; Olson et al. 1980; Ruddick 1996; Schaffner 1999; Whitbeck and Hoyt 1999). There is some evidence that running away is associated with social class, with more runaways and homeless young people coming from working-class and lower-income households (Schaffner 1999; Whitbeck and Hoyt 1999); however, there are few detailed studies of this relationship¹ or its links to globalization. Not all poor families are unhealthy; nonetheless, the chronic frustration of making ends meet with few resources often manifests as alcoholism, drug addiction,

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criminal activity, and abuse, transforming the family from safe haven to treacherous landscape (Newman 1999; Singer et al. 1998). Where the impact of globalization can be documented more clearly is in the urban environment in which young people who run away from home must survive and meet their basic needs (Katz 1998). To maintain stable, independent lives adolescents must have external and internal resources such as employment at a living wage, access to affordable housing, legal independence, support from adults and peers, a positive sense of self, hope in the future, and the ability to sustain beneficial social relationships. For most young runaways the balance of these resources is precarious: one small mistake, one fight, or the loss of one resource can topple the arrangement, leaving them on the streets. For the streets to be a viable place for young people to survive, there must be niches in the formal economy for work that demands few skills, informal economic activities, rent-free shelter (parks, abandoned buildings), and sources of free or low-cost food, clothing, and healthcare. The young person must be creative, resourceful, and able to defend him or herself. Globalization shapes each of these factors, both those that enable a young person to live on his or her own and those that make living on the streets a possibility and often a necessity. A key characteristic of the global political economy is the variety of responses it engenders in local communities; the researcher’s task is to describe and document the links between global processes and local responses (Lewellen 2002). This chapter represents part of a growing body of literature documenting the experiences and environments of homeless and runaway young people in urban centers in North America, from the global cities of New York (Finkelstein 2005; chapter 3, this volume), Los Angeles (Ruddick 1996), San Francisco (Donovan 2002; Pfeffer 1997), and Vancouver and Toronto (Hagen and McCarthy 1997) to the smaller cities of the Midwest (Lundy 1995; Whitbeck and Hoyt 1999) and the Northeast (Schaffner 1999). It examines the circumstances of homeless and runaway young people in Denver, Colorado, and the interventions of Urban Peak, a not-for-profit agency that serves them. The conditions under which these young people live are shaped by global forces: in the world of flexible capital and labor, young people with little or no family support must be the most flexible to survive. Similarly, the agencies that seek to assist these young people are constrained by global forces and social values that are institutionalized in public policy and programs. Urban Peak has adopted a social work, case management model for its shelter services. Although this model provides valuable services such as housing, employment, education, healthcare, counseling, and treatment for drug and alcohol addiction to homeless and runaway young people, it does so at a price (cf. Rowe 1999). Programs are designed and funded to solve problems rooted in the individual young person: substance abuse, mental illness, physical illness, or adolescent pregnancy. Although this approach serves well young people who have recently left home, retain some trust of adults and institutions, or lack confidence in their ability to survive on the streets, it is less effective for and often rejected by young people who have been living on their own for a significant period of time and who have had multiple bad experiences with a variety of institutions, from juvenile justice and foster care to public schools and healthcare services. Additionally, by directing services to the individual and his or her problems,

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it ignores the larger political and economic forces that place all young people in industrialized countries in a position of economic dependence until well into their late twenties (International Labour Organization 2002; Larson 2002). More importantly, young people’s independence is undermined by the agency’s monopoly on important resources such as subsidized housing,² by funding that is insufficient to help young people establish secure, long-term self-sufficiency, and by the requirement that they be defined as homeless and runaway to be classified as “worthy” of receiving services. Although, because of their youth, this may cast them in a sympathetic light, it also labels them as deviant (Schneider and Ingram 1997); therefore it is important to critically examine social work case management as the sole model for delivering services to young people living on their own.

Urban Life in the Age of Information: Globalized Cities and Flexible Youth Because of the opportunities they provide for work, education, and adventure, cities have long been magnets for young people (Kleniewski 2002:6). Cities have also been visibly restructured by globalization, and so what they offer young people and how young people locate themselves in cities have changed. Manuel Castells argues that a new mode of development based on information technology, in which “its raw material itself is information, and so is its outcome,” coupled with the restructuring of capitalism in the late 1970s, has led to the rise of the “informational city” (1989:6). As capital is freed from the control of national governments, global cities arise that concentrate capital and the enterprises that serve them (Sassen 1991).³ Both Sassen and Castells link these processes with changes in the opportunity structure of major American cities: a bifurcated or bimodal labor market with a small number of jobs concentrated in the high-wage, high-skill, high-tech sector and a much larger number of jobs in the low-wage, low-skill, nontechnical service sector. Although there is instability in each of these sectors as businesses and hence workers must adapt to constantly and rapidly changing international markets, workers in the nontechnical sector are extremely vulnerable to unemployment, poverty, and homelessness. Flexibility for these workers means multiple part-time jobs at minimum wage without pension or savings plans, healthcare benefits, or job security. One-quarter of workers in the United States hold a temporary job (Honkala et al. 1999). Whereas in the post–World War II era, a high school diploma was sufficient preparation for high-paying jobs in manufacturing or small businesses (Scandlyn 1993), as the United States and other industrialized economies shifted from manufacturing to services, the economic value of a high school diploma declined. From 1973 to 1987 mean real earnings for twenty to twenty-four year olds not enrolled in school declined 12 percent. In 1967 the median weekly wage of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old males was 74 percent of the adult wage (twenty-five-plus years of age), but by 1988 it had dropped to 54 percent (Sum and Fogg 1991:81, 86). In Office for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)⁴ nations, adolescents and young adults, because of their relative lack of work experience and education, are most likely to find their first

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jobs in the service sector, where they may be competing with immigrants and older dislocated workers. To delay entry into a very competitive job market and to increase their skills, young people who can afford to are extending their formal education.⁵ These patterns contribute to an increase in the average age for completing the transition from school to work into the mid-twenties (International Labour Organization 2002; Larson 2002). Moreover, jobs in the service sector contribute minimally to the development of human capital through on-the-job training or career-building experience. People under the age of eighteen now make up 10–15 percent (Taylor and Hochron 1996:27) of the total homeless population in the United States.⁶ Today’s homeless are younger, poorer, and more consistently living in shelters or on the streets and include many more women with children. The average age of homeless people nationally is now thirty, compared with fifty-five to sixty-five in surveys of homeless people conducted in the 1950s. Women, who constituted 3 percent of the skid row population in Chicago in the 1950s (Bogue 1963), now constitute up to one-third of homeless adults. In contrast, older adults, particularly men, once the majority of homeless people, have largely disappeared from the streets. As many as 1.6 million adolescents are homeless at some point (from one or two nights to several months) each year, with approximately two hundred thousand living permanently on the streets (Taylor and Hochron 1996:27). This figure reflects the political character of the social safety net. Social Security and Medicare have been very effective in reducing poverty among older adults, a group defined as worthy of security by virtue of their past work. Older adults have protected these benefits by voting as an organized bloc and appealing to that worthiness (Mink 1998). It also reflects the absence of an effective safety net for young men and women who have not yet “proved” their worthiness at a time when the state is pulling away from investment in the human capital of its young citizens (Castells 1989; Larson 2002). In the literature on youth homelessness a great deal of attention is paid to the psychological and social development of adolescents; what is rarely discussed is adolescents’ place in the family cycle and its economic consequences. Young people depend on their parents for housing and economic support, either through continued formal education or while working, well into their late 20s. Regardless of the type of work, wages in entry-level jobs are much lower than for jobs that require older, experienced workers. In a study of the working poor in Harlem, Katherine Newman (1999) found that employers in fast-food restaurants, one of the most available sources of work in inner cities, favor older workers, new immigrants, and those from outside the immediate neighborhood over local, native-born adolescent workers. Thus adolescents who lack family support are always vulnerable to periods of homelessness if they must rely on private sector housing, even if they can find steady employment. Some industrialized countries recognize this need and build it into their housing policy. For example, in the Netherlands almost everyone is expected to move through public housing at some point in his or her life, particularly in early adulthood. In Finland students receive a housing allowance (Avramov 1998). In the United States, however, young people must turn to family or peers. Whereas American adolescents experience less autonomy when they engage in adult activities as producers of goods and services, as consumers of youth-oriented products such as movies, video games, music, and fashion they are actively targeted by advertisers

Integrating Interventions

and marketing programs. Far from being passive in this sphere, young people often use consumption or abstinence from consumption to express their protest against the marginal place they occupy in the global economy (Aitken 2001; Ferrell 2001; Finnegan 1999; Ruddick 1996).

Denver’s Place in the Global Political Economy Denver is linked to the global information-based economy as a “secondary milieu of innovation” (Castells 1989:114). Such smaller urban centers provide technological innovation and production that serve higher-order centers on which they depend. The rapid growth in size and population of Colorado’s Front Range cities (Denver, Fort Collins, Boulder, and Colorado Springs) over the past decade has been fueled largely by their role as a secondary center of computer and communication technology for Silicon Valley. Denver is the largest urban center in the Western plains and intermountain region of the United States. With a population of 554,636, it is located in the center of a seven-county metropolitan region of just over 2 million (U.S. Census Bureau 2001).⁷ Economic room for small investors, an active federal center, and significant defense spending contributed to its high-tech boom (Castells 1989). In 1999, Denver was one of the fastest-growing and most prosperous cities in the nation (Olinger 2001). The city’s population grew by 18 percent from 1990 to 2000 (DHPG 2003:27), with regional growth of 41.9 percent for the metropolitan area and 23.1 percent for the state in the same period (U.S. Census Bureau 2001). Because of Colorado’s link to Silicon Valley, the highest proportion of total and net migration to Colorado is from California, with Texas yielding the second largest number of internal migrants (Colorado State Government 2004). But Denver’s general growth and prosperity belie increasing poverty and homelessness, particularly for native-born Coloradoans. Although government and healthcare is the first and social services is the third largest employment sector in the Denver metropolitan area, and both offer high wages, the greatest number of job vacancies is concentrated in the lowest-paid sectors: retail trade and food service.⁸ These figures, taken from employer surveys, do not reflect employment in the informal sector. Reflecting the bimodal labor market of the global economy in industrialized nations, Denver also has a high number of employers in the professional, scientific, and technology sectors (16.4 percent), although the total proportion of employees is small (7.8 percent). The majority of all jobs require more than a high school education (63 percent), and 72 percent require related or specific experience (Colorado Department of Labor and Employment 2004). Thus Denver’s high-tech job market is not particularly welcoming to young people with little work experience or training and only a high school diploma or General Educational Development (GED) certificate. In a metropolitan region whose median household income ranges from $29,293 in Denver County to $63,570 in Douglas County, almost one-fifth (17.7 percent) of Denver’s residents are poor. Of children five to seventeen years of age, 28.5 percent are poor. Disinvestments in human capital in Colorado are evident throughout the public infrastructure. Almost one-third of Coloradoans are medically uninsured or underinsured

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(Tilly and Chesky 2002). Colorado ranks thirty-ninth of fifty states in per capita spending for public education (kindergarten through twelfth grade) and forty-seventh nationally in total taxable income spent on education (NEA 2004). General fund support for higher education declined by $179.6 million from fiscal year 2002 to 2004 (University of Colorado 2003). Colorado’s voters have approved several amendments to the state’s constitution that limit tax increases that would support education.⁹ Public investment in Denver during this period favored projects that support business and tourism, such as a new airport, highway improvement, sport stadiums, and a new convention center. This public development, coupled with gentrification of areas adjacent to Denver’s central business district in which single-room occupancy hotels had been located, meant the loss of 2,665 rooms between 1974 and 2001 (DHPG 2003:10). Although the state provides housing vouchers for those who qualify, they are inadequate. Because the rapid increase in population generated demand for housing, rents rose by 42 percent from 1998 to 2003 (DHPG 2003:8). Although in Colorado new housing developments ate up the surrounding prairie and prices for houses climbed rapidly, nationally the investment in housing actually declined from 1960 to 1995, a result of a “global investment environment” that favors liquidity and short-term investments (Bartelt 1997:3).

Methods This chapter is based on a qualitative study of young men and women who are or have been homeless or have run away from home, conducted from September 2000 to September 2002. The purpose of the study was to identify factors that place currently homeless young people at risk for homelessness as adults. The first part of the research consisted of life history interviews with older adolescents and young adults who had been homeless during adolescence and now have a variety of living situations. The second part consisted of an ethnographic study of people who are currently homeless that incorporated life history interviews with participant observation on the streets. In the first part, the sample consisted of forty-eight people aged seventeen to thirty; in the second part, the sample consisted of thirty-five people aged fifteen to twenty. The sample was purposive: Participants were selected to match the demographic characteristics of homeless and runaway people served by Urban Peak in the shelter and through street outreach and to represent the range of outcomes of young adults who were homeless as adolescents. Participants were recruited by recommendations from Urban Peak staff and from other informants as being experts on street life (Handwerker 2001). There is some overlap in the two samples with regard to age. We used a flexible life history interview schedule to obtain information on participants’ childhood and family life, how they entered street life, the key events that affected their life on the streets, their comments on access to, use of, and recommendations for services, and their plans and aspirations for the future.¹⁰ Interviews lasted forty-five to ninety minutes and took place in a variety of locations, from the shelter to cafés and public spaces convenient to the people being interviewed. We analyzed data using computer software programs to identify themes and patterns in the data;

Integrating Interventions

provisional models were generated and tested in further interviews (Strauss and Corbin 1990).¹¹ From the beginning the study has been a participatory project in collaboration with Urban Peak and its staff. The research proposal was reviewed and approved by the Urban Peak Research Committee, which includes Urban Peak staff members and service providers and researchers from the community who meet quarterly to discuss research with homeless and runaway young people in the community. We convened advisory groups of young men and women from the shelter to assist us in the development of the interview questions. We also participated actively in service delivery through the interactions surrounding the interviews and through regularly scheduled volunteer work as members of the outreach team, discussed later. Our continued dialogue with young people and staff at Urban Peak not only enabled us to more fully observe street life but also contributed to the validity of our findings as we used a variety of data collection tools.¹² Additionally, intervening with Urban Peak clients directly (e.g., taking a young person to the emergency room for treatment or referring him or her to a soup kitchen) gave us first-hand experience of the factors and events that affect their lives.

Homeless and Runaway Adolescents and Young Adults in Denver During the city’s period of economic growth and prosperity in the 1990s, its population of homeless young people doubled (James 1991:2; Metro Denver Homeless Initiative 2003).¹³ This is part of the overall increase of 40.3 percent in the number of homeless people in Denver in 1998. Many adults who moved to Colorado seeking work in the expanding high-wage, high-tech sector found themselves unable to find stable employment at a sustainable wage. This, combined with rising housing costs, contributed to an increase in the number of homeless families with children.¹⁴ In 1996 complaints from recreational users of the bike path along Cherry Creek and the South Platte River resulted in sweeps of these areas and a prohibition against camping (DHPG 2003). In 2003 the city’s newly elected mayor took up the situation of a visibly increasing population by creating a commission to end homelessness in the city in the next ten years (Drayer 2003). Although few of the young men and women we interviewed came from families that were currently homeless, the majority did come from families in which one or both parents worked in low-wage jobs or had experienced unemployment or underemployment in the past five years. Although one young man’s parents were both professionals, most participants’ parents had high school educations and were working class (e.g., postal employee, childcare worker, legal assistant, auto mechanic, construction worker, and truck driver).

Hard-Living Families In a working-class neighborhood in Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s, as global restructuring was hitting East Coast cities in the form of deindustrialization, Joseph Howell (1973) observed two opposing lifestyles: settled living and hard living.

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Settled-living families owned their homes, attended church, had solid marriages, did not drink or use drugs, were rooted in the community, and lived within their means. They were protective of their children, often applying strict discipline, and their children completed high school and sometimes college. In contrast, hard-living families survived from day to day, renting houses or apartments and moving frequently. Their daily lives were chaotic: Adults drank heavily, and personal relationships, the focus of much of their time and energy, were fragile and filled with conflict that often erupted into violence. Howell states that these two styles represent ends of a continuum. Families might move from hard to settled living at different points in time, or siblings in the same extended family might have hard or settled styles of life. Settled living was always precarious: The death of a wage earner, the loss of a job, or a divorce could quickly send a settled family into the chaos of hard living. Howell’s point is that working families differed not in the values by which they lived their lives but in their access to and control over the resources necessary to realize those values. More than three decades later, the plight of the families of the young people we interviewed in Denver are remarkably similar and resemble the difficulties faced by the working poor families in Harlem described by Katherine Newman (1999). As Steve,¹⁵ a seventeen-year-old staying at Urban Peak, said, Pretty much until I was, you know, about eight, everything was real easy, you know, carefree. And that’s when my, well sort of, my first stepdad died. He was, you know, I called him dad, you know, he really was as far as I was concerned. Apparently, my, my real dad had abused me, and my mom left him when I was still a little baby.

After his stepfather’s death, he and his mother returned to Colorado to live with her parents. She supported them by working as a legal assistant and then remarried a man who abused her, contributing to her attempting suicide six times. She divorced him and remarried. The new husband and Steve had conflicts over discipline and authority, at which point Steve began living at a friend’s house. When they asked him to leave, he sought refuge at the shelter. Sharry’s life began with hard living. She never knew her father; her mother had four children by her early twenties and gave the youngest two up to foster care. Sharry and her sister went to live with her grandmother because her mother was an alcoholic and heroin addict. Her mother checked herself into a treatment program for two years and has been drug and alcohol free since. But her second marriage resulted in her being jailed on charges of attempted murder when her husband, drunk, jumped out of the back of the pickup truck she was driving. She divorced him and returned to Denver, where she attended a local college and became a family advocate. She then supported her two oldest children and Sharry’s sister’s child, working hard to establish a more settled life. Then she got me and my sister back. So I think that’s why she was freaking out when we started using drugs. . . . Well, she was telling me, you know, you can’t live here if you’re not going to school. You need to get a job; these are my rules and all that.

Integrating Interventions

Bill, nineteen, who grew up in Oregon and California, said that although his father made good money working in lumber mills and mowing lawns, there was often no food in the house because his mother was using methamphetamine. His father also used drugs and drank heavily until he became a born-again Christian and a youth pastor. But Bill had trouble in school with truancy and poor grades, and he came home one day to find his things piled on a blanket in the front yard with a note on the front door saying, “You’re gone.” Another source of stress and family dysfunction that often propels adolescents to run away is methamphetamine production and use in rural areas of Colorado and Texas. One of us interviewed a young woman and two young men who had arrived at Urban Peak from rural Texas to get help in establishing independent lives in Denver. Everyone in their extended network of family and friends was involved in the production and use of methamphetamine. Dave described the life: [Town’s name] was full of meth. It was all there was around. I tried it, liked it, and kept doing it. I was snorting, shooting, eating, smoking it. I stopped getting high after smoking for so many days. I would be up for months. It ate my teeth away, my bones. I feel like I’m sixty but I’m only twenty. My back is always hurting even though I eat calcium. Meth is everywhere. People make it to support their habit and make money. My brother uses it, my dad uses it; it’s why my parents got divorced. My dad is an auto mechanic. He’d get high to work, so he could work for long stretches of time.

Dave went on the say that no one he knew actually became wealthy making and selling methamphetamine because they all used it too much themselves, and therefore it remained within the local community. The number of methamphetamine labs seized by law enforcement agents in Colorado rose from 31 in 1998 to 550 in 2003 (Laurie Moriarty, North Metro Task Force, lecture May 18, 2004). Many factors, including the ease of producing methamphetamine, contributed to this rise, but among them are the economic pressures on families in the working and middle class that force them to take multiple jobs, commute long distances, and work long hours. In many of the families these young people come from, the path away from drug addiction or alcoholism and toward more settled living involves conversion to strict forms of fundamentalist Christianity. Whereas for many families and their children organized religion provides stability, direction, and strength in coping with personal crises, for others it drives a wedge between adolescents who are struggling for independence and their parents who are struggling to establish or maintain order. It is especially problematic for adolescents who have experienced highly inconsistent efforts at discipline from their parents. Six of the young people among the sample of currently homeless young people we interviewed attributed their decision to run away to conflicts arising from their parents imposing their strict Christian beliefs on them; three of these people turned to Satanism. In straightened circumstances, adolescents, who produce little income for the household but are expensive to support, may be the family members most likely to be “spun off.” Mary, sixteen years old, asked one of us for directions to the Colorado State Fair.

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She wanted to go there so that she could become a “carnie,” running amusement rides and traveling across the country. She said that her mother had suggested it, telling her to get out and see the country, as she had done when she was a young single mother. Probing further, we found that her mother had recently remarried and now lived with her new husband and their two young children and two slightly older children from his previous marriage with Mary in a one-bedroom apartment. “There isn’t much room. It’s really tight, so she needs me to get out on my own.” When adolescents act out, have mental health problems, or are children from previous unions, families may not have the financial or emotional resources to keep them at home. The majority of young people living on the streets we interviewed had left home one or more times. These rehearsals took the form of staying in the homes of their friends or living with extended family members (grandparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings). Often it is not until these resources are exhausted that a young person appears on the streets. As Laurie Schaffner (1999) notes in Teenage Runaways, it is the growing tension between the ideals adolescents have internalized about family as a source of love, support, and guidance and the reality of their situation that finally provides them with the emotional energy or moral capital to leave abusive homes. Without interviewing their parents, it is difficult to establish how much economic stress directly contributes to young people leaving home. Many of the people we interviewed were vague about their parents’ work history and economic status, particularly for the early periods of their lives. Events that led them to leave home were most commonly attributed to conflicts in interpersonal relationships or personality traits rather than to economic conditions. This psychologizing of social problems is itself a feature of the erosion of the social contract under globalization, as the state decreases its supportive programs and justifies it through an ideology of individual responsibility (Castells 1989; Schneider and Ingram 1997). Figures of failures are also important in reinforcing positive values and norms of achievement in those who are barely making it (Newman 1999:212–216). Young people internalize these messages and attribute being on the streets to personality traits or poor decisions: “I don’t know, some people just don’t seem to have much motivation”; “The biggest change that I think I would change would be . . . my defiance . . . that’s what put me to where I am now”; “No, it’s up to the person individually. I mean, life is how you choose.” Jay expressed anger at himself and others who are on the streets: So I meet someone who is super smart on the street and just has got so much smarts and so much quickness and just doesn’t care that they have all of this. It makes me mad and I’ll yell at them for it. It will be like, do you realize, that like you could find a cure for AIDS or, you know, make the antinuclear bomb or something?

Given that Jay has not completed his GED and has a serious addiction to heroin, intelligence alone will not make this expectation realistic. This is not to suggest that young people are not affected psychologically by their family experiences. Judith Musick argues that for girls in “underclass” communities or chaotic family situations, the identity questions raised during adolescence concern relationships rather than the actions they will take to improve their situation: “Who

Integrating Interventions

cares about me? Who can I trust? Who can I depend on?” (1991:118). Most of the young people were fiercely loyal to their families of origin even when they had experienced significant abuse and neglect, a not surprising finding considering the symbolic and emotional power of family in our society (Weisner 2002).

Life on the Streets The most recent point-in-time survey of homeless young people in Denver (Metro Denver Homeless Initiative 2003) showed that there were roughly twice as many males as females, that more than half of the young people counted were eighteen to twenty years old, and that almost three-quarters were Caucasian, with a significant minority of African Americans but few Latinos or Asians. These numbers reflect the most visible group of young people on the streets in Denver, the “central city” population who spend a significant portion of their day on the pedestrian mall¹⁶ in the central business district, where they congregate, share information and resources, and panhandle. The majority of the young people we interviewed were born in Colorado or lived in Colorado before becoming homeless, consistent with findings from the Midwest Homeless and Runaway Adolescent Study (cf. Whitbeck and Hoyt 1999:7). Young people from other areas of the country pass through the city on their travels, particularly in the summer; however, they do not spend significant amounts of time hanging out on the mall with local young people. From our observations, although these travelers may cross paths with locals, they maintain social and physical distance from them.¹⁷ On any given day on the mall, there will be a mix of young people who are living on the streets for the first time, who have been living on the streets off and on for several years, who are experiencing their second or third episode of homelessness, and who are living in the shelter or other housing (Section 8 or sharing an apartment with friends) but spend significant portions of their time on the mall.¹⁸ On the weekends and during the summer there are also young people called “home kids” or “home bums” who live at home but come to the mall to try out street life. Life on the streets is hard and dangerous, a reality that the young people we interviewed readily acknowledge: It was a junkyard chow. And he’d bit my arm. I went to the hospital, I was thinking, well, they’re just going to give me a tetanus shot. . . . Laid me down, and then put these two arm straps on me. And they came up with all these syringes and gave me twelve rabies shots in my stomach. Around 3:00 in the morning every night, well, your body temperature lowers, like around 3:00 in the morning. And your hands, living on the street, turn black and like even after I got off the streets it took me about three weeks to get the black off my hands.

In addition to the physical hardships of living in abandoned buildings or under bridges, they are subject to the taunts of pedestrians. “I’ve had people yell all kinds of

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things at me,” said Diana, seventeen years old. “Things like, ‘Get a job!’ and ‘You’re going to rot in hell!’ and ‘You’re disgusting.’” Life on the streets is not all pain and suffering, however. Young people are quick to talk about the advantages of life on their own. “Maybe I know no matter where I go I’m always going to find like family, I guess you could say. I don’t think anywhere that I go I’ll really be unsafe or anything like that.” Andy described living in his car: “It was kind of nice actually. I didn’t really mind it because it was shelter. You know, it was a controlled environment. It was like my home. I used to have my two skateboards in it. And I had a really nice house which was a car.” Several people mentioned “rainbow gatherings” as relaxed settings where you didn’t need money to get food, where sharing and acceptance were the stated norms, and you could camp without being hassled. Others spoke of having the freedom to make their own decisions and not meet other people’s demands. The mall is attractive to young people on their own because of the contact it provides with people and businesses that have greater economic resources. Strangers can also be kind and generous. One young woman told me that an older woman asked her for a lighter and then offered her a joint. We have seen pedestrians hand out bags of hamburgers from McDonald’s or pass along their leftovers from a meal at a local restaurant. Spanging (the term is a combination of spare and change) can yield enough cash to buy a bag of heroin, some marijuana, or a meal or to pool with others to rent a hotel room. Although some young people said they routinely made $60 a day spanging, $20 is more likely. Homeless and runaway young people are the scavengers of the urban environment, getting meals through donations or diving into dumpsters and trash cans, panhandling, hustling for odd jobs, and occasionally shoplifting. Adults may cruise the city’s streets at night looking for young people who will exchange sex for money or a place to stay. “I think they assume that you’re on the streets and you’re female like 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning that you’re out for—looking for sex for exchange for something.”

Prospects for the Future Once on the streets, adolescents and young adults are seriously limited in the options available to them. It is not surprising that the majority of young people on the streets recruited for surveys are between eighteen and twenty-one. Legally, they are neither children nor fully adults. Increasingly responsible for criminal acts as if they were adults, people under the age of twenty-one nonetheless face restrictions in obtaining birth control, consenting to nonemergency medical treatment, signing leases or entering into other contracts, and enrolling in public schools (Discenza 2004). Another serious constraint is the lack of access to identity documents such as birth certificates, which may be held by parents whom the adolescent does not want to contact. Even when agencies such as Urban Peak help a young person obtain his or her birth certificate and a state-issued ID card, other institutions, most notably the police and city hospital, often are negligent in returning documents. In 2003 the Holy Ghost Church spent an average of $3,545 per month, an increase of more than 300 percent from 2001, helping homeless people replace their documents (DHPG 2003:20).

Integrating Interventions

During Denver’s boom in the 1990s demand for housing rose, resulting in a surge in new housing starts that, in turn, generated a demand for low-skilled and nonskilled day labor in construction and supporting service industries. This, along with a general shortage in the labor market during the boom,¹⁹ may have contributed initially to the rise in numbers of homeless and runaway young people. Through our observations and based on comments made in informal interviews, it was evident that young people could leave home and support themselves through day labor jobs in construction that paid in cash at the end of the day and whose employers did not ask for ID or drug tests. In general, the jobs young people on their own obtain are in low-wage occupations that demand little or no formal training, such as working in fast-food restaurants, cleaning up construction sites, telemarketing, selling goods from street carts, working in retail sales, or selling food at sport stadiums. Almost all jobs held by the young men and women we interviewed pay the current minimum wage of $5.15 (Colorado Department of Labor and Employment 2004). Frequent moves during childhood mean frequent interruptions in education and in obtaining the certification necessary for good jobs. As Spike noted, “I’ve got a lot of experience, but I don’t have the job experience, work experience.” Their only advantage may be literacy, basic math skills, and speaking English. As Ray noted recently, “Used to be you could get day jobs pretty easy. But I went down two days this week and nobody picked me. All the Mexicans were getting jobs, but they wouldn’t pick me.” When unemployment increases, they are no longer competitive with other workers. The lack of permanent residence also handicaps them in the mainstream job market: Without a reliable residence or telephone, they cannot be contacted by employers, and they cannot call their employer if they are sick or late. “I lost my job. I was really sick last week. I could hardly stand up. But I didn’t have any way to call them. So I guess it’s gone.” Physical appearance, from styles that incorporate multiple piercing and tattoos to poor hygiene from lack of access to bathing and laundry facilities and clean clothing, often make employers reluctant or unwilling to hire young homeless people. As another young woman said, “They won’t hire me for food service because of the way I look. You know, dirty and with my piercings and all.” People with drug or alcohol addictions may not be able to pass mandatory drug tests or fulfill job requirements on a regular basis. Length of time on the streets and number of homeless episodes are factors that influence a person’s ability to exit street life. Young people who spend most of their time on the streets quickly accumulate long lists of misdemeanors, status offenses,²⁰ or “lifestyle” crimes: urinating in public, walking on the grass, breaking curfew, sleeping on sidewalks, camping in areas where it is prohibited, and aggressive panhandling. Others may have records of more serious crimes. Dan, now twenty-six, said that he had been looking for a job for several months but could not find anything because he had a felony on his record. Many people in their late teens and twenties maintain a hopeful outlook on their life prospects: I want to be having kids in like five years. You know, maybe like look into getting a house with a yard and all that stuff. Washer, dryer, start the plan to have kids. Have a good job. Have a career hopefully by then, you know; not just a job. (Interview transcript, female, age nineteen)

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By the time they approach thirty their hopelessness has often turned to despair: I’m kind of at that little crest right now from moving out of the real young adult age. . . . I’m still kind of—once you reach thirty, you’re kind of leading up to where there’s even less available. I know I’ve got to get off the streets now and stay off while I’m relatively young, or I might never get off. (Interview transcript, male, age thirty)

Therefore it is crucial to intervene when adolescents begin living on the streets.

Providing Shelter: Urban Peak History and Objectives In 1988 the Capital Hill United Neighborhood established Urban Peak as a storefront drop-in center with street outreach in the Capital Hill area of Denver to serve the increasing number of homeless and runaway adolescents in the central city. In 1992 Urban Peak incorporated as a not-for-profit agency and opened a twenty-bed youth shelter, Safe at St. Paul’s, based on an existing church-run shelter. It is the only state-licensed shelter for homeless and runaway young people in Colorado.²¹ Urban Peak’s mission is to serve homeless and runaway youth. We provide youth a safe, caring, stable environment and assist them in permanently exiting street life. Urban Peak believes in the potential of every youth to contribute to our world. Over the past five years Urban Peak has expanded its facilities and programs. The agency constructed a new shelter south of downtown and created a subsidiary not-forprofit agency, Urban Peak Housing Corporation that owns and manages three apartment buildings with a total of 75 units. In 2001, Urban Peak established Urban Peak Colorado Springs, which offers day treatment services, outreach, and a twenty-bed transitional housing facility. In 2002 Urban Peak opened a Resource Center four blocks from the mall as a base for its street outreach program. The next year it merged with the Spot, a recreational center for urban young people ages fourteen to twenty-four, and created the Starting Transition and Recovery (STAR) program, a residential treatment program for young people with drug addictions.²² In fiscal year 2003–2004 Urban Peak Denver served 420 young people, with an average of 33 young people staying at the shelter each night. Of the total served, 45 obtained GEDs, 207 found employment, and 252 (60 percent) permanently exited street life (Urban Peak 2004). In addition to direct services, a key feature of Urban Peak’s vision statement is “Being the Expert.” To that end, staff members conduct and facilitate research on the characteristics and experiences of runaway and homeless young people in Colorado and, with other local researchers, present their work at local and national conferences in a variety of disciplines (e.g., youth justice, drug treatment, anthropology, and adolescent medicine and nursing). Urban Peak is required by law to contact the legal guardians of minors within seventy-two hours after they enter the shelter; however, its policy is to contact them within twenty-four hours whenever possible.²³ The agency embraces the concept

Integrating Interventions

of reunification of young people with their families and builds its programs around strengthening this base. Given the pervasive physical, sexual, and emotional abuse present in these families, however, it is not always possible to reestablish family ties. To assist young people who need to become independent as minors, the agency’s staff worked with community leaders and state legislators to draft Colorado’s Homeless Youth Act (Colorado Revised Statues 18-601). The act is modeled on the federal Runaway and Homeless Youth Act (P.L. 106-71) and provides a legal definition of “homeless and runaway youth” so that young people on their own can enroll in school, sign leases, and consent to nonemergency medical and dental care. Exiting street life means that a young person will be able to support himself or herself and any legal dependents (children) in permanent housing.²⁴ What young people tell us is that although they need support to leave the streets, they also want to be empowered to live independently. To achieve this goal Urban Peak uses an individual, intensive case management model in which each young person works with a case manager to assess his or her strengths and needs, formulate a service plan, and then complete the plan with supervision by the case manager and other staff members. Thus Urban Peak is not an emergency shelter where people can spend an occasional night or week. To remain at the shelter, clients must participate in routine chores, be alcohol and drug free while on the premises, participate in programs or leave the shelter during the day between meals, and work with their case manager in accordance with their service plan. Clients are also encouraged and supported to clear up outstanding warrants.

Shelter Services Shelter services and transitional housing are key components of Urban Peak’s efforts to help homeless young people exit street life. J. T. Fest distinguishes between “runaway youth” and “street-dependent youth” and their use of shelters and other services. Adolescents who run away have trouble with authority and discipline, which may be inconsistent or absent in their families, “but, again, the family bond is healthy and the return home is viable. Individuals in this category are quick to seek services, often terrified by their street experiences, and generally not accepted by street-dependent youth” (Fest 1998:16). Disparaging comments about the shelter and its rules suggest an awareness of some young people’s need for structure. John, who attributed some allure of the streets to the lack of accountability to others, also stated, “I went to the shelter because I kind of want some authority over me.” In discussing plans for a resource center downtown with Jason, he said, “Like if I had a place like this right here, where you could just hang out. Guaranteed you can’t come in if you’re drunk.” Staff members at Urban Peak are open to the ideas and suggestions of young people: Issues that affect the shelter population as a whole (e.g., people destroying shelter property or not doing chores) can be addressed at the weekly community breakfasts. The Youth Council meets monthly to make recommendations to shelter staff.²⁵ Nonetheless, the shelter is not a democracy, and adult staff members retain control over residents’ activities and behavior. Not all young people are willing or able to use services on this basis. Young people who have been on their own several years call those who stay in the shelter “shelter rats” or “weekend warriors” who are put down for their lack of street skills, lack of experience of

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true hardship, and lack of ability to “make it on their own.” Darryl, who was staying in the shelter until he got a lease on his apartment, told us about his attitude toward the shelter: outreach staff: I had heard that the street kids didn’t like the shelter kids. darryl: Yeah, well, they come down here and try to be cool, but they don’t have a clue. The kids down here can’t stand them. They’re soft. They couldn’t make it out here for a day. outreach staff: The shelter kids really look up to you guys. darryl: Yeah, I guess they do. But they should be scared of us. We’re tough. They don’t know nothin’ and we’d beat their asses if they tried anything down here. They want to be one of us, but they don’t get it. Me, I’m doing something with my life.

Darryl’s statement is typical of young people who have lived on their own for several months or more. Fest (1998) describes them as street-dependent youth, those who come from deeply dysfunctional family situations where there is no viable family bond. Their level of distrust of authority is high; this is reflected in their rejection of shelter youth, whom they view as dependent and weak. When Susie was asked what kind of shelter she would like, she said, Buy one of these big giant hotels or something and turn it into a place to stay for kids. And not like, Urban Peak, I mean they kind of have strict rules, but at the same time it would be more like you’re renting a room from me for like ten bucks and like, as long as you keep it clean and take care of it, that’s it.

Many people we encountered on the streets had stayed at the shelter for periods of time but were unable or unwilling to live within the structure of shelter life. When restricted from the shelter premises for failure to conform to shelter rules or make progress toward their treatment goals, they often interpreted this as a permanent banishment rather than a consequence of their actions that in most cases they could rectify by meeting with their case manager. In contradiction to Fest’s view of these young people as “street dependent,” one could view them as determined to maintain their autonomy and dignity even if it means going without resources to which Urban Peak controls access.

Reaching Out Many young people simply do not trust adults. They have little or no experience— either in their families or in institutions such as public schools or police departments— with adults who will listen to their point of view and allow them to express their feelings while maintaining appropriate boundaries and limits. As John said, “You know you can’t trust a cop. So many of them are corrupted by money.” We have observed young people who stayed on the periphery of a group, not saying anything to the staff member for months until one day they opened up. In some cases, behaviors young people develop while living on the streets (e.g., drug or alcohol addiction), outstanding police warrants, and patterns of violent confrontation make it impossible for them to be accommodated in the shelter. These people are viewed as the hardest to reach, those

Integrating Interventions

for whom leaving the streets may entail several cycles of leaving and returning to street life before they can achieve a more stable life (Fest 1998). To serve these people, Urban Peak has an active and innovative street outreach program in which we participated. Each day staff members and volunteers walk the mall to contact young people. Service is based on a risk reduction public health model in which the goal is to maintain or improve the health and safety of young people while they are on the streets. Similar programs exist in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and other U.S. cities. Each carries a backpack filled with items donated to the agency: sodas, protein bars, hygiene products, warm clothing in winter, socks, condoms, limited first aid materials, and bleach kits.²⁶ When an opportunity arises, we counsel them on safe sex practices, HIV prevention and transmission, conflict resolution, and other health and safety issues. The outreach team also provides free testing for sexually transmitted infections (STIs), pregnancy, and HIV on the mall.²⁷ An important component of the outreach program is the peer outreach worker.²⁸ Peer outreach workers are young men and women in their late teens or early twenties who have left street life. They participate in street outreach and peer counseling and assist other outreach staff in developing programs. They are very successful in serving as links between the world of the streets and the world of the agency and more mainstream work. Young people on the streets often know the peer outreach workers from their days on the streets, and they can see that they are working, are earning a good income, and have confidence and skills to bring to the relationship without having “sold out.”²⁹ In our research, the peer outreach workers have been invaluable partners in providing contact with young people, explaining the purpose and nature of the research, and sharing their insights, knowledge, and observations. Urban Peak staff members who walk the city’s streets daily develop an accurate picture of the street community (e.g., trends in drug use, ability to find work, and group dynamics). Outreach staff members provide young homeless people with backpacks and clothing when available. In addition to these material supports, outreach workers also provide information, services, and case management similar to that offered in the shelter directly to young people on the streets. Whereas many of the young people on the streets express dislike for the shelter at Urban Peak, few have strong feelings against the outreach team. Many don’t realize that the outreach team is part of Urban Peak’s program. brian: I don’t like Urban Peak any more. They used to be just for street youth, for them. It was their place where they could chill and take a shower and have a dry place to sleep. Now it’s like a group home. It’s all about money. js: What about outreach? brian: Oh, the people with the backpacks? That’s fine. They just give out what you need—food, condoms, stuff like that.

Contrasting Models of Service Delivery To some extent young peoples’ very different reactions to the shelter and the outreach staff reflects the very different approaches—risk reduction and case management—of

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the two components of the Urban Peak program. Whereas most of the outreach team staff members have done some work in the shelter, members of the shelter staff are not always equally aware of what street outreach is like. The risk reduction model of public health assumes that the person’s living situation may not change and therefore directs service to reducing high-risk behaviors in that setting. It thus honors young people’s autonomy by offering support for change only when the young person asks for it. As Jason said, “You can’t force feed anybody man, you can’t, that’s not how you teach people man.” The outreach team works on the young person’s turf, where they have no direct authority and young people can easily avoid them. For example, a young woman who was addicted to heroin had worked with an outreach staff member so that she could enter a rehabilitation program. As the time to enter approached, she disappeared every time the outreach worker was on the mall, although other young people reported that she had just been there. In a study of encounters between outreach workers and homeless persons, Michael Rowe describes them as “crossing borders” between the worlds of the homeless and the “social and organizational elements of status, function, and power” (1999:5). Outreach workers provide services that link homeless people to the basic resource of affordable housing. In exchange for this resource, homeless people enter the institutional world of social service delivery that controls who deserves care and what kind of care. But the relationship is not equal, and both parties are aware of the role power plays in their encounters. In the case of young people, they will have to accept, at least for the purposes of obtaining services, the identity of being “homeless and runaway” and abide by the rules of the shelter and the goals of their service plan. Like the homeless adults Rowe interviewed, many of the young people who are clients at Urban Peak fear that they will not be able to maintain a new identity. Darryl, who obtained an apartment, became increasingly nervous as the night arrived when he was to receive an award from Urban Peak for his progress toward independence. He was afraid that he would mess up, lose his job, or do something that would cause him to lose his apartment. This fear of failing was not unusual among the young people we interviewed. Outreach workers are divided between their empathy for the young people they serve, an awareness of the difference in power between themselves and the young people, and a desire to rescue them (Rowe 1999). This ambivalence is greater when young people are involved because they often evoke parental responses and may manipulate those impulses to get handouts and other forms of assistance. Certainly in our own encounters with young people, we have each had the impulse to “rescue” someone from life on the streets. The ambivalence surrounding the amount of autonomy young people should have manifests itself in two areas. In 2002 Urban Peak opened a resource center a few blocks from the mall as a base for the outreach team. This facility provides a convenient place when more information, privacy, or access to the computer is needed, a place they can wait for medical appointments at the free health clinic for the homeless across the street or access the free on-site health clinic just for young people on Tuesday evenings. The Spot, an evening recreational center that merged with Urban Peak in 2003, has an on-site GED program. Additionally, P.S.1 at the Spot, a branch of a Denver Public School charter school (P.S.10), provides a fully accredited diploma-granting high school program on a flexible schedule. Increasingly, clients are aware that they can drop by

Integrating Interventions

the resource center to pick up things they need and meet with staff on a more extended basis than during outreach. Thus the resource center serves as a gateway (DeRosa et al. 1999) to services. While planning the resource center, Urban Peak staff members who worked at the shelter voiced their concern that creating a center near the mall would facilitate young people staying on the streets by providing a safe and comfortable place for them to hang out. So far, this has not proved to be the case, in part because the main room is deliberately small and because the staff has been clear in setting limits to hanging out. Given the mission of the agency to help youth exit street life, this policy is understandable; however, it fails to acknowledge that young people might stay on the streets if they have a drop-in center as a resource because there are few alternatives open to them on their own terms that would make self-sufficiency possible. The second area concerns the provision of supplies by outreach workers. Although outreach workers distribute condoms and bleach kits, they will not provide young people with the means to “sleep rough” (e.g., sleeping bags, tents, or cooking equipment). Again, this reinforces the agency as the gatekeeper to housing and jobs without acknowledging that by being part of the social service system they are already contributing to the dependence of these young people. If the goal is to keep young people safe until they are ready to leave the streets, then why not provide them with the means to stay warm and prepare food? Ironically, it is through a part of their program outside the case management model that Urban Peak effectively fosters long-term independence. Employing young people who have been homeless is one of the most successful long-term strategies Urban Peak pursues. Peer outreach workers and youth hired as receptionists and administrative assistants not only receive training in office skills or peer counseling but also participate in all the training courses provided to Urban Peak staff, such as updates on STIs and HIV or dealing with youth in crisis. Several peer outreach workers have attended national and statewide youth leadership conferences, where they have given presentations about their work. These positions empower young people to work in jobs from a basis of strength, using the skills and knowledge they already possess in a setting that is structured but familiar and supportive and in which their employers have a stake in their success. These people have been able to move from their work at Urban Peak into higher-paying jobs or jobs that better fit their long-term interests (e.g., banking, social service, full-time clerical work, creative writing programs, and research). One former outreach worker told me that she wanted to quit her job every month or so, but her Urban Peak employer “just wouldn’t let me.”

Facing the Reality of the Global Political Economy Although or perhaps because Urban Peak has been successful in garnering support in the community and the legislature for its programs, it has not challenged the assumptions and contradictions on which the social service system is based. The social service model assumes that the “problem” of homelessness rests within individuals and families, not in the larger society. Thus programs are directed at assisting individuals and families and limited in their scope and the amount of support they provide.

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Additionally, they rest on moral decisions of who “deserves” help, defined for the most part as those who cannot help themselves. The agency thus becomes the gatekeeper to resources by determining eligibility. People who want services must accept the ascribed status of “homeless,” “runaway,” “drug addict,” “mentally ill,” or “victim of domestic abuse” to access the resources the agency controls. Getting young people off the streets may improve their quality of life, but it also makes their situation less visible and thus easier to ignore. Youth homelessness is but one aspect of the growing impoverishment of large numbers of people in developing and developed nations in response to globalization. Additionally, leaving the streets entails separating oneself from street-based peer networks (Fest 1998) that could serve as a source of collective consciousness, solidarity, and political action (Ferrell 2001). Developing that consciousness would take effort because the majority of young people we interviewed in Denver internalize the values of mainstream society. They see themselves as the primary cause of their homeless condition and believe that it is primarily through their own efforts that they will exit street life. Although they may rail against the system in the abstract through punk music, anarchist symbols, and antimaterialism, these postures more closely resemble the “shadow values” (Liebow 1967) and “street corner mythmaking” (Hannerz 1969) of poor African American men in the 1960s than those of the radical dropouts of the 1960s. Unable to achieve the goals of mainstream society (house, marriage, children, car), they reject them outwardly while holding themselves to those standards inwardly.³⁰ Working within the system means that solutions often are political compromises or workarounds that make things easier for individuals but do not address the marginalization of young people in general. Legally defining a young person as homeless or runaway quickly secures access to services and the ability to consent to them but does not provide the same status as emancipation. By providing housing that is, in part, privately funded, agencies such as Urban Peak enable the state to avoid developing a comprehensive, coherent housing policy for its citizens that confers benefits regardless of age, gender, and marital or parental status, a policy that acknowledges the vagaries of the global economic system and the contribution flexible workers provide. This piecemeal approach to social programs is one aspect of the dismantling of the welfare state in the United States that began during the Reagan administration (Castells 1989) and culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. Accompanying the changes in benefits is the change in how those who receive benefits are viewed. Instead of poor women receiving benefits so that they can raise their children, they are stigmatized as irresponsible, immoral, and undisciplined (Mink 1998). Thus receiving assistance of any kind “contaminates” recipients as similarly irresponsible and undeserving. Although Urban Peak does not view the young people they serve in this way, the young people we interviewed recounted multiple encounters with people on the streets who called them “lazy” or “disgusting” or told them to “get a job.” Despite the fact that most people who receive public assistance do so for short periods of time (Mink 1998), this view of recipients has led to a fear of creating dependency and a “just enough” approach to services: As long as services are just enough to survive on, work will seem a better alternative. But our interviews with young people consistently show how precarious their life off the streets is. The “just enough” philosophy actually

Integrating Interventions

creates dependence by pushing them back onto the streets when they lose their job or their roommate moves out unexpectedly. The longer they are on the streets, the more likely they are to have felony records, chronic health problems, or frequent changes of residence that disrupt work histories, education, and social networks. Without a safety net to rely on during the lean years of early adulthood, some may never achieve full independence. Nor should that safety net depend on a history of abuse or neglect, mental illness, or any other “pathology.” If young people can commit an offense merely by their status as minors (e.g., curfew violations), then they should have access to lowcost housing on the same basis and without a social service agency as intermediary if they wish (cf. Donovan 2002). As a not-for-profit and state-licensed agency, Urban Peak must compete for funding with other programs that “manage” young people who are “out of place” (e.g., foster care, residential treatment centers, and prisons). Thus Urban Peak evaluates its programs, in part, on their cost effectiveness.³¹ Although cost effectiveness is a laudable feature of any program, the fact that Urban Peak must sell its program in this way demonstrates how little our society truly values these young people who lack support from their families. At present, there is very little money or policy support to fund aftercare services, services that are essential to maintaining long-term independence. It also means that Urban Peak must ration its services where they are most likely to succeed: with young people who have more internal and external assets when they arrive. “Research indicates that services for homeless people reproduce social stratification by selecting easier clients” (Avramov 2002:34). Research on youth homelessness in Europe shows similar trends to those in the United States (Avramov 1998), with clear links to global political and economic processes. What is needed now is true participatory action research that works with clients not only within the system but also against the system (Brown and Tandon 1983), research that clearly links the marginalization of young people to their place in the global political economy, research that demonstrates the need for an adequate support system for young people not only during but also after episodes of homelessness, research that builds their capacity to advocate for themselves and their peers to take a valued place in society.

Notes 1. An important exception is the excellent study by Joan I. Vondra (1986). As Vondra concludes, the relationship between social class and running away is complex; some families are able to weather the storms of unemployment and poverty and remain intact and healthy, whereas others with more economic resources cannot. 2. Amy Donovan developed this concept through her work with homeless and runaway young people in San Francisco. The authors are grateful to her for many long hours of late-night phone conversations through which we developed this discussion. 3. As Lewellen notes, “Globalization may be conceived as empirical fact, as theory, or as ideology” (2002:8). Whether it is fact or theory and whether these changes represent merely the extension and intensification of capitalism or a truly new form or mode of development (Castells 1989) is an important and fascinating discussion beyond the scope of this chapter.

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Jean Scandlyn, Suzanne Discenza, and James Van Leeuwen 4. “The OECD was set up under a Convention signed in Paris in 1960. The original members are Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States.” The following countries became members subsequently through accession: Japan, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and the Republic of Korea (International Labour Organization 2002:11, footnote 16). 5. As Reed Larson (2002) observes, adolescents in poorer families never enter school or are pulled from school to help support their families. In the United States they may be required to attend school, but the schools they attend often are underfunded and serve as sources of discouragement and lack of self-confidence. 6. Although people nine to twenty-one years of age represent only 4.1 percent of the total homeless population in Denver, this figure does not include young people who are counted as part of “youth-headed families” or as “children in families” but who may be expected to find their own shelter and meet their own basic needs (Denver Homeless Planning Group [DHPG] 2003:32). 7. The city and county of Denver are coterminous. The Denver metropolitan area’s population of 2.3 million is divided among the following cities and counties: Denver City and County, 499,775; Boulder County, 273,112; Arapahoe County, 482,089; Adams County, 331,045; Douglas County, 156,860; and Jefferson County, 509,222 (U.S. Census Bureau 2001). In the 1990s Colorado was the third fastest-growing state by percentage, with Douglas County the fastest-growing county in the nation. Douglas County entered the decade with 60,000 residents and more than doubled its total population in ten years, an increase of 191 percent (Olinger 2001:10A). 8. Jobs in retail trade pay an average of $9.69 / hour and in food service $7.84 / hour. These data come from a survey of employers conducted by the Colorado Department of Labor, so they do not reflect wages paid in cash, tips, or other forms of unreported compensation. Many of these jobs are part time and do not include healthcare and other benefits (Colorado Department of Labor and Employment 2004). 9. The Tabor Amendment, passed in 1992, is the key legislation that limits state revenue, requires voter approval for tax increases, and limits property taxes. Amendment 23 (2000) and the Gallagher Amendment (1982) further limit increases in property taxes and on the tax base for local government, including school districts, by limiting the value of residential property. With the downturn in the national economy, by 2001 Colorado faced some of the most serious deficits in state revenues in the country (Legislative Council Staff 2003). 10. Life history is ideal for our purposes for two reasons. First, it enables us to collect information on each of the topics that we thought, based on the literature and our initial group interviews and discussions with the research committee, would be important factors in determining whether homeless and runaway young people were at risk for chronic homelessness. Second, life history provides a flexible interview in which the participant can narrate life events in his or her own style. The structure and flow of their narrative can reveal important information about the participants’ perceptions: how they connect events, what factors they see as significant, areas of contradiction or denial, and aspects or events in their lives that they view as most important. Subsequent interviews were more directed to ensure the saturation of themes and explore key factors in more depth. 11. The interviews were recorded on audiotape and then transcribed and analyzed using NUDIST 6 and Atlas.ti 4.2. We met regularly to review our findings. Midway through data collection, we developed a graphic model from the data to depict the role of homelessness in the life course of young adults. The model was further refined and tested in subsequent interviews and

Integrating Interventions observation. The project was reviewed and approved by the Human Subjects Research Committee of the University of Colorado at Denver. Informed written consent was obtained from each person who agreed to participate in the study, and each was paid $20 and provided with a meal. 12. In anthropology this is known as triangulation, a term that comes from the nautical technique of using three points to establish one’s location. Anthropologists use multiple sources of data to ensure that they are accurately locating the “point” or phenomenon under study (Handwerker 2001). 13. The figures from the two surveys used slightly different methods to count homeless and runaway youths and therefore are not completely comparable. Franklin James’s survey of 1991 was more inclusive than the later point-in-time surveys, so if anything the increase is higher than the total numbers here indicate. Using only data from the point-in-time surveys, the number of homeless youths increased from 197 in 1998 to 401 in 2003. 14. “In 1995, 74 of the homeless population was single individuals and 26 were persons in families. In 2001, 66 of the homeless population was persons in families and 34 were single individuals” (DHPG 2003: appendix, homeless trends). 15. All names are pseudonyms, and identifying information has been changed to protect the privacy of participants. 16. “In 2003, the 16th Street Mall ranked 2 in metro tourist attractions in a survey conducted by the Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau.” I. M. Pei designed the 16-block section of 16th Street, completed in 1982, with a tree-lined meridian, benches, information kiosks, and chess tables to encourage pedestrians to linger and shop. Free shuttle buses run up and down the mall every few minutes and connect with the light rail system at Stout Street (Downtown Denver Partnership 2004). 17. Travelers were not the focus of this study. See chapter 3, this volume, for a description of the traveler subculture. 18. Because of its central location, active pedestrian traffic of tourists and urban workers, free shuttle buses and connection to the city’s light rail system and regional bus system, and variety of public spaces, the mall is very attractive to young people on their own. This attractiveness has been met with some ambivalence and resistance from local business owners, specifically the Downtown Denver Partnership and Business Improvement District, workers in the area, and police. In 2003 the Federal Reserve Bank, whose building faces the mall, replaced the low, broad concrete border surrounding its property with a five-foot iron fence. Increasing security after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was one probable motivation; nonetheless, the low concrete border was a popular place for street youth to hang out. Before the wall was built, we observed increasing frequency of instances in which homeless youth were harassed and chased away by the Fed’s security guards. Most of the young people viewed it as a direct action taken to push them away. Skyline Park, designed in the 1970s by Lawrence Halprin to mimic Colorado’s many red rock canyons, with multiple levels and water features, was another public space occupied by youth on their own. By 2000 the park had fallen into disrepair, and whether it should be restored or redesigned was the focus of active public debate. The park is currently closed and is being completely rebuilt with a more conventional design on one level (Downtown Denver Partnership 2004). It will be interesting to see whether and how young people use the new park. 19. In 2001 Colorado’s unemployment rate was 2.5 percent, slightly more than half that of the national rate of 4.25 percent (State of Colorado 2001). 20. A status offense is one that occurs because of a person’s place in the social order (i.e., age, gender, marital status). In the case of minors in Denver, for example, being under the age of

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Jean Scandlyn, Suzanne Discenza, and James Van Leeuwen eighteen and on the streets after 11:00 p.m. on a weeknight or 12:00 a.m. on a weekend night violates the city’s age-based curfew. 21. Information on the history and objectives of Urban Peak is compiled from a number of documents, including a description of Urban Peak programs, Urban Peak Strategic Plan 2001–2004, Urban Peak marketing brochures, and their Web site (www.urbanpeak.org, accessed June 15, 2004). 22. STAR is a collaborative project of Urban Peak Denver, the Office of Drug Strategy, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Addiction Research Treatment Services, Denver Human Services, and Colorado’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division. Funding comes from a variety of sources: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for subsidized housing, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration federal dollars for treatment, and the City of Denver for wraparound services (which address the multiple issues homeless young people face, e.g., housing, education, mental health, employment, and healthcare). Urban Peak staff manage the site and oversee the program (J. Petersen, personal communication, Sept. 30, 2003). 23. If Urban Peak cannot locate the parents, they work with Social Services to arrange a safe living situation. In most cases, Social Services grants Urban Peak permission to shelter the young person until a suitable custodian is identified. Sometimes Urban Peak requests that Social Services take custody, depending on the situation and the age of the client. 24. Permanent housing in this context means housing to which the occupant has legal title and protection as long as he or she meets all legal and fiscal responsibilities (e.g., a leased apartment or a house or a dwelling unit that is individually owned). 25. At the September 2003 Youth Council meeting the following topics were discussed: organizing a “paintball” activity with staff, dorm captains, making it possible for clients to prepare at least one meal per month at the shelter, disrespect toward staff, an all-client phone to be placed in the drop-in center, concern with clients taking food outside, and a project to address the appearance of the picnic tables. 26. Needle exchange is illegal in Denver. Bleach kits are given to intravenous drug users so that they can clean their “works” or needles by flushing them with a disinfectant. The kits include a small plastic bottle filled with a chlorine bleach solution, a vial of clean water, cotton balls, an aluminum cap, a twist tie, alcohol wipes, and a condom in a small baggie. 27. Urban Peak uses the Ora-Sure® oral test for HIV. It consists of a large swab that is placed against the inner lining of the mouth for five minutes and then collected by the outreach team and processed by one of Urban Peak’s physicians. Outreach team members receive training in administering the test and counseling young people. To test for STIs and pregnancy, a young person is given a clean plastic cup with a lid, which they take to a nearby public restroom. The urine samples are taken to the city’s Department of Health, where they are processed. The young person is given an identification number to use when calling the department for his or her results. 28. The official title is “Youth Opportunity Enrichment Worker.” 29. This evaluation of the effectiveness of peer outreach workers is based both on direct statements by young people and on direct observation of positive encounters, requests for services, and evidence of changed behavior (getting a job, enrolling in a GED program) during outreach over a period of three years with four different peer outreach workers. 30. In the majority of our interviews, when young people were asked about where they would like to be in five years, when they were able to think that far ahead, their answers focused on having a stable home, job, and family. 31. Urban Peak can move a youth from homelessness to self-sufficiency for just over $5,500. In Colorado Springs, the cost per successful outcome is just over $3,800. For youth in housing,

Integrating Interventions the figure is just under $10,000 and is higher because youth stay in the program much longer. These costs represent a tremendous savings to the community when compared with the $53,655 annual cost of detention or the $53,527 annual cost of residential childcare facility placement, both of which are probable outcomes for homeless youth (Urban Peak 2004).

References Aitken, S. C. 2001. Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity. London: Routledge. Avramov, D., ed. 1998. Youth Homelessness in the European Union. Brussels: FEANTSA. ——. 2002. People, Demography and Social Exclusion. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Bartelt, D. W. 1997. Urban housing in an era of global capital. Annals of the American Academy of Planning, 551: 121–137. Bogue, D. J. 1963. Skid Row in American Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago, Community and Family Study Center. Brown, D. L. and R. Tandon. 1983. Ideology and political economy in inquiry: Action research and participatory research. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 19(3): 277–294. Castells, M. 1989. The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. 2004. Labor Market Information for Economists and Researchers. Retrieved April 25, 2004, from coworkforce.com / LMI / Intro / research.asp. Colorado State Government. 2004. Components of Change: Births, Deaths, & Net Migration. Retrieved April 25, 2004, from dola.colorado.gov / demog / Compentents.dfm. Denver Homeless Planning Group. 2003. A Blueprint for Addressing Homelessness in Denver. Photocopy, files of the authors. DeRosa, C., S. B. Montgomery, M. K. Kipke, E. Iverson, J. L. Ma, and J. B. Unger. 1999. Service utilization among homeless and runaway youth in Los Angeles, California: Rates and reasons. Journal of Adolescent Health, 24: 449–458. Discenza, S. 2004. Assessing the Risk of Homeless Adolescents Becoming Homeless Adults. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Colorado at Denver. Donovan, A. A. 2002. Telling Me Different: An Ethnography of Homeless Youth in San Francisco. Ph.D. dissertation, New School for Social Research. Downtown Denver Partnership. 2004. Downtown Denver Business Improvement District 16th Street Mall. Retrieved May 5, 2004, from www.downtowndenver.com / bid / 16thstmall.htm. Drayer, D. 2003, Dec. 8. Colorado Matters: Denver Commission to End Homelessness. Denver: Colorado Public Radio. Ferrell, J. 2001. Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy. New York: Palgrave. Fest, J. T. 1998. Street Culture: An Epistemology of Street-Dependent Youth. Portland: J.T. Fest. Finkelstein, M. 2005. With No Direction Home: Homeless Youth on the Road and in the Streets. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. Finnegan, W. 1999. Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country. New York: Modern Library. Hagen, J. and B. McCarthy. 1997. Mean Streets: Youth Crime and Homelessness. New York: Cambridge University Press. Handwerker, W. P. 2001. Quick Ethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. Hannerz, U. 1969. Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Jean Scandlyn, Suzanne Discenza, and James Van Leeuwen Honkala, C., R. Goldstein, and E. Thul. 1999. Globalisation and homelessness in the USA: Building a social movement to end poverty. Development in Practice, 9(5): 526–538. Howell, J. T. 1973. Hard Living on Clay Street: Portraits of Blue Collar Families. Garden City, NY: Anchor. International Labour Organization. 2002. Employing Youth: Promoting Employment-Intensive Growth. Report for the Interregional Symposium on Strategies to Combat Youth Unemployment and Marginalisation. Geneva: International Labour Office. James, F. J. 1991. Homeless Youth on Their Own: An Exploratory Study of Colorado. Denver: University of Colorado Graduate School of Public Affairs. Photocopy, files of the authors. Katz, C. 1998. Disintegrating developments: Global economic restructuring and the eroding of ecologies of youth. In T. Skelton and G. Valentine, eds., Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, 130–144. London: Routledge. Kleniewski, N. 2002. Cities, Change, and Conflict: A Political Economy of Urban Life. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. Kryder-Coe, J. H., L. M. Salamon, and J. M. Molnar. 1991. Homeless Children and Youth: A New American Dilemma. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Larson, R. W. 2002. Globalization, societal change, and new technologies: What they mean for the future of adolescence. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 12(1): 1–30. Legislative Council Staff. 2003. House Joint Resolution 03-1033 Study: TABOR, Amendment 23, the Gallagher Amendment, and Other Fiscal Issues. Publication No. 518. Denver: Colorado General Assembly. Lewellen, T. C. 2002. The Anthropology of Globalization: Cultural Anthropology Enters the 21st Century. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Liebow, E. 1967. Tally’s Corner. Boston: Little, Brown. Lundy, K. C. 1995. Sidewalks Talk: A Naturalistic Study of Street Kids. New York: Garland. Metro Denver Homeless Initiative. 2003. Point in Time Survey of Homeless Youths in Denver, Colorado. Photocopy, files of the authors. Mickelson, R. A. 2000. Globalization, childhood poverty, and education in the Americas. In R. A. Mickelson, ed., Children on the Streets of the Americas: Globalization, Homelessness and Education in the United States, Brazil and Cuba, 11–39. London: Routledge. Mink, G. 1998. Welfare’s End. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Musick, J. S. 1991. The high stakes challenge of programs for adolescent mothers. In P. B. Edelman and J. Ladner, eds., Adolescence and Poverty: Challenge for the 1990s, 111–137. Washington, DC: Center for National Policy Press. National Coalition for the Homeless. 2002. Why Are People Homeless? NCH Fact Sheet 1. Retrieved May 5, 2002, from www.nationalhomeless.org / causes.html. NEA. 2004. Rankings and Estimates: Rankings of the States 2003 and Estimates of School Statistics 2004. Retrieved June 1, 2004, from www.nea.org. Newman, K. S. 1999. No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. New York: Alfred A. Knopf and the Russell Sage Foundation. Olinger, D. 2001, April 3. West is fastest-growing area. Denver Post, pp. 1A, 10A. Olson, L., E. Liebow, F. V. Mannino, and M. F. Shore. 1980. Runaway children twelve years later. Journal of Family Issues, 1(2): 165–188. Pfeffer, R. 1997. Surviving the Streets: Girls Living on Their Own. New York: Garland; San Francisco: Center for Young Women’s Development. Rowe, M. 1999. Crossing the Border: Encounters Between Homeless People and Outreach Workers. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Integrating Interventions Ruddick, S. M. 1996. Young and Homeless in Hollywood: Mapping Social Identities. New York: Routledge. Sassen, S. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Scandlyn, J. 1993. When the Social Contract Fails: Inter-Generational and Inter-Ethnic Conflict in an American Suburban School District. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University. Schaffner, L. 1999. Teenage Runaways: Broken Hearts and “Bad Attitudes.” New York: Haworth. Schneider, A. L. and H. Ingram. 1997. Policy Design for Democracy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Singer, M., F. Valentín, H. Baer, and Z. Jia. 1998. Why does Juan García have a drinking problem? The perspective of critical medical anthropology. In P. J. Brown, ed., Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology, 286–302. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield. State of Colorado. 2001. State of Colorado governor’s page. Retrieved April 24, 2001, from www .state.co.us / gov_dir / governor_office.html. Strauss, A. and J. Corbin. 1990. Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sum, A. M. and W. N. Fogg. 1991. Adolescent poor and the transition to early adulthood. In P. B. Edelman and J. Ladner, eds., Adolescence and Poverty: Challenge for the 1990s, 37–110. Washington, DC: Center for National Policy Press. Taylor, A. M. and J. Hochron. 1996. Understanding the health care needs of homeless youth. Community Youth Development, 2(1): 26–31. Tilly, J. and J. Chesky. 2002. Recent Changes in Health Policy for Low-Income People in Colorado. Retrieved May 5, 2004, from www.urban.org / url.cfm?ID=310446. University of Colorado. 2003. Surviving Financial Challenges at the University of Colorado, Executive Summary. Boulder: Office of Budget and Finance, University of Colorado. Urban Peak. 2004. Welcome Urban Peak. Retrieved May 5, 2004, from www.urbanpeak.org. U.S. Census Bureau. 2001. State and County QuickFacts: Colorado. Retrieved April 25, 2004, from www.quickfacts.census.gov / qfd / states / 08000.html. Vondra, J. I. 1986. Socioeconomic stress and family functioning in adolescence. In J. Garbarino, C. J. Schellenbach, and J. Sebes, eds., Troubled Youth, Troubled Families: Understanding Families at-Risk for Adolescent Maltreatment, 191–233. New York: Aldine. Weisner, T. S. 2002. The American dependency conflict: Continuities and discontinuities in behavior and values of countercultural parents and their children. Ethos, 29(3): 271–295. Whitbeck, L. B. and D. R. Hoyt. 1999. Nowhere to Grow: Homeless and Runaway Adolescents and Their Families. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

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15. Youth Force in the South Bronx

Why is it that in some of the nation’s most economically disinvested urban areas, young people are creating community change? What are some of the strategies they use, and what lessons can be learned from them? These questions challenge conventional thinking about these areas, which often are noted for their deficiencies and needs and for the services on which some residents become dependent, although they also have assets and resources with which to help themselves and build healthier communities. Their youth are portrayed as troubled or troubling, who themselves need services, although they too have resources on which to build (Finn 2001; Finn and Checkoway 1998). If society were to view these areas and their youth as resourceful rather than as troubled, then people might commit to more significant community development rather than the present services that prevail. There is need for more knowledge of young people as competent community builders in urban areas, but the literature largely emphasizes their deficiencies (Checkoway et al. 2003). This chapter examines the case of Youth Force, a community-based organization in New York’s South Bronx, described wherever possible in the words of its participants. Operating in one of the nation’s poorest areas, young people have both provided services and organized for social and political action. They have formulated a Democracy Multiplied Zone (DMZ) to “mobilize a youth-led movement for social change” and “enable young people to develop a united voice and coherent vision” for the future of the “boogie down.” Their efforts have been exceptional, and a great deal can be learned from them.

South Bronx New York’s South Bronx is among America’s most economically disinvested areas. Over several decades, manufacturing firms have closed, and jobs have gone elsewhere.

Youth Force in the South Bronx

The area has the densest concentration of public housing in the nation, only a small fraction of the housing is owner occupied, and this is often substandard. The area has high rates of infant mortality, crime, and violence, although these have declined in recent years (Freudenberg et al. 1999; New York City Department of City Planning 1998). South Bronx young people are portrayed by news media as criminals, drug takers, school dropouts, or other problems in society (Alicia and DeSena 1999). When Youth Force members studied how The New York Times frames youth, they found that the coverage overrepresented youth as perpetrators of crime and that most Americans believe that juvenile crime is rising at a time when it is actually falling (Figueroa et al. 2000). Social scientists reinforce these views with studies of poverty, racism, and other forces that cause worsening social conditions that result in youth pathologies that warrant intervention. In his books about the South Bronx, Jonathan Kozol (1996, 2000) describes children from broken families, terrible schools, and poor living conditions. Some of his children are resilient, but most of them are not, and his writings have a large readership. His images are paralleled by those of Robert Putnam (2000) and other social scientists who describe young people as withdrawn from participation and disengaged from democracy. Youth Force seeks to mobilize youth in the Mott Haven and Morrisiana neighborhoods of the South Bronx. Mott Haven is the poorest neighborhood in the city in one of the nation’s lowest-income congressional districts. Eighty-five percent of the residents receive public assistance, and 35 percent of the area’s young men are in prison or detention or on probation. Youth Force members are aware of these conditions but view themselves as among the organizations that are fighting back: “So, despite the fact that our area was rated the neighborhood with the dirtiest streets, we also have more community gardens than any other community. Despite the fact that the community has the nation’s largest concentration of dilapidated or abandoned property, it is also the area with the most grassroots efforts aimed at successful housing development.” Youth Force is part of the history of community building in the South Bronx (Hall 1999; Jonnes 1986; Rooney 1995; Simmon 1997), and its members take pride of residence in the area’s grassroots innovations, from Banana Kelly’s homesteaders to street organizations such as the Young Lords, Latin Kings, and Zulu Nation. When they boast of the South Bronx as “where it all began,” they are referring to the birth of hip hop, breakdancing, graffiti “flava,” and a unique culture that strengthens their place in the world: “This community and its streets, parks, and playgrounds that we call home have a special place in our hearts,” they write. “We are not passing through on our way to somewhere else.”

Origins and Activities Youth Force was established in the South Bronx in 1994. In the words of its founders, “Youth Force was created by and for young people to school each other to the fact

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that we are not powerless, we should be seen and heard, and we have the ability and right to act for change. We are committed to giving ourselves and other youth the skills and opportunities we need to participate in the running of our schools, the neighborhood, and city. ’Cause until youth act, New York City won’t change. ’Nuff said.” Youth Force has its roots in the 1980s in a community youth advisory council in Manhattan whose young people operated out of a van while organizing a successful campaign to reclaim a playground from drug traffickers. They later produced publications that reached more than fifty thousand teenagers, a youth leadership program in Spofford Juvenile Justice Facility, and youth-led community organizing activities that won widespread notice. In 1994 Youth Force moved into a former crack house and turned it into a vibrant civic space that continues today. In an area of substandard housing and industrial buildings, Youth Force is easily distinguished by its colorful mural of young people in action. Downstairs has space for meetings and socializing, the library has books on community organizing, and the walls are covered with inspirational sayings and murals that celebrate Frederick Douglass and other historic figures. Upstairs are offices for staff members, who operate in collective fashion and move constantly from room to room. The building has a colorful appearance whose tenor and mood are upbeat and inviting in comparison with others in the area. It provides a neutral ground and safe haven to which young people can come and go and expect to feel welcome and comfortable. It provides a place for meeting and discussion, not the kind of formal talking-down that they experience in school or church but informal dialogue or serious planning in an interactive fashion about issues they care about. There are other meeting places in the South Bronx, but none of them has the same qualities as Youth Force. Since 1994, Youth Force has combined youth services and youth organizing. As an initial effort, they established Ujima Productions, a program in the Spofford Juvenile Detention Center intended to unite young residents and advocate better conditions. They created a library, expanded religious services, increased contact with lawyers, and established counseling services for depressed and suicidal youth. These programs strengthened social support for residents, as one young resident wrote from prison: “My mother has visited me four times in 33 months, and doesn’t have a phone. The only consistent visits and calls I have are from Youth Force, a youth program that’s been my family since the beginning.” Youth Force enabled Spofford residents to learn community organizing skills while still institutionalized, and some former residents transitioned into leadership roles at Youth Force, where they worked on reforming the juvenile justice system (James 1999). For example, three Ujima founders were released from Spofford, conducted a research project at Youth Force, and prepared Jail Logic, a report on the New York Police Department, youth experiences at Spofford, and conditions facing young people in the schools, streets, and community (Scott et al. 1996). During this period, Youth Force received public funding and established the South Bronx Community Justice Center to divert youth from juvenile and criminal justice systems (Youth Force 1999). The center provides legal rights education for youth on probation, photo identification to improve interactions with police, and a Youth Court where young people are tried by their peers. The hearings are run by a youth court

Youth Force in the South Bronx

presider instead of a judge, a youth community impact assessor instead of a prosecutor, a youth advocate instead of a defense attorney, and four youth jurors. If found guilty, youth offenders may receive community service sentences, legal education courses, or other forms of counseling. The center provides young people with community-based services that are alternatives to formal interventions by adult agencies and also recruits them to become members of Youth Force. These services make up a caring community that draws youth toward the organization. For example, one youth left Spofford, took a staff position at Youth Force, and reflected, “The Center is a way for us to give back to our community. It’s my payback, so to speak, for my community supporting me when I was in trouble.” Also, a young man who slept in a homeless shelter took a position in the center that provided new purpose: “It’s a place where you can dream,” he said. “There are things that you never thought possible that you can do. Windows of opportunity have opened up to me. And I can use my past experiences to help younger youth not fall like I did.” Furthermore, a young woman shuttled from one group home to another, slept in streets and stairwells, and attempted suicide. When she was offered a job at the center by Youth Force members who saw her potential, she said, “I want to devote my life to helping juveniles make it. I’ve been knocked down and had a lot of setbacks, Without love and support, I wouldn’t have made it. But I want to be there for someone else who doesn’t have a person to say, you really can make it.” Thus the center provides Youth Force with a youth service program, an ongoing vehicle for recruitment, and a stable source of funding with which to staff the organization. Its services are essential, although its members often emphasize youth organizing when they describe the organization.

Democracy Multiplied Zone In 1999, Youth Force formulated the idea of a DMZ to mobilize young people in the South Bronx for a youth-led movement for social change. In response to a request for proposals from Lifting New Voices (Checkoway and Richards-Schuster 2001; McGillicuddy 1999), they identified a specific area—bordered by the Harlem River on the south, Jerome Avenue on the west, Bruckner Boulevard on the east, and Fordham Road on the north—and proposed to increase the involvement of young people in organizational development and community change: “Our goal is . . . to enable young people to develop and promote a united voice and vision for the present and future of the South Bronx.” The DMZ was rooted in a conscious strategy Youth Force uses to integrate service and organizing, which they summarize as follows: First, most young people struggle in silence and start finding their voice by talking to friends or speaking publicly at meetings. Then they see suffering or injustice and try to ease it through community service, legal education, or court support. Then they develop a political analysis—through education and training—and decide that power must be challenged. Then they rock

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the system by increasing the involvement of young people in the issue. Then they build coalitions and alliances with other organizations to build a stronger voice and make some noise through rallies or demonstrations. Finally they pressure policymakers to back the demands of campaigns through public hearings, voter registration, and youth action days (Youth Force 2001). The DMZ was guided by a concept of youth empowerment, defined as “youth taking an active role in community planning, decision making, program implementation, and education. . . . It means having the courage and commitment to fight for a youth voice wherever it is absent. It means, most of all, that WE are not powerless, that along with other youth, or in partnership with adults, we can make a difference.” The DMZ enabled Youth Force to integrate its youth services with youth organizing in a new combination. For this purpose, Youth Force hired a full-time youth organizer, formed a steering committee, and achieved a level of activism that was unlimited in its potential. The following is a summary of some of the activities that have been clustered under the DMZ since its start.

Outreach and Recruitment Youth Force members reached out and recruited young people to the organization in various ways. For example, Street Outreach enabled members to approach young people and share information in places where they congregated. They went into the shelters with information on job training and safety patrols, drug areas with information on drug legal education and legal rights, and youth centers with information on youth employment, recreation, gang prevention, and support groups for ex-offenders. Outreach teams performed skits on the streets in order to grab young people’s attention and, once they gathered around, discussed community issues and the need for organized action. For an antiviolence skit on how to avoid physical confrontation, for example, an outreach team started a street fight and, as a crowd formed, engaged them in a dialogue. They went to fast-food restaurants, shopping centers, and other hot spots where youth congregated. They gave out information packets, resource cards, condoms, and times for upcoming meetings. Chapters became special vehicles for involving young people through outreach and organizing. Outreach workers went to high schools and community groups and established youth-led projects to educate and engage young people. They gave talks in high school classes and recruited students to attend meetings of the organization. Youth Force members also recruited young people by building relationships with residents through direct service “Give Backs” to the community. They cleared trash from alleys, painted public housing apartments, and tutored children in reading. However, direct service was part of a strategy of reaching out and building the organization. Youth Force sought to bring young people together and strengthen their solidarity. They invited people to meetings with others who shared similar concerns and organized rallies and actions that tried to create change. When people came together in these ways, it increased their social interaction and strengthened their social connectedness. They provided young people with a membership card that identified them with a

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cause that was larger than themselves and tried to teach them that they could do more together than any individual acting alone.

Education and Training Youth Force prepared people for social and political action through education and training. For example, they conducted in-house training for youth leaders and staff members on “Knowledge Is Power,” “Youth Organizing 101,” and “Training of Trainers,” including practical tools on meeting facilitation and group process. “Popular Education and Revolutionary Theory” featured the theories of Paulo Freire and Franz Fanon on indigenous rights movements and education for liberation (Youth Force 2002). Boot Camp was an intensive ten-week training program to develop new community organizers. Sixteen young people engaged in experiential education designed to provide practical skills in community organizing. Sessions included information on fighting oppression, planning campaigns, and mass mobilization. As part of the program, participants developed plans for a series of forums to be held in the streets, schools youth centers, and public housing projects (Youth Force 2000). Street University was a large-scale program to prepare young people for active participation through workshops in political theory, organizational development, and community change. Some workshops provided critical analysis of policy issues such as “Police and the Courts,” “Criminalization of Youth of Color,” and “Unequal Education.” Others provided practical skills such as “Getting Your Word Out” and “Planning a Campaign.” The program included guest speakers, field trips, and “Wouldja Couldja Grants” for which youth could apply for funds for a project “that will bring justice and progress to the South Bronx.” Street University also featured workshops on electoral participation. Sessions included techniques to register voters, educate them on the candidates and their positions on public policies, and get them to the polls on election day. They included sessions on political systems, legislative advocacy, and practical politics for empowering young people. It was not surprising that Youth Force members gained a reputation for training and that their services were sought by grassroots groups, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies. Youth Force organized arts and cultural activities that enabled young people to promote public awareness and critical consciousness. In partnership with Stress Magazine, for example, they sponsored Tag Up Here, a project for them to produce graffiti art and public murals portraying prison conditions and other issues from their own lives. They also produced Park Avenue Reality Check, a video that compared Park Avenue in the South Bronx and in Manhattan, a street that exemplified extreme economic inequalities. Youth Force challenged the criminalization of youth in the media by involving youth in a project to study The New York Times. In collaboration with We Interrupt This Message, they trained young people in research methods and conducted a content analysis that resulted in Between the Lines: How The New York Times Frames Youth (Figueroa

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et al. 2000), reporting that the newspaper portrayed youth of color as criminals, whereas white youth appeared in suit-and-tie school yearbook photos or in smiling poses beside their parents. When youth researchers met with a Times editor, he challenged its methods and dismissed its findings. The researchers sent the report to other newspapers and conducted workshops on its findings in community meetings. “The way young people are treated and the way they’re portrayed in the media, the negative stereotypes—it just makes me want to stay in there and be part of the struggle,” said a young person who helped prepare the report. “Adults need to realize that young people are really intelligent and have important things to say.”

Politrix In Youth Force, Politrix refers to the active political participation of youth in issue-based campaigns. Young people learn about issues in which they have a stake, attend political meetings and rallies, form coalitions with organizational allies, contact elected officials and political leaders, and try to influence the outcomes of policy decisions. For example, People’s Justice 2000 enabled them to engage young people in Youth Action Days and press public policy demands on youth issues in the state legislature. Politrix enables Youth Force members to collaborate with organizational allies. For example, Youth Agenda was a coalition of 120 community organizations to advocate for public policies that promote education, employment, housing, and healthcare services that benefit young people. They sponsor marches, rallies, letter-writing campaigns, and advocacy days at City Hall and the state house. Youth Force has involved young people in several issue-based campaigns, described in this section.

Teens and Tenants In response to residents’ complaints about inadequate housing, young people have served as tenant organizers. They have established tenant associations in public housing, conducted tenant surveys, and prepared renovation plans for unsafe housing. They have helped tenants get needed repairs, held police accountable for compliance with regulations, and brought suits against landlords for lead paint poisoning violations. They have promoted drug-free environments, increased resident control over community spaces, and advocated new tenant laws and public housing policies (Youth Force n.d.-c).

No New Beds In response to conditions in Spofford Juvenile Detention Center, young people have conducted an extensive campaign to monitor the facility, address a wide range of violations, improve living conditions, and finally close the facility. They have fought to reduce the number of youth detention and prison beds in the city and state, expand

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alternatives to detention and to court programs, and challenge the criminalization of youth in society (Youth Force n.d.-a, n.d.-b). In 2001, Youth Force members helped organize speakouts at a detention center and City Hall against a proposed increase in funding for juvenile detention centers. They rallied against a proposed plan to add $65 million to the city budget to create two thousand new juvenile beds in the city.

Cops Outta Schools When the New York Board of Education transferred school security to the New York Police Department, young people campaigned against the decision. They conducted surveys in the schools, in youth centers, at community rallies, and in the streets to document youth experiences with police in the schools. One young organizer explained, “This is definitely just the beginning. Putting cops in our schools is just another step toward our preparation as inmates to fill the cells. The more our schools look and act like prisons, the better prepared we’ll be for a life behind bars.”

One Hundred Homes for One Hundred Youth Youth Force has challenged housing development corporations to set aside apartments for youth who are growing too old for foster care and who are returning from prison.

Organizational Changes DMZ activities were accompanied by organizational developments during this time. Youth Force entered the period with a lead organizer who had special skills in youth participation and community organization. She brought together a core group of young people and created a support system around their common cause. She expressed strong values of youth organizing and contributed to an organizational culture that reflected these values. She built positive relationships with funders, served as their primary contact, and authored several successful proposals that furthered the vision. She maintained communication with funding agencies and the board of directors, who traditionally had remained behind the scenes. She was a bridging person who helped cohere the organization and connect it outside the neighborhood (McGillicuddy 1997). The lead organizer was joined by a management staff of young adults who had grown up in the neighborhood and participated in the organization. Team members met biweekly for planning and implementation of their specific activities. They prepared written guidelines about behavior in meetings, interpersonal interactions, and mutual respect. Management team members formed committees that expressed the organizational philosophy: Vision ensured that the activities corresponded with the overall mission, Voice ensured that the public voice reflected the mission and promoted youth voice, Spirit ensured that individual rights were respected, and Strength ensured that the

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organization had the resources needed to do its work. Their focus was largely on internal planning and program implementation and less on communication with the board of directors or funding agencies. These structures provided a vehicle for organizational development. They included forms of problem solving and program planning, goal setting and decision making, participation and leadership, and other organizational elements. In contrast to people whose isolation keeps them from getting organized or acting collectively, Youth Force developed organizational capacity whose effects were especially important for people who lack similar structures elsewhere. Youth Force increased its number of members, through Street Outreach, Chapters, and other activities that gave prospective participants information about meetings and events. All youth between the ages of eight and twenty-four who lived, worked, or attended school in the South Bronx were eligible for membership. Membership meetings were held weekly, many decisions were made in the meetings, and all members below the age of twenty-two were eligible to vote. Meetings strengthened social interaction and relationship building between members. In 2000, management team members met many times to reorganize their work and prepare changes in bylaws for presentation to the board of directors. The board traditionally included adult and youth members, and the proposed changes promised to strengthen youth representation and leadership. A decision-making guide was written and distributed to members to help clarify the decision-making process. The guide caused tensions between youth, sympathetic adults, and adults who felt disrespected by the process. In 2001, the lead organizer resigned. Initially, her place was taken by the co–lead organizer who had entered the organization through one of its programs. This person had extensive knowledge of juvenile justice issues and practical skills in community organizing but lacked the relationships his predecessor had with funding agencies and board members. He resigned also, and soon the board of directors selected a new executive director who had experience in nonprofit management and social services. She came from outside the organization, found it difficult to adapt its special culture, and also resigned, after which the board of directors appointed one of its members to the position. At this writing, the South Bronx Community Justice Center continues to provide needed services and funding with which to staff the organization. The DMZ continues as a vehicle to involve young people in organizing for social and political action around issues that affect them. The management team continues to combine services and organizing, and although they know that the future of the organization is uncertain, they also believe that it is limitless.

PPP Youth Force is a community-based organization in one of the nation’s most disinvested urban areas. Despite difficult conditions, they have established the South Bronx Community Justice Center with a Youth Court and supportive services that offer alternatives to established juvenile and criminal justice institutions and other adult agencies.

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These services are staffed by young people, draw other youth toward the organization, and provide a stable source of funding for its staffing. At the same time, the DMZ has mobilized a youth-led movement for social change. This initiative has enabled them to devise a systematic strategy for recruiting and engaging young people through Street Outreach and Chapters, providing education and training to prepare them for social and political action through Boot Camp and Street University, and involving them in community campaigns on housing and tenant rights, juvenile justice, police in schools, and other important issues in society. Youth Force has a significant record of activities and accomplishments from which a great deal can be learned. During the most productive period of the DMZ, they devised a systematic strategy for recruiting young people, brought people together and strengthened their solidarity, and provided a vehicle for their organizational development. They provided education and training for social and political action and actively engaged in direct action on important issues that affect their lives. They also created a caring community for participants, contributed to organizational and community learning, and provided a physical place and civic space for which they felt ownership. Today Youth Force is undergoing organizational changes that will affect its future, but any changes should not diminish what they have accomplished against the odds they face. If their aspirations are unfulfilled because of limited resources and the conditions they face, or if their present efforts are uncertain because of changes in leadership, they are no less significant for their exceptional efforts. Young people are arising in some of the nation’s most socially disadvantaged and economically disinvested areas (Checkoway 1998), and it is unfortunate that the popular media, social science, and professional practice continue to characterize them as withdrawn from participation and disengaged from democracy. Young people are making exceptional efforts to create community change, and their exceptional status only increases the significance of their activities and accomplishments and the need for more knowledge of their strategies.

Acknowledgments This chapter draws on information from Lifting New Voices, a project of the Center for Community Change, with funding from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and Ford Foundation (Checkoway and Richards-Schuster 2001). The authors are national and community-based evaluators of this project, and much of the reported information draws on a series of quarterly reports prepared by the community-based evaluator in collaboration with a youth-adult evaluation team formed by Youth Force. References Alicia, G. C. and C. DeSena. 1999. The Air Down Here: True Tales from a South Bronx Boyhood. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Checkoway, B. 1998. Involving young people in neighborhood development. Children and Youth Services Review, 20: 765–795.

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Barry Checkoway, Lisa Figueroa, and Katie Richards-Schuster —— and K. Richards-Schuster. 2001. Lifting new voices for socially just communities. Community Youth Development, 2: 32–37. ——, ——, S. Abdullah, M. Aragon, E. Facio, L. Figueroa, E. Reddy, M. Welsh, and A. White. 2003. Young people as competent citizens. Community Development Journal, 38: 298–309. Figueroa, L., P. Infante, and P. Serna. 2000. In Between the Lines: How The New York Times Frames Youth. New York: New York City Youth Media Watch. Finn, J. L. 2001. Text and turbulence: Representing adolescence as pathology in the human services. Childhood, 8: 167–192. —— and B. Checkoway. 1998. Young people as competent community builders: A challenge to social work. Social Work, 43: 335–345. Freudenberg, N., L. Richards, L. Richie, R. T. B. E. Taylor, K. MacGillicuddy, and M. B. Greene. 1999. Coming up in the boogie down: The role of violence in the lives of adolescents in the South Bronx. Health Education & Behavior, 26: 788–805. Hall, T. 1999. A South Bronx very different from the cliché. The New York Times, Feb. 14, pp. 1, 6. James, R. 1999. Community Vision, 6: 1–2, 5. Jonnes, J. 1986. We’re Still Here: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of the South Bronx. Boston: Atlantic Monthly. Kozol, J. 1996. Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. New York: HarperCollins. ——. 2000. Ordinary Insurrections: Children in the Years of Hope. New York: Crown. McGillicuddy, K. 1997. Funding Youth Organizers: Strategies for Building Power and Youth Leadership. New York: Funders Collaborative. ——. 1999. Lifting New Voices Proposal. New York: Youth Force. New York City Department of City Planning. 1998. 1997 Annual Report on Social Indicators. New York: Author. Putnam, R. D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rooney, J. 1995. Organizing the South Bronx. Albany: State University of New York. Scott, N. et al. 1996. Jail Logic. New York: Youth Force. Simmon, L. 1997. Twenty-five years of community building in the South Bronx. In W. Van Vliet, ed., Affordable Housing and Urban Redevelopment in the United States, 73–94. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Youth Force. 1999. This Is the Deal on Youth Court. New York: Author. ——. 2000. Boot Camp 2000. New York: Author. ——. 2001. Power Politics. New York: Author. ——. 2002. Youth Force Training 2002. New York: Author. ——. n.d.-a. Close Spofford: No New Beds. New York: Author. —— n.d.-b. No More Jail Beds! New York: Author. ——. n.d.-c. Teens-n-Tenants Youth Housing Campaign. New York: Author.

Leonisa Ardizzone

16. Motivating and Supporting Activist Youth A View from Nonformal Settings

I am a peace educator. What does that mean? Quite simply, it means that I believe education should facilitate personal transformation so that people can work for peace and social justice. I design and teach courses that promote the core values (planetary stewardship, humane relationship, global citizenship; see Reardon 1986) of peace using peace pedagogy (e.g., dialogue, inquiry). Peace education supports critical thinking, connection making, and global-mindedness. One of the primary goals of peace education is to understand the root causes of violence in all its forms. Therefore, as a peace educator, I often begin my analyses of social problems with the assumption that we live in a society permeated by structural violence.¹ Structural violence is manifested in marginalization, exploitation, penetration, fragmentation, and segmentation (Galtung 1976).² This chapter addresses the idea of marginalization as it pertains to youth. I believe that youth are pushed to the margins of society—economically, socially, and politically—and thus are denied a voice and the opportunity to be part of social change. This issue is especially more important in the age of globalization, when decision making no longer affects only local populations. Marginalizing youth in our global community limits their say in their own future. Research often shows that in response to marginalization, youth and other oppressed groups use forms of direct violence³ as their outlet. However, additional research shows that this is not the only option. In actuality, if youth or other marginalized groups are given the opportunity to undergo a consciousness-raising process in which structural violence is recognized, then the potential exists for altering this system. In accordance with the ideologies of Dewey, Freire, and current peace educators, nonformal education can be the means for this consciousness-raising process. The educational philosophy my research supports is that education (formal or nonformal) is a socializing agent and can serve as a means for social change. By providing learners with opportunities to raise their own consciousness and then apply this awareness by taking action for change, education becomes a transformative experience for individuals and for society.

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Although education can be the major impetus for this transformation, the connection between the internal and external must be understood, for ultimately it is where these two contexts intersect that motivation lies. The external is the previously discussed structure of society and its inherent violence and education as either a supporter or subverter of this system. The internal processes to be understood relate to the agents themselves, in this case, adolescents. Therefore, I consider the context of adolescence— general development, relationship to and position in society, situations of distress, and factors that determine resilience—as a means of balancing the inner, micro, and local with the outer, macro, global context. To understand prosocial behavior among marginalized youth, namely what motivates them to take action, the inner and outer contexts must be incorporated because motivation is not only dictated by the inner workings of the youth, but also controlled by the outer context of their realities. I had the opportunity to speak with twenty-five New York City youth between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two who are involved with prosocial peace-building organizations (which are considered nonformal education mainly because they take place outside school hours). All participants attended public high school, 64 percent were female, and they came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.⁴ They were involved with one of six groups that I identified for their peace work. I matched their mission statements with the three core values of peace education: planetary stewardship, humane relationship, and global citizenship. The groups were Global Kids (GK), Youth Force, Global Action Project (GAP), Roots, New Youth Conservationists (NYC), and the Rheedlen University for Community Education (TRUCE).⁵ The work of these particular groups personified what peace education could look like in an urban setting. They addressed both local and global issues and both direct and structural violence, and, most importantly, their objectives and actions were dictated by the youth themselves. I interviewed participants about their motivations to action, the impact the work has on them, and their feelings about their education. We spoke about their experiences with structural violence, and they shared stories and feelings about being young in the world. Their experiences can not only support the creation of additional similar nonformal peace-building programs but also provide ideas to formal education systems, other youth workers, and the global youth movement.

Structural Violence and the Oppression of Youth Teens are portrayed in the media today as, we’re young and we don’t know better. We are screw-ups, and I wanted to let them see that there are other teens who are doing good in society, and we are trying to accomplish things. We go to school every day, and we get good grades. We are good kids, and we’re thinking and we’re discussing issues that are important to us. (Keisha, sixteen)

In In Defense of Youth (1962), Kelley points to the relationship between society and its young people. He breaks down the myth that “youth has gone to the dogs” (p. 3) by calling for an examination of how our society as a whole responds to youth, proclaiming, “We don’t like our youth very well” (p. 13). He believes that we don’t provide for

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them, as evidenced by the subpar education and limited choices offered to many of them. He introduces the idea that society scapegoats youth, stating that when something goes wrong in the world, we don’t look at the Pentagon or Congress; instead, we blame it on the “lazy, indolent, fun-loving youth” (p. 11). Other researchers (Clark 1975; Males 1996) expand on the theme of how young people are viewed and treated by society. In The Scapegoat Generation (1996) Michael Males contends that the media and politicians often claim that youth are the cause of society’s problems. The rhetoric of politics and institutional reports perpetuates the myths of youth. For example, dangerous youth behavior is written off as “high-risk”⁶ adolescent behavior grounded in “teenage immaturity, instability, rebelliousness, self-destructiveness and impulsiveness” (p. 219). However, there is no social science evidence that any “deviant” behavior is innate. Those who make these assertions confuse identity exploration with innate characteristics of insensitivity, carelessness, and destruction. When “high-risk” youth behavior is discussed in political (or media) circles, the conversation often excludes the responsibility or behavior of adults. Although there is overwhelming evidence to support the relationship between abusive or neglectful parents and youth violence, this relationship is rarely discussed. Once again, by avoiding a deeper look at the cause of the so-called youth crisis, people can place the blame more easily on youth rather than on adults or social structures. Violence in a broader sense is to blame for the marginalization of youth. Two definitions of violence inform my research, and their relationship can be discussed to elucidate the concerns of youth today. The first, direct violence, is physical violence demonstrated through abuse, physical harm, and war. The second, structural violence, also known as indirect violence, is the violence that is embedded in the social, political, and economic structures that make up society. Because indirect violence is embedded in such pervasive societal forces, its effects are as diverse as racism, sexism, poverty, hunger, violation of human rights, and militarism. Structural violence is perhaps the more pernicious because, of the two forms of violence, it is often camouflaged and accepted as the norm. The relationship between these two forms of violence is important for youth workers to understand. Researchers and educators (Canada 1995; Fine 1991, 1999; Freire 1970; Galtung 1976, 1978, 1988, 1996; Garbarino et al. 1991, 1992; Kozol 1991; Ogbu 1974) have determined that, at the very least, structural violence creates limited opportunity for social growth. Although there is debate, many of these same researchers (Canada 1995; Fine 1999; Freire 1970; Garbarino et al. 1991, 1992) believe there is a causal relationship between structural violence and direct violence. In my opinion, the work of Paulo Freire (1970) best clarifies the relationship between structural and direct violence. By analyzing the nature of oppression and the effects of oppression on both the oppressed and the oppressor, Freire offers the idea of dehumanization—that oppression keeps the oppressed from being fully human and therefore is inherently violent. I am drawn to this idea of oppression as dehumanization, especially as it pertains to the treatment of youth—namely the denial of their own inherent being, of their value, of their dignity. Oppression in this sense implies an active marginalization of youth on the part of society in that it limits their voice, further perpetuating an us–them dichotomy, which asserts that youth are not central, are not empowered. These denials not only oppress youth but also limit societal growth.

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Perhaps if more attention were paid to the phenomenon of dehumanization, other problems (e.g., direct violence) would become less prevalent. Freire acknowledges this by addressing the fact that the imposition of structural violence in the form of oppression often leads to direct violence acted out laterally. This is seen in the striking out against one another among the oppressed and in the self-deprecation of the oppressed. Freire states that “once a situation of violence and oppression has been established, it engenders an entire way of life and behavior” (1970:44). In inner cities, for example, the structural violence of poverty and injustice breeds despair and hopelessness among youth, resulting in neighbors killing neighbors. Geoffrey Canada describes this kind of laterally acted-out violence in his compelling personal history of violence, Fist Stick Knife Gun (1995), in which he links structural inequalities to violent crime in New York City’s poor minority neighborhoods. Canada points out that many youth are driven into a violent life as a means of survival. He states, “The explosion of killing we see today is based on decades of [either] ignoring the issue of violence in our inner cities” (1995:36) or responding to violence by enacting control through more police (who are not trusted by most inner-city dwellers) and more prisons. Subsequently, communities plagued with manifestations of structural violence become breeding grounds for direct violence where very little is done to provide young people with a way to feel safe and express their feelings and fears. It follows that a constant exposure to structural violence leads to distrust of government and authority, causing feelings of alienation, rage, and cynicism that often result in direct violence (Fine 1999). Although structural violence often is connected to direct violence, it can also serve as a powerful motivating force for change. A number of youth I spoke with were able to articulate feelings of dehumanization. In our discussions, they painted pictures of being treated differently (i.e., harshly) because of their age (e.g., being followed in stores or followed by police in the streets). For many of them, their race and ethnicity added to this burden, and they found that the dehumanizing treatment they received was a motivating factor for them to work for social change. For example, Scott, fifteen, whose organization works to teach young people their rights when they are being harassed by police, cites examples of police harassment in his neighborhood, stating, “When a cop walks by, kids automatically put their hands on the wall. . . . Cops should feel ashamed.” When Scott and his other Latino friends were walking in the South Bronx on Halloween, two police officers stopped them. All the boys but one were thrown onto the car and searched: “My friend’s brother, who looks white, was told by police to stand aside and wait.” While telling this anecdote, Scott made it quite clear that he knew that skin color affects his and his friends’ futures, and this brought him to Youth Force. Kenyetta describes how, in her boyfriend’s neighborhood, cops do sweeps after 9:30 p.m. She sees this as “weird because that is his neighborhood, and he should be outside.” She recalls an incident when she was out late (2 a.m.) with her two cousins. Realizing the hour, they looked at each other and said, “It’s 2 a.m., we’re really not supposed to be out here. . . . How can the government control our lives so much because we’re African American people? Oh, we’re not supposed to be out here at this time because we’re scared of getting arrested for being out late. . . . It’s not supposed to be like that. It’s our

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place as much as anyone else’s. So I guess that really affected me, it motivated me to make a change. I don’t know how I’m gonna do it, but that’s not right.” Certainly, in the past, disillusionment with authority sparked student involvement (e.g., Vietnam War protests, the Civil Rights Movement). However, more often than not it leads to depression and apathy, coupled with an eroding ethic of social responsibility and reciprocity (Garbarino et al. 1991, 1992). Garbarino explains that children experiencing traumatic events lose interest in the world and often alter their behavior to hide fear. The situation of inner-city youth, such as that of the participants in my study, is a complex one that cannot be dismissed as simple street or school violence. As Garbarino et al. argue, “The central issue [is] the deprivation and dysfunction of poor families mired in deteriorated inner-city environments and lodged in a legacy of racism” (1992:115). Nevertheless, many of the youth I spoke with demonstrated not only an understanding of structural violence but also an interest in working to change oppressive structures. As inner-city youth, the participants I spoke with witness and experience structural violence on a regular basis. The most common response observed (by researchers and popular media) is that of direct violence, but the youth in my study represent an alternative view: the choice to become a peace builder and an agent for social change. I chose to use the title peace builder because these youth challenge others to reduce violence and also to build positive peace.⁷ The phrase peace builder more aptly describes the nature of their objectives than activist does and is particularly well suited to these youth. They are not simply focusing on peacekeeping (cutting down on direct violence) or peace making (focusing on skills to manage conflict and direct violence) but rather are working to build peace within themselves, in their communities, and in larger society. Through the nonformal education settings of their respective youth organizations, these youth not only become aware of the structural and direct violence that surrounds them but also are given the opportunity to take action. Thus the path of structural violence leading to direct violence is altered, and the route from structural violence to social action is established.

Resilience and Youth The violence in my community has motivated me to do the opposite—to try to end this. (Jaubel) I lived through that and I went beyond that. I got more of a look at the world, and I just know there’s more out there than what they’re [guys on the street] talking about. A lot of kids in my neighborhood don’t have that. People don’t really move. (Akim)

Who are these youth I am speaking about? What makes them different? What forces are acting on them? The answers are simple and at the same time complex. They are kids like any other, yet many have more cards stacked against them. They are the kids you see on the subway being loud and unruly and the kids you see at a peace march in Central Park. They are kids who listen to their peers but don’t allow peer pressure to

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compromise their view of the world. In many ways they are “typical teenagers,” if such a category exists. One thing they all are is resilient. Defined as “successful adaptation despite risk and adversity” (Masten 1994:3), resilience can be the key to survival for many inner-city youth. Although these youth live in a danger zone, they take an active role for social change. Their situation therefore is quite complex. In actuality, they are not simply resilient; they are resistant. My research showed me that in order to understand the situation of youth in urban centers, one must not only examine the inward (personal and psychological) and outward (environmental and societal) factors but also consider the connections between the two to discover how social and environmental characteristics of child’s environment affect development. For example, for inner-city youth, living in poverty brings additional risks that compound the risks of living in violent neighborhoods, such as inadequate schools and family disruption. For many poor youth, their experiences of violence are multifaceted in the home and community. However, not all children sustain damage from violence. Some are highly resilient, a factor that is determined by a number of physical and social environment factors and individual characteristics. One important characteristic of resilience is the role of community, specifically how community support affects whether parents are active in their child’s development. Community support also affects school environment, which can either support active processing between schools, parents, and children or compound negative relationships by being rigid and authoritarian. Reflexively, if schools are more democratic and issue focused, they can foster both community and moral development. In this sense schools not only foster resilience but also aid in the development of resistance. Most researchers agree that the ingredients necessary for resilience are the presence of significant others, role models, and a sense of community (Garbarino et al. 1992; Gordon and Song 1994; Masten 1994; Wang and Gordon 1994). Gordon and Song add that support for development and learning, opportunity, challenge, networking, personality, and specific environmental influences also contribute to resilience. However, none of these characteristics can be viewed separately but rather must be seen collectively as a combination of personal characteristics, environmental characteristics, and situational constraints. The fact that inner-city youth peace builders respond to oppression in positive ways is linked to resilience theory, specifically to the notions of hospitable spaces and significant others. Each of the youth organizations in this study provides a safe community space for its members. Although the desire for a safe community space is not expressed as a primary reason for joining the organizations, it may be a subconscious motivation. Regardless of initial motivation, the positive response to structural violence of the members of the organizations in this study provides additional evidence of the need for hospitable spaces. More importantly, however, it shows resistance: resistance to becoming a statistic, resistance to unjust structures, resisting societal images of troubled youth, and resisting the silence imposed on them by society. Finding others who think the way they do in a supportive environment where they can see positive outcomes breeds hope. And as Masten states, “Rekindling hope may be an important spark for resilience processes to begin their restorative work” (1994:21).

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A Sense of Place: Nonformal Education Global Kids is my home away from home. (Flora)

As participants shared some of their experiences in formal education, a picture emerged of an education that was often inequitable and irrelevant. The youth considered themselves underrepresented in the curriculum, unengaged by the pedagogy, and disregarded by teachers. For example, Latisha and Judith (both from the Bronx) told a story about their high school history class. While learning about the Holocaust in history class, they inquired about parallel incidents that related to their culture, namely what they called “the black holocaust.” They tried and failed to get this point across to the teacher and subsequently got angry. They told me that this incident drew them to the conclusion that school is not oriented toward their history, and their teachers are not interested in listening to them. A particularly disturbing example comes from Janine (from Harlem), who told me that in a five-month period she had seven different earth science teachers and from this asked me, “Do you think they really want us to pass the Regents exam?” Their nonformal education experiences are quite different, however. Most participants see their involvement as a way to learn more, and many agree that their organization teaches them a lot, more so than formal school. Richard states, “Yeah, some aspects, finding who I am, learning about society and how to deal with situations. It’s like Global Kids complements—they provide what we don’t get in school.” Another GK member, Sarah, stated, “[Unlike in school] I learned a lot more about different countries and organizations, and I know more of what’s going on in these countries than I did last year.” In relation to their organizations, the participants expressed feelings of empowerment. They liked having a choice of what they could learn about and pursue, having the opportunity to share their opinions with others, designing learning experiences (workshops or outreach education), being agents of change, and changing people’s perceptions of youth. These are examples of how these nonformal organizations provide youth with learning opportunities they do not feel they receive in school. The nature of these organizations is the key to their success in providing youth with feelings of empowerment. These organizations seek to empower youth, to help them become citizens, and provide them with an outlet to confront structural and direct violence. Because they are not bound by the structures of formal education, they can offer learners more flexibility and freedom to question, find answers, and act. These characteristics make these youth organizations different from others—such as athletic, religio-cultural, or vocational—in that they don’t just help youth stay out of trouble but offer youth a chance to be part of the solution. Nonformal education is difficult to define because it has many contexts with no single institutional base on which to construct a definition. Kleis et al. define nonformal education as Any intentional and systemic educational enterprise (usually outside of traditional schooling) in which content, media, time units, admission criteria, staff, facilities and other system components are selected and / or adapted for particular students,

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populations or situations in order to maximize attainment of the learning mission and minimize maintenance constraints of the system. (1974:4)

In many settings, nonformal education focuses on improvement of social and personal situations. It focuses on means, or what education can do to make changes in self and environment. Nonformal education usually is practical, functional, and, most importantly, person centered and need centered, with the content being determined by the learners’ needs. “Non-formal education is responsive to the cry of the masses for relevant education” (Ward and Dettoni 1974:20). Unfortunately, nonformal education often is regarded as antiestablishment education because it makes it possible for certain things to be studied that formal education does not cover. Therefore, caution surrounds it. Grandstaff contends that “the turn to non-formal modes of education is a search for ways to do things that the formal schools have demonstrated their incapability of doing or that can be done more effectively in some arena other than the formal school” (1974:11). If the assumption about education is that it is supposed to relate to or serve societal welfare, then nonformal education is one arena where this effort can be focused. Nonformal education forces us to rethink the function of education in society, to see alternative models to traditional schooling. “Non-formal education promises to be a more effective approach to solving certain problems of education for national development and individual growth” (Ward and Dettoni 1974:18). Nonformal education often occurs where there are limited resources, participants usually are underrepresented or marginalized in society, development efforts (in developing and developed nations) are needed, and cooperation with formal education can exist, creating links between schools and communities.

Motivational Characteristics of Youth Peace Builders It’s up to me, I’m gettin’ my word out. (Franco)

According to Freire, any liberatory movement must come from within the oppressed population. They cannot be shown models provided by the oppressor. The oppressed must begin to take part in the struggle, to believe in themselves and always be engaged in the process. In other words, the need exists for the oppressed to develop their own pedagogy of liberation. To begin this experience, this movement, consciousness raising must occur. It calls for a critical questioning of their reality. From a Freirean perspective—which I agree with—consciousness raising is about seeing things differently for the first time, it’s having an epiphany that allows us to see the world or our place in the world from another perspective. It is the moment or moments when we see hypocrisy, double standards, bias, and propaganda and realize our place in those contradictions. It is a personal “a-ha” when all the things we took for granted or never even knew existed come clearly into view. When this transformation occurs, we feel compelled to do something; we become politicized and feel ready to take action for social change. For inner-city youth who live in poverty and feel marginalized or dehumanized, youth organizations are a means to witness, give voice to, and question the structural violence inherent in their situation. Their organizations give them the opportunity to see what

Motivating and Supporting Activist Youth

others may see, find people who have similar points of view, and validate their beliefs. This questioning and affirmation process begins their transformation, moving them from despair and fatalism to awakeness and action. Their critical consciousness is raised and, along with it, potentially those of their friends, family, and community members. Through this transformation, they no longer accept the status quo, and they begin to work for social change. Perhaps the most important evidence for this is that they are active in the development of these youth organizations. Most of the youth organizations I worked with were founded by youth and organized, administrated, and facilitated by youth. They are in charge of their own social movements. The programs described in my research, GK, Youth Force, Roots, NYC, GAP, and TRUCE, all operate outside the formal education system. Although formal education and educators can also play a crucial role in the process of conscientizacão as facilitators of questioning and transformation, this process cannot occur through traditional “banking” methods. Freire’s conception of banking, in which information is deposited in students’ heads to be regurgitated at a later date, is alive and well in many schools today. This teaching technique not only denies any development of critical thought but also leaves youth voices out of the discussion. However, for change to occur, the education process must be dialogical, incorporating themes generated by the learners and critical problem posing and solving methods. Quite simply, real discussion about relevant issues must occur not only between students but also between teachers and students. There must be a shared learning experience that both student and teacher can benefit from. In other words, learning must be a democratic process. Learning that is critical, creative, and student subjective allows the development of democracy and open communication. It follows that an education, whether formal or nonformal, that fosters critical consciousness allows young people to subvert the structural violence– direct violence relationship and support efforts for justice, peace, and social change. In my conversations with youth, they described a variety of reasons for becoming involved with peace-building organizations. For many, more than one reason explains their motivation. Naturally, some reasons fell into the mundane category: “It will look good on my transcript” or “I wanted to meet girls.” Others were interested in learning for its own sake: I want to know about foreign policy, things going on in the world. Learning [is my motivation] because [at GK] I can learn about stuff that I won’t be able to learn in school. To know more and to see what, as a leader, they bring to the school and what they provide for the community. Knowledge! They help me see what the pictures are made of.

Still others were motivated by a sense of social responsibility: I can help people . . . help other people get the information. I can make a difference . . . hoping that what I say teaches another person. I do it because I know it’s the right thing to do.

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Many youth are motivated to join these particular youth organizations because of their interest in finding and using their voice. Quite a few participants feel very strongly about changing the public’s perception of teenagers. This category was called “getting my word out” by one of the participants: There are a lot of us [teens] trying to do something really good, and people don’t know about that, but now maybe [they’re] getting the point. To take away the stereotypes of teens.

Finally, all participants described some sort of personal experience that brought them to peace building. These descriptions were very rich and ranged from having a friend or role model who sparked their interest in prosocial activity to witnessing injustice and personally feeling oppressed and wanting to change the societal situation that caused it. Karen cites two experiences. The first occurred when she and her friends went to clubs in the city: “My friends would get arrested for these quality of life crimes; I thought it was a travesty because these were people you’d bring home to your mother.” The second experience occurred while she was working against the death penalty. She spent time with death row inmates, and “it was an awakening.” “To see what people go through . . . the torture . . . if people saw that it would be different. People don’t see death row inmates as human—but as soon as you put a face and a voice with it, everything changes.” For some, their personal experience became the content that informed their work with an organization. Through GAP, Milani created a video about her significant experience. In creating the video, Milani was able to examine an incident that occurred between her boyfriend (a self-described “Goth”) and a homeless man from all perspectives. From this deconstruction, she was able to conclude that conflict that occurs because of appearance is common. She says that the Catholic school girls in her neighborhood always call her “weird.” The incident with the homeless man is part of a video looking at issues of disrespect. Another segment, written by Keisha, portrays her experience being grabbed by a boy in her neighborhood. About the incident and the subsequent video she says, I wrote that scene. I had it happen to me numerous times, so I said, “I’m gonna make a difference about this.” A guy shouldn’t grab you, and if you want to turn a guy down they shouldn’t be disrespectful. I wanted to teach fellas that you don’t have to approach a girl like that, she’s not an object, so don’t grab on her. And teach girls that you are better than that; don’t talk to a guy for grabbing you.

When I began this study, I believed that youth are motivated to action because of an epiphany, an experience that raises one’s consciousness, compelling one to take action for the greater good (something clicks, and one sees the world differently). After completing the research, I discovered that the critical or thought-provoking experiences the youth spoke of were part of a series of events or understandings and therefore not

Motivating and Supporting Activist Youth

epiphanic. For many, their first critical experience was witnessing a program or activity that the organization conducts. For example, many youth were inspired to join GK after hearing a guest speaker from GK at their school. Others were motivated to become more committed members of the organization after attending the annual GK conference, a highly energetic, hands-on event. Youth members of other organizations also mention similar experiences involving their organization. Two youth from Youth Force and TRUCE were exposed to their respective organizations through the Summer Youth Employment Program of New York City. For others, an experience with a different organization initiated involvement, eventually motivating them to become involved, eventually leading them to join their current organization. Some members of the NYC fall into this category. For example, one member of NYC tells of his experiences with Progresso Latino (an organization his sister is involved with in Rhode Island) that ultimately led him to NYC. Another participant mentions that it was through her attendance at an ecology program at the American Museum of Natural History that she met the director of the NYC. After making this connection, she joined NYC. Akim, a participant from GAP, recounts a similar experience. He was attending General Educational Development classes at the Door (a Manhattan-based community center) when he learned about GAP. Richard, a participant from GK, sums up the snowball effect of involvement with these types of organizations: “Basically, I’ve done other programs, and it made me want more.” In short, initial involvement is key. Once youth become involved in programs, they become committed to these nonformal outlets.

Applications and Conclusion The findings from my research indicate that if we are interested in motivating youth to become peace builders, we should create opportunities that address these areas of motivation. Both the social nature and the positive reputations of the youth organizations satisfy the mundane and pragmatic reasons for youth motivation. The pedagogical aspects of the organizations attract youth motivated by a desire to learn. The outreach component of the youth organizations appeals to those motivated by finding voice and practicing social responsibility. The curricular relevance, determined in part by its self-generation, provides a strong pull on those motivated by personal experience. My discussions with involved youth support the notion of an epiphanic process or series of critical experiences that leads to and sustains involvement. This epiphanic process can be enhanced or even facilitated by an education that is relevant and meaningful and exposes youth to people, places, and information they have not explored before. Just as the organizations in my research served as epiphanic moments for many youth, other nonformal or formal education programs could function in this manner. In actuality, the results of my study show that involvement in youth organizations is the epiphanic experience for many, fostering social responsibility and a commitment to justice and social change.

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Notes 1. Structural violence (also known as indirect violence) is the violence embedded in social structures such as oppression, marginalization, alienation, and fragmentation, as defined by Galtung (1976, 1978) and discussed later in the chapter. 2. For an in-depth discussion of different types of violence and their relationships to one another see the work of peace researcher Johann Galtung (1976, 1978). Also see the work of Jamil Salmi (2000), who has created more readable interpretations of Galtung’s work. 3. Direct violence is the more readily understood definition of violence (e.g., fighting, war, torture, gun violence, abuse). 4. Participants were asked to identify themselves according to standard demographic categories; however, because I did not want to confine them, this portion of the questionnaire was optional. One participant simply wrote “Aquarius.” 5. GK is a not-for-profit organization that describes itself as “dedicated to preparing urban youth to become global citizens and community leaders.” The youth involved in GK come from all over New York City, many of whom are considered at risk for academic failure. GK provides all young people with the opportunity to share their talent, energy, and creativity to address complex domestic and international issues. Youth involved in GK become educators themselves and work to take action in their community. Every year, GK holds a conference organized by youth, offering other inner-city teens an opportunity to learn through workshops designed and led by GK youth. Themes of human rights, civic participation, violence prevention, and health are explored. The purpose of GAP, a nonprofit organization, is to educate young people to become agents of change in their communities using the media, leadership development, and peer education as tools of empowerment. Through the use of video technology, youth create short films that address issues of concern to them. GAP philosophy is “guided by the belief that young people are positive forces in their communities when they have the opportunity to engage in meaningful activities. Video is a powerful and accessible medium through which this can take place.” GAP responds to the need for positive images of youth in media and educational programs about social issues that have a local and global perspective. NYC is a project operated by the Urban Forest & Education Program of City Parks Foundation in collaboration with Christadora, Inc., that provides inner-city youth (New York City metropolitan area) in grades 9–12 with the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with the environment and conservation efforts. Youth participate in activities ranging from hikes to restoration projects to educational outreach. The group meets weekly at the Urban Forest Ecology Center in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Each year, students are presented with a specific project that involves finding a solution to an environmental problem in the park. Roots is a project of the War Resisters League (WRL), an organization founded in 1923 to eliminate war and the root causes of war through nonviolent means and education. Roots is one of the primary focal areas of WRL, “a campaign promoting nonviolence, justice and an end to the militarization of youth” (www.warresisters.org). A central mission of Roots is to keep the military from luring in young people and to educate their peers about militarism, police brutality, and the valuing of profits over people. Based in the WRL office in New York City, with chapters organized by young people all over the world, Roots consists of young people who hope to make a change through radical nonviolent activism. They are currently producing a hip-hop magazine and a CD called AWOL. This project brings together prominent artists and young people to offer articles, poems, and music that address issues of militarism. A Bronx-based, youth-run organization, Youth Force was created to “school young people to the fact that we are not powerless, we should be seen and heard, and we have the ability and the right to act for change.” Through education and

Motivating and Supporting Activist Youth outreach, Youth Force staff and members, 95 percent of whom are between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three, provide themselves and other inner-city youth with skills and opportunities needed to participate in their community. Youth Force has three main components: Youth Court, Street Outreach, and Teens ’n’ Tenants (TNT). Youth court is an alternative to family court where youth are judged by a jury of their youth peers as responsible or not responsible for offenses. Sentencing, usually a volunteer community service assignment, is designed to turn their negative action into a positive experience. Street Outreach provides information to young people in the South Bronx to politicize them. TNT is a program in which youth partner with South Bronx tenants to aid in the formation of tenants’ associations. Youth Force has encountered serious funding problems lately, and their continuation is in jeopardy. TRUCE is a project of the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, founded by Geoffrey Canada. TRUCE is open to children who live in the Harlem Children’s Zone and offers a variety of programs after school and on weekends. TRUCE offers a “holistic approach to support the artistic, intellectual, technological, emotional, spiritual and healthy growth of every teenager who walks through the door.” TRUCE uses media literacy as a means for youth to challenge the media, develop critical thinking skills, and become activists in their community. Programs young people can take part in are the Real Deal, Harlem Overheard, H.O.T. Works, the Fitness and Nutrition Center, and the Insight Center. The Real Deal is a “media arts program where youth producers create their award-winning cable television program that appears on Manhattan Neighborhood Network.” Harlem Overheard allows youth to develop their research, writing, and leadership skills by publishing a newspaper distributed to New York City’s high schools, libraries, and youth programs. Students write articles focusing on issues of concern to them and the Harlem community. 6. High-risk behaviors for adolescents often include sex and drug and cigarette use. 7. Peace researchers distinguish between negative peace and positive peace. Negative peace is the absence of direct violence (e.g., war, assault, torture, abuse). Positive peace—the ultimate goal—goes a step further and is the absence of structural violence or the presence of justice (e.g., equity, social responsibility).

References Ardizzone, L. 2007. Gettin’ My Word Out: Voices of Urban Youth Activists. Albany: State University of New York Press. Canada, G. 1995. Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America. Boston: Beacon. Clark, T. 1975. The Oppression of Youth. New York: Harper Colophon. Fine, M. 1991. Framing Dropouts: Notes on the Politics of an Urban Public High School. Albany: State University of New York Press. ——. 1999, Oct. Lecture delivered at Children and Violence Conference, Teachers College and Adelphi University. Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury. Galtung, J. 1976. Peace and Social Structure: Essays in Peace Research, Vol. 2. Copenhagen: Christian Eljers. ——. 1978. Peace and Social Structure: Essays in Peace Research, Vol. 3. Copenhagen: Christian Eljers. ——. 1988. Peace and Social Structure: Essays in Peace Research, Vol. 6. Copenhagen: Christian Eljers. ——. 1996. Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization. London: Sage.

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Leonisa Ardizzone Garbarino, J., N. Dubrow, K. Kostelny, and C. Pardo. 1992. Children in Danger: Coping with the Consequences of Community Violence. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. ——, K. Kostelny, and N. Dubrow. 1991. No Place to Be a Child: Growing Up in a War Zone. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Gordon, E. W. and L. D. Song. 1994. Variations in the experience of resilience. In M. C. Wang and E. W. Gordon, eds., Educational Resilience in Inner-City America: Challenges and Prospects. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Grandstaff, M. 1974. Non-Formal Education and an Expanded Conception of Development. East Lansing: Michigan State University. Kelley, E. C. 1962. In Defense of Youth. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Kleis, R. J., D. L. Lang, J. R. Mietus, and F. T. S. Tiapula. 1974. Toward a contextual definition of non-formal education. In R. J. Kleis et al., eds., Non-Formal Education: The Definitional Problem. East Lansing: Michigan State University. Kozol, J. 1991. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. New York: Harper Perennial. Males, M. A. 1996. The Scapegoat Generation: America’s War on Adolescents. Monroe, ME: Common Courage. Masten, A. S. 1994. Resilience in individual development: Successful adaptation despite risk and adversity. In M. C. Wang and E. W. Gordon, eds., Educational Resilience in Inner-City America: Challenges and Prospects. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Ogbu, J. 1974. The Next Generation: An Ethnography of Education in an Urban Neighborhood. New York: Academic Press. Reardon, B. A. 1986. Comprehensive Peace Education: Educating for Global Responsibility. New York: Teachers College Press. Salmi, J. 2000, Feb. Violence, Democracy and Education: An Analytical Framework. The World Bank, Human Development Department, LCSHD Paper Series No. 56. Wang, M. C. and E. W. Gordon, eds. 1994. Educational Resilience in Inner-City America: Challenges and Prospects. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Ward, T. and J. Dettoni. 1974. Non-formal education: Problems and promises. In T. Ward and J. Dettoni, eds., Non-Formal Education: The Definitional Problem. East Lansing: Michigan State University.

Donna DeCesare

Appendix Agents of Change Responding to Violence and Exclusion

Media use of decontextualized or dehumanized images, which focus exclusively on the shock of violence, are one way that youth are denied a voice. Another is in the lack of serious attention paid to young people engaged in social change. In general, crime and violence reporting falls short on information beyond graphic headlines and images or preliminary police reports. There are a host of structural obstacles faced by reporters, which feed this tendency to rely on the police as the single authoritative source. But the resulting news items fail to inform the public with context or diverse viewpoints. Indeed, they seldom follow up on criminal investigations— especially when those involved are young and poor. These reporting weaknesses reinforce a vicious cycle of social inequality, according to Luiz Eduardo Soares, a leading social anthropologist known for his ethnographic work on youth, violence, and the police in Brazil. “Social inequality translates into unequal access to justice and, consequently, unequal treatment in the media,” Soares notes. Nongovernmental organizations with youth-oriented agendas use positive images of young people more often than the mainstream media. Yet in these representations there is sometimes a sanitizing effect that also decontextualizes young people from their own very specific social arena. If youth become part of a branded sales pitch with generic positive appeal similar to advertising imagery, they are also denied their own agency and authentic context. In my own approach to representing young people, I try to follow the documentary tradition of portraiture and intuitive response that is based upon a clear collaboration with the subject. Sometimes the young people I photograph decide where and how they want to pose for a portrait. I spend time observing and looking for elements that contextualize and reveal their individuality and spirit in literal and metaphorical ways. The images that follow are of young people taking risks to work with their peers in Guatemala and Colombia. Whether they are HIV activists, do street outreach for

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homeless children, or engage in peace work aimed at decreasing gang violence or the recruitment of youth by Colombia’s illegal armed groups, these young people are exceptionally courageous. They struggle against an extraordinarily capricious and rapacious climate of social exclusion. The specificity of their stories and their courage deserves our recognition, attention, and, most of all, our respect.

Maria Ixcoy, twenty-seven, discovered her purpose in life by learning the truth of her family’s past. Until she was sixteen she thought her father had died in a car accident. Her mother was afraid to tell Maria the truth—that her father was an activist in Quiche who was “disappeared” by the Guatemalan National Guard. Maria was able to get an education after working for years as a child servant. She now works as an activist educating street children and doing violence prevention outreach to youth involved in gangs. She also belongs to HIJOS, a group of children of disappeared parents who work to end impunity in Guatemala City.

GU AT EM ALA C IT Y, GU AT EM ALA (2005)

Street outreach workers from Nuestros Derechos / Our Rights, who themselves are former homeless youth, bring meals to feed children and young people living on Guatemala’s mean streets. They offer food and a bed in a shelter where the youth can receive help with drug addiction and HIV treatment.

G U ATEM ALA C I TY, G U ATEM ALA ( 2005)

Tono, a street outreach worker and former White Fence gang member, now does counseling for Grupo Ceiba—a violence prevention program that runs an alternative school and computer lab. Tono (right) is trying to convince Ronnie (left), a current White Fence leader, to join a peace process.

G U ATEM ALA C I TY, G U ATEM ALA ( 2005)

Sergio, a former Mara Salvatrucha gang member, recently left his gang with the help of APREDE (the Alliance for the Prevention of Crime). He has joined an evangelical church to help support his decision and, with APREDE’s help, began a training program to become an outreach worker for violence prevention and human rights offered by the Guatemalan Human Rights office.

G U ATEM ALA C I TY, G U ATEM ALA ( 2003)

The performers and jugglers from the performance art project Caja Ludica are current and former street children. The program focuses on teaching the young people skills and helps them earn a living performing in public festivals and at private party events. It has transformed the lives of many homeless children.

G U ATEM ALA C I TY, G U ATEM ALA ( 2003)

“Just don’t show my face,” a youth human rights workers says. Since taking control of the city six months ago, paramilitary death squads have targeted young people working with the Catholic Church and the Women’s Popular Movement.

( 2001)

B AR R AN C AB ER M EJA, C OLOM B I A

Youth from Eagles of the Dawn, a nongovernmental youth organization, clear land to start a farm that they hope will create jobs and grow into an agricultural college. They work hard to maintain independence from the illegal armed groups that threaten to infiltrate or control many local projects.

( 2001)

B AR AN AC AB ER M EJA, C OLOM B I A

A youth volunteer with a health outreach group prepares to talk about prevention of sexually transmitted diseases including HIV to her peers in the community of Cazuca. Those who have HIV are targets for social cleansing by the gangs, paramilitaries, and guerrillas who often control poor barrios here. Involvement in education about public health is one way young people are fighting back and helping empower civil society.

C OLOM B I A ( 2005)

SAN TO D OM I N G O ALTOS D E C AZU C A,

One of the ways young HIV educators take their message to the streets is with dance and acrobatic performances. They invite young people from the barrio to participate while the youth group raps about the dangers of HIV and methods of prevention.

C OLOM BIA (2005)

SAN T O DOM IN GO ALT OS DE C AZU C A,

Las Margaritas, one of the barrios on the outskirts of El Carmen, is home to displaced peasants who fled the massacres that took place in the late 1990s at El Salado and Chengue. The young people of a community radio collective founded by Soraya Bayuelo visit with children in Las Margaritas to film a human rights training session led by activist Julio Cesar García (left). Julio himself was displaced from the farm where he grew up by one of the illegal armed groups operating in the region.

( 2005)

EL C AR M EN D E B OLI VAR , C OLOM B I A

Eduardo runs a youth program and a school in one of Cali’s poorest neighborhoods. His group tries to prevent gang violence and recruitment by the armed guerrilla and paramilitary factions. Their slogan is Ante Todo la Vida, or Life First. Eduardo regularly visits families in the barrio to ask about problems they face.

SI LOÉ, C ALI , C OLOM B I A ( 2001)

“Rose Linda” (an alias; she did not want to give her real name) became a youth outreach worker after attending a UNICEF and public health ministry workshop on HIV for young people in the isolated Choco region. Choco, which borders on the Darien jungle of Panama, is Colombia’s poorest and most abandoned region. The majority of its people are Afro-Colombian or indigenous Embera. The zone currently has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in Colombia. Elders complain that prostitutes from Medellín, who have come with the incursion of paramilitaries into the zone, are undermining local traditions and endangering the health of local youth.

N AI PI PI C H OC O, C OLOM B I A ( 2005)

Contributors

Leonisa Ardizzone is executive director of the Salvadori Center in New York City and taught at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Education. She is a former high school teacher who is interested in peace education, youth culture, science, and spirituality and the author of Gettin’ My Word Out: Voices of Urban Youth Activists. Randy Blazak is an associate professor of sociology at Portland State University. He is the director of the Hate Crimes Research Network (www.hatecrime.net), which connects academic work on bias criminality. He is also the co-founder of Oregon Spotlight, which monitors hate groups in the state of Oregon, and chair of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crimes. He has published his research on youth and hate in journals, book chapters, and books, including his text with Wayne S. Wooden, Renegade Kids, Suburban Outlaws: From Youth Culture to Delinquency (2001), and an upcoming text for Wadsworth on juvenile delinquency. His most recent work appears in The Encyclopedia of Terrorism (2002) and Home-Grown Hate (2004). Blazak is currently researching racist Odinism among white supremacist inmates. Barbara Brents is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has published research on political conflict, social policy, social movements, sexuality, and the sex industry. She is currently co-authoring a book on the brothel industry in Nevada. David C. Brotherton is a professor and chair of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the City University of New York. In 1994, Dr. Brotherton came to John Jay College of Criminal Justice to continue his research on street subcultures, youth resistance, and marginalization, co-founding the Street Organization Project with Luis Barrios in 1997. He has received numerous research grants from private and public agencies and has published widely in journals, books, newspapers, and magazines. His research interests include the transnationalization of gangs and the intersection of social control

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and immigration, as seen in processes of deportation. His recent books include The Encyclopedia of Gangs (co-edited with Luis Kontos, 2007), The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Street Gang (with Luis Barrios, 2004) and Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspectives (co-edited with Louis Kontos and Luis Barrios, 2005). Upcoming publications include Keeping Out the Other: Immigration Control Today (co-edited with Phil Kretsedemas) and Back to the Homeland: Social Control and the Dominican Deportee (co-authored with Luis Barrios). Barry Checkoway is a professor of social work and urban planning at the University of Michigan. His research interests include increasing involvement of diverse groups in community organization, social planning, and neighborhood development. He is founding director of the Edward Ginsberg Center for Community Service and Learning and of the Michigan Neighborhood AmeriCorps Program, involving graduate students and community-based organizations in Detroit neighborhoods. He has been a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Richard Curtis is chair of the Anthropology Department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He has more than 25 years of experience conducting ethnographic research in New York City neighborhoods. At John Jay College, he was the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse–funded “Heroin in the 21st Century” project, a five-year ethnographic study of heroin users and distributors in New York City. He is currently working on three projects: a study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to examine drug injector behaviors in Long Island and New York City; a study of drug dealing and violence in Rochester, New York; and a study of teenage prostitutes in New York City. Dr. Curtis serves on the boards of directors of several local social service organizations, including the Family Services Network and the After Hours Project in Brooklyn and CitiWide Harm Reduction in the Bronx. Ana Daza is a senior research fellow with the Bogotá Crime and Violence Observatory. Over the last nine years she has developed conceptual models to approach problems such as conditions produced by the presence of illegal groups in urban neighborhoods, prevention of extortion and kidnapping, analytical approaches to crime prevention through baseline investigations, educational models and research tools for the prevention of antipersonnel mine accidents, victimization research, and local and community justice in relation to public action. Donna DeCesare, an award-winning photojournalist, is widely known for her groundbreaking coverage of the spread of Los Angeles gangs in Central America. She is currently on the faculty of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the Advisory Board of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. DeCesare’s photographs have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Life, Newsweek, the Atlantic, Aperture, DoubleTake, and Mother Jones, among other publications. DeCesare is the recipient of fellowships and grants that include the Dorothea Lange prize (1993), the New York State Foundation for the Arts Photography grant (1996), the

Contributors

Alicia Patterson fellowship (1997), the Mother Jones International Photo Fund grant (1999), the Soros Independent Project fellowship (2001). In 2005 she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to continue her documentation of children affected by armed conflict in Colombia. DeCesare’s photo reportage of U.S. and Latin American gang violence has won national and international awards. In 2002 she was awarded a top prize in the NPPA Best of Photojournalism contest for her photo essay on Colombia published by Crimes of War. Suzanne Discenza is an associate professor of healthcare management and the director of gerontology programs at the Metropolitan State College of Denver. She is also an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Her primary research interests have focused on the needs of homeless youth in Colorado and access to healthcare for disadvantaged populations. She serves on the board of directors of Urban Peak–Denver and the board of directors of the Colorado Culture Change Coalition, and she is immediate past president of the Colorado chapter of the American Society for Public Administration. Gipsy Escobar is a lecturer in sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a Ph.D. candidate in criminal justice at the City University of New York. She worked for three years for the National Council for Urban Security, an office within the Presidency of the Republic of Colombia, where she helped design and evaluate policies to prevent and fight urban crime in that country. Her research interests are related to the measurement of violent crime, collective violence, social capital, and social networks; the evaluation of public policies dealing with such issues; and the comparative analysis of criminal justice systems, particularly in the United States and Latin America. Lisa Figueroa is a community youth organizer at YouthForce, located in the Bronx, New York. Michelle Fine is a distinguished professor of psychology, women’s studies, and urban education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her recent books include Silenced Voices and Extraordinary Conversations (2003), Construction Sites: Excavating Race, Class and Gender with Urban Youth (with Lois Weis, 2001), Speedbumps: A Student Friendly Guide to Qualitative Research (2000), and Changing Minds: A Participatory Action Research Analysis of College in Prison. Marni Finkelstein is the author of With No Direction Home: Homeless Youth on the Road and in the Streets. She has taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and was a senior research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, both in New York City. Her work focuses primarily on urban populations at risk. In addition to her research with street kids, she has conducted ethnographic studies on substance abuse, adolescents in the New York City foster care system, and victims of sexual assault. Michael Flynn is an associate professor of psychology at York College / City University of New York and associate director of the Center on Terrorism at John Jay College of

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Criminal Justice / City University of New York. He is the co-editor (with Charles B. Strozier)of Genocide and Human Survival, Trauma and Self, and The Year 2000: Essays on the End. He is in the final stages of editing a book on the second nuclear age. Nick Freudenberg is a professor and director of the Program in Urban Public Health at Hunter College, City University of New York. He is founder of the Center on AIDS, Drugs and Community Health and served as its director from 1987 to 1999 and again in 2000 to 2001. For the last 25 years, he has worked with community organizations in New York City to develop and evaluate interventions to reduce HIV infection, substance abuse, environmental threats to health, childhood asthma, and other conditions. Since 1992 he has led the center’s Health Link project, a model program designed to reduce drug use, HIV risk, and rearrest among women and adolescents returning to New York City neighborhoods from the city jail. Simon Hallsworth is a principal lecturer in the Department of Applied Social Science and director of the Centre for Social Evaluation Research at London Metropolitan University. His current work with the center includes projects with the Metropolitan Police and the Youth Justice Board studying gang activity and gun-related crime from a European perspective. He is the author of Street Crime and editor of The New Punitiveness: Trends, Theories, and Perspectives. Anita Harris is a lecturer in sociology in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University. Her research interests include youth identities; citizenship, rights, and social change; feminist, political, and social theory; new social movements; and postmodern politics. Her current research explores the impact of globalization and deindustrialization on contemporary constructions of youth, especially girlhood, and young people and new forms of civic engagement. She is co-editor of the Journal of Intercultural Studies. Ralph W. Larkin is senior research fellow at John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Street Organization Project and president of Academic Research Consulting Service, which specializes in consultation the social sciences. He is the author of Suburban Youth and Cultural Crisis (1979), Beyond Revolution: A New Theory of Social Movements (with Daniel Foss, 1986), and articles on education, youth, sociology of religion, and social movements. His latest book is Comprehending Columbine (2006). Dana M. Nurge is an associate professor of criminal justice in the School of Public Administration and Urban Studies at San Diego State University. Before coming to San Diego, she taught at Northeastern University College of Criminal Justice in Boston, where she completed a four-year qualitative study of girls’ involvement in gangs and cliques. Her book on this subject, Nobody’s Punk: Respect, Survival and Sisterhood Among Gang / Clique Girls, is being published by the University Press of New England. She is currently involved in research on girls’ prostitution in three U.S. cities; this research examines the role that gangs and pimps play in prostituting girls and how the

Contributors

justice and youth service systems are addressing this problem. Her primary research interests relate to juvenile justice policy, youth violence and gangs, and girls’ prevention and intervention programming. Janet Ransom is senior lecturer, Department of Applied Social Science, London Metropolitan University. Katie Richards-Schuster is a research scientist in the School of Social work at the University of Michigan and, with Barry Checkoway, co-directs the Michigan Youth and Community Program. Benedito Rodrigues dos Santos is university professor of anthropology and coordinator for the Research Center on Childhood, Adolescence, and Family at the Catholic University of Goiás in Brazil. He is a consultant to UNICEF on child labor and street children in Brazil, an activist for children’s rights, and a co-founder and member of several Brazilian organizations, including the Brazilian National Movement of Street Boys and Girls and the Defense of Children’s Rights. Martin Ruck is an associate professor in the Ph.D. program in psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He was the recipient of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship in Developmental Psychology and was a senior researcher with the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System. Professor Ruck’s research examines the overall process of cognitive socialization—at the intersection of race, ethnicity, and class—in terms of children’s and adolescents’ thinking about human rights, educational opportunity, and social injustice. Jean Scandlyn is senior instructor of anthropology and health and behavioral science at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center and visiting faculty in anthropology at Colorado College. Her research interests include migration, medical anthropology, gender, and urban anthropology, with a focus on social justice. Since 2000 she has been working in collaboration with Urban Peak, the only state-licensed shelter for homeless and runaway young people in Colorado, and the Spot, a recreation-based program for urban young people. She also served as a curriculum consultant to Project Liftoff, a privately funded program for students at risk of dropping out of high school at Cherry Creek High School from 1996 to 2004. Michael Shively is a senior associate at Abt Associates Inc., serving for the past six years at the Center for Crime and Drug Control Policy. He previously served for three years as deputy director of research for the Massachusetts Department of Correction and for six years as an assistant professor in the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. He has conducted a wide range of studies in criminology and victimology and evaluations of criminal justice programs and policies.

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Pete Simi is an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas in 2003. His current research focuses on social movements, violence, and gangs. Barry Spunt is an associate professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He is also on the doctoral faculty in criminal justice at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He has been involved in drug research for 25 years, and his early work focused on methadone treatment, especially methadone diversion and crime among methadone patients. He has been awarded a number of major grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse focusing on the relationship between drugs and violence. He recently completed a five-year ethnographic study of the heroin scene in New York City. Svetlana Stephenson is a senior lecturer in comparative sociology at London Metropolitan University. Her areas of interest include homelessness, street children, street social organizations, and youth violence. She is the author of Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia (2006). She is working on a study of street gangs in Russia, funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. James van Leeuwen is project manager for Denver’s Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness. Before taking this position, he served in leadership roles for Urban Peak, the largest provider of services to homeless youth in metro Denver. He has published on substance dependence, affordable housing, and public health among homeless youth and on strategic outreach interventions to provide youth with testing services for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. James Diego Vigil is a professor of social ecology at the University of California at Irvine. An expert on street gangs and Mexican American culture, Professor Vigil has testified in numerous court trials and, when necessary, provided deposition and declaration testimony for attorneys. He has lectured on the subject throughout the United States and in Europe, Asian, and Latin America, and he is developing a transnational approach to the emergence of street gangs globally. As an urban anthropologist focusing on Mexican Americans, he has conducted research on ethnohistory, education, culture change and acculturation, and adolescent and youth issues, especially street gangs. This work has resulted in such publications as From Indians to Chicanos: The Dynamics of Mexican American Culture, 2nd edition (1998), Personas Mexicanas: Chicano Highschoolers in a Changing Los Angeles (1997), and Barrio Gangs (1988). He has two recent books, A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures in the Mega-City (2002), which takes a cross-cultural look at the street gangs of Los Angeles, and The Projects: Gang and Non-Gang Families in an East Los Angeles Housing Development (2007), a four-year community study that involves observations and interviews with adults and children.

Index

Abuse: child, 69; emotional, 49, 64; runaways and, 154; self-esteem and, 151–52; verbal, 64; see also Neglect; Physical abuse; Sexual abuse; Substance abuse Activist youth, see Peace builders Adaptation, 118 Addiction, see Substance abuse Adults, as danger, 38–41; see also Parents AF, see American Front Agency, 117, 119 Alcohol abuse, 6; rape and, 151 Alcoholics Anonymous, 123 ALKQN, see Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation Alliance for the Prevention of Crime (APREDE), 4 Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation (ALKQN), 6, 114; bible of, 125; in Dominican Republic, 128; in Ecuador, 128; education from, 124; as family, 127; founding of, 130n1; girls in, 122; as halfway house, 127; interviews with, 115; literacy and, 124; play by, 2; in Puerto Rico, 128, 129–30; recovery and, 121–24; reintegration by, 127–28; renaming and, 124–26; resistance by, 120–28; rituals of, 125; self-esteem and, 124; in Spain, 128 America: homelessness in, 7; school shootings in, 16; youth violence in, 16; see also Boston; Denver; Los Angeles; New York City

American Firm, 192 American Front (AF), 193 Analyzing Social Settings (Lofland and Lofland), 170 Anarchism, 120, 189 Angry Aryans, 195, 197 Anomie, 170–72; of whites, 179, 182 Anxiety: PTSD and, 150; rape and, 150; violence and, 35–36 APREDE, see Alliance for the Prevention of Crime Ardizzone, Leonisa, 7 Argentina, 9 Arrests: of drug dealers, 153; for fighting, 153; of girls, 153; of minorities, 18; of street gangs, 153; surveillance and, 18 Aryan Nation, 170, 181, 212 Aryan Terrorism, 197 Aryan White Separatists (AWS), 194 Aryanfest, 181, 195 Asatrú, see Odinism Asatru Folk Assembly, 180 Assassinations: in Columbia, 138; mutual exchange of, 145n1 Assimilation, 172 Austin, Joe, 126 Australia: juvenile detention centers in, 18; minorities in, 17, 18; see also Melbourne Avtoriteti, 86 AWS, see Aryan White Separatists

308

Index Babenco, Hector, 62 Baseball bats, 34 Bauman, Zygmunt, 220, 221 Bazuco, 137 Beats, 50 Beliefs, 97; Los Angeles street gangs and, 109–11; social control and, 109–11 Bennet, William, 229 Bensman, J., 209 Berg, Alan, 200n11 Bespredelshiki, 88 Besprizornie, 91 Betrayal, 28 Between the Lines: How The New York Times Frames Youth (Figueroa), 267 Beverly Hills, 90210 (TV program), 171 Beverly Hills High School, 170–71; minorities in, 172 Beznadzornie, 91 Biltmore Fourteen, 111n1 Birmingham School, 119–20 Black Flag, 190 Black History Month, 174 Black is beautiful, 173 Black Panthers, 125 Black Power, 174 Blazak, Randy, 6 Bleach kits, 251, 253, 258n26 Bloods, 2 Blue-Eyed Devils, 197 Bobo, Lawrence, 182 Bomzhi, 86 Boot Camp, 267 Boreyelo, Soraya, p10 Boston: girls in, 152–55; housing in, 154; poverty in, 153; street gangs in, 152–55; unemployment in, 152–53 Bourdieu, Pierre, 80 Branch Davidians, 211 Brazil, 6; see also São Paulo Brazilian National Movement of Street Boys and Girls, 73n1 Brents, Barbara, 6 British National Front (NF), 190 Brotherton, David, 6, 9 Brown Berets, 111n1 Brutal Attack, 197

Bulimic society, 41, 221 Burdi, George, 197 Bussing, 169 Butler, Richard, 181, 188 Caja Ludica, p5 California: punks in, 190–91; see also Los Angeles street gangs Camaradas, 104, 110 Cambiazo, 138 Campbell, Anne, 147 Campbell, Bea, 37 Canada, 17, 21–24 Canada, Geoffrey, 276 Capital Hill United Neighborhood, 248–55 Capitalism: corporations and, 120, 209–10; culture and, 204–5; globalization and, 3; nomadism and, 51; recovery and, 121; see also Commercialization; Privatization Car washing, 71 Carneil, Michael, 203 Castells, Manuel, 221 Catholic Church, 135; in Columbia, p6; immigrants of, 173 Caucasians; see Whites Celebrity, 204–6 Cell phones, 84, 87; fighting and, 35 Celtic Highland games, 180 Center for New Community, 196 Chains, 34 Chalfant, Henry, 126 Checkoway, Bary, 7 Chesney-Lind, M., 126 Child abuse, in New York City, 69 Child labor, 106 Christianity, 207–9, 243 Circle One, 191 Citizenship, 100 Cliques, 153; sexual abuse and, 162; support from, 162–63 Clothing: of AF, 193; of skinheads, 189, 193; status of, 205; of street gangs, 109, 118, 157 Coady, C. A. J., 230 Colombia, 6, 7, 10, 11; assassinations in, 138; Catholic Church in, 6; crowding in, 137; drug cartels in, 138; guns in, 137; HIV in, 8, 9, p12; law enforcement in, 138; militia

Index in, 139; organized crime in, 139; poverty in, 136–37; prostitution in, 12; street gangs in, 133–45; street youth in, 63; UNICEF in, 12; violence in, 138; see also Los Muchachos La Colonia, 104 Coloradas, Mangas, 111n1 Colorblindness, 174 Columbine High School, 6, 203–14; Evangelical Christians and, 207–9; globalization and, 209–10; guns at, 212 Commercialization: of leisure, 27; of public places, 27 Communism, 120; in Russia, 78–79 Communitas, 129 Community organizers, compensation for, 9 Condoms, 251, 253, 258n27, 266 Confederate battle flag, 178, 187 Confederate Hammerskins, 195 Conflict resolution: by Los Muchachos, 141–42, 143; by Urban Peak, 251 Conformity, 96; criminal justice system and, 110; law enforcement and, 110; street gangs and, 111 Conquergood, Dwight, 125–26 Consumer mentality, 51 Continuation schools, 103–4 Convergence, 187; skinheads and, 199 Corporations, 120, 209–10 The Cosby Show (TV program), 174 Cosmopolitanism, 52 Covenant House, 74n3 Crack cocaine, 137 Crime; see Delinquency Criminal justice system: conformity and, 110; in Russia, 81; street gangs and, 98; surveillance and, 15; see also Law enforcement Crips, 2 Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror (Delgado and Stefanic), 183 Cross burnings, 181 Crowding: in Columbia, 137; in family housing, 106, 159–60 Culture: assimilation of, 172; capitalism and, 204–5; nomadism and, 51; see also Enculturation; Multiculturalism Curtis, Richard, 6 Cycle of violence, 151

Danger: adults as, 38–41; in London, 31–43; organized crime and, 86; in Russia, 82–83; of street gangs, 33 Dark forces, 138–39 Daza, Ana, 6 Debs, Eugene, 210–11 DeCesare, Donna, 7 Dehumanization, with globalization, 52 Delgado, R., 183 Delinquency, 118; peer groups and, 151–52; physical abuse and, 159; sexual abuse and, 159; victimization and, 148–49, 151, 159 Democracy: diminished belief in, 15; privatization and, 28 Democracy Multiplied Zone (DMZ), 262, 265–68 Denver, 239–40; homelessness in, 241; runaways in, 241; see also Urban Peak Deportation, 128 Depression, 5; drugs for, 151; with girls, 151; with PTSD, 150; rape and, 150; victimization and, 150 Diabetes, 160 Discrimination: of minorities, 23; in schools, 23 Divorce: Los Angeles street gangs and, 100; runaways and, 64; see also Single-parent families DMZ; see Democracy Multiplied Zone Domination and the Arts of Resistance (Scott), 3 Dominican Republic, 9; ALKQN in, 128 Douglas, Mary, 81 Drive-by shootings, 156–57, 160 Drop-in centers, 63 Drop-out rates, 17 Drug(s), 34; cartels, 138; crack cocaine, 137; for depression, 151; globalization of, 8; glue sniffing, 62; heroin, 34; needle exchange, 258n26; purposes for, 151 Drug abuse, 6; girls and, 149–50, 151; motivation for, 151; by runaways, 50; victimization and, 149–50 Drug dealers, 52; arrests of, 153; exploitation by, 149; girls as, 148; homicide and, 138; in New York City, 62; nomadism and, 54, 70; street youth as, 70 Druids, 180

309

310

Index Duke, David, 170 Durkheim, Emile, 170 Dvorovie, 84 Eagles of the Dawn, p7 Eating disorders, 150 Ecuador, ALKQN in, 128 Education, 9–10; from ALKQN, 124; bussing and, 169; discrimination in, 23; drop-out rates in, 17; integration of, 175–76; law enforcement in, 18, 21–22, 269; minorities and, 103, 107; minority graduation rates, 8; multiculturalism in, 175; multiple marginality and, 96; about peace, 7; in Russia, 81; social control from, 107; street gangs and, 107; street youth and, 81; suspensions from, 17, 23; see also Literacy; The Rheedlen University for Community Education Elliott, Anthony, 28 Eminem, 179 Emotional abuse: homelessness and, 49; runaways and, 64 Employment, 37; globalization and, 171, 237–39; homelessness and, 238; nomadism and, 54; redundancy and, 226; in Russia, 79; see also Unemployment Enculturation, 96; street gangs and, 109 Engagement, 97; Los Angeles street gangs and, 103–6; minorities and, 105; social control and, 103–6; street gangs and, 103–6 Entertainment; see Recreation Escobar, Pablo, 137, 138 “Estimate of the Number of Street Children and Adolescents in the City of São Paulo,” 74n4 Ethnic envy, 169–83 Euro-Knowledge, 181 European Clubs, 175 Evangelical Christians, 207–9 Evers, Medgar, 174 Exploitation: by drug dealers, 149; of girls, 147, 149; of runaways, 149; by street gangs, 149 Extortion, benefits from, 143, 144 La Familia, 121 Family, 37; ALKQN as, 127; breakdown of, 96; homelessness and, 49; multiple marginality

and, 96; nomadism and, 49–50, 57; peer groups as, 57; poverty in, 159–60; as role models, 108; in Russia, 80–82; sexual abuse in, 160; social control from, 107; street gangs as, 101–2, 108, 161; violence in, 160; See also Single-parent families Fanon, Franz, 267 Favelas paulistanas, 72 Felipe, Luis, 130n1 Feminism, 121 Ferrell, Jeff, 126 Fictive kin, 57 Fiero, 138 Fight for Freedom, 191 Fighting, 34–35; arrests for, 153; cell phones and, 35; invigoration with, 36; street gangs and, 37, 87; thrill of, 155 Figueroa, Lisa, 7, 267 Finkelstein, Marni, 6 First Blood (movie), 212 Fist Stick Knife Gun (Canada, G.), 276 Fitness and Nutrition Center, 285n5 Flashbacks, 150; PTSD and, 161; of sexual abuse, 161 Flynn, Michael, 6, 9 Focus groups, 32–33 Foster care: in New York City, 69; physical abuse in, 122; street gangs and, 154 Fourth world, 90 Free trade, 7 Free Your Mind Productions, 197 Freemanv. Pitts, 169 Freire, Paulo, 267, 275, 280 Fuckyouism, 190 Fueled by Hate, 197 Fundamentalist Christianity, substance abuse and, 243 Gang bill, 115–16 Gangs; see Street gangs GAP; see Global Action Project García, Julio Cesar, 10 Gays, 171; skinheads and, 189 Gender roles, 171 Generation X, 220 Georgia, minorities in, 169 Girls: in ALKQN, 122; arrests of, 153; in Boston, 152–55; depression with, 151; drug

Index abuse and, 149–50, 151; drug dealing by, 148; exploitation of, 147, 149; guns and, 152; in Hawaii, 149; marginality of, 147, 163; neglect of, 147–48; physical abuse of, 147–48, 154, 163; poverty of, 147; prostitution by, 68, 148, 149; PTSD in, 150; resistance by, 147–64; as runaways, 149–50; in São Paulo, 74n4; self-mutilation of, 155; sexual abuse of, 147, 154, 163; stealing by, 148, 149; in street gangs, 147–64; as street youth, 68; victimization of, 147–64; violence and, 147–64 Giuliani, Rudolph, 1 GK; see Global Kids Gliebe, Erich, 197 Global Action Project (GAP), 274, 283, 284n5 Global Kids (GK), 274, 279, 283, 284n5 Globalization: of arms, 8; capitalism and, 3; cities and, 237–39; Columbine High School and, 209–10; dehumanization with, 52; of drugs, 8; employment and, 171, 237–39; income distribution and, 163; Internet and, 51; nomadism and, 50–54, 58; racism and, 175–82; skinheads and, 185–201; of street gangs, 8; suburbs and, 171; violence and, 216–30; whites and, 179–82; WPM and, 186–88 Globalization and Its Discontents (Sassen), 3 Glue sniffing, 62 Golden, Andrew, 203 Graffiti, street gangs and, 118 Great Britain: punks in, 189; skinheads in, 189; see also London Green, Donald, 182 Grupo Ceiba, 3 Guantanamo, 7 Guatemala, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Guns, 34; in Columbia, 137; at Columbine High School, 212; girls and, 152; handmade, 137; street gangs and, 156 Gypsies, 50, 54 Hale, Matt, 170 Haley, Alex, 173 Half-way house, ALKQN as, 127 Hamm, Mark S., 170 Hammerfest, 195 Hammerskin Nation (HSN), 188, 195–96

Harlem Overheard, 285n5 Harris, Eric, 6, 203–14 Hate crimes, in suburbs, 182 Hawaii, girl gangs in, 149 Hawthorne, George Eric, 187 Hayward, Keith, 84 Heick, Bob, 193 Heidegger, Martin, 81 Hell Patrol, 227–28 Heroin, 34 Hess, Rudolf, 197 High school graduation rates, of minorities, 8 High-density housing, 32 HIJOS, p1 Hip-hop music, 179 Hippies, 204 History of respectable fears, 33 Hitchhiking: minorities and, 49; nomadism and, 47, 49 HIV / AIDS, 8, 251, 253; in Columbia, 8, 9, 12 Hobsbawm, Eric, 85 Hodgson, Godfrey, 222 Homelessness, 5; in America, 7; in Brazil, 6; in Denver, 241; emotional abuse and, 49; employment and, 238; family and, 49; in New York City, 6, 48–49; physical abuse and, 49; prevalence of, 73n1–74n1; sexual abuse and, 49; shelters and, 67; sleeping and, 67–68; street gangs and, 74n2; years of, 54; see also Nomadism; Runaways Homicide, drug dealing and, 138 H.O.T. Works, 285n5 Housing: in Boston, 154; crowding in, 106, 159–60; high-density, 32; street gangs and, 154 Howell, Joseph, 241 HSN; see Hammerskin Nation Humanist socialism, 120 Hutchings, Vincent, 182 Illiteracy, 6 Immigration: Catholic Church and, 173; skinheads and, 189; of slaves, 176; of whites, 176 In Defense of Youth (Kelley), 274–75 Incarceration: of minorities, 120; postincarceration reentry and, 6; rape and, 148; victimization and, 148–49; see also Arrests; Prisons

311

312

Index Incest, 150 Indirect violence; see Structural violence Initiation, into street gangs, 158 Insight Center, 285n5 Integration, of schools, 175–76 Internet: globalization and, 51; skinheads and, 196–99; surveillance of, 28; WPM and, 198–99 Interracial romance, 98 Intersectionality, 130n4 Invisible Punishment (Chesney-Lind and Mauer), 126 Isolation, 51 Ixcoy, Maria, p1 Jail Logic, 264 Jews, 173; Orthodox, 125; whites and, 182; WPM and, 200n6 Jim Crow laws, 125 John Jay Administration, 3 Johnson, Mitchell, 203 Joyriding, 34, 37; as entertainment, 42 Juvenile detention centers: in Australia, 18; in New York City, 74n8; in São Paulo, 74n8 Karenga, Maulana Ron, 180 Kelley, E. C., 274–75 Kenya, 9 Kerouac, Jack, 50 King Blood, 130n1 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 174 King, Rodney, 174 King Tone, 123, 127 Kinkel, Kip, 203 Klebold, Dylan, 6, 203–14 Knives, 35 Koernke, Mark, 211 Ku Klux Klan, 169, 187, 211 Kwanzaa, 180 L.A. Thirteen, 111n1 LaFollette, Robert, 210 Larkin, Ralph, 6 Latin Kings, 130n1, 263 Law enforcement, 5; brutality by, 17; in Columbia, 138; conformity and, 110; disrespect for, 38–41; in education, 18, 21–22, 269; in Melbourne, 25–26; minorities and, 17, 20; racial

profiling by, 1; sexual harassment by, 20–21; stop-and-search by, 38; surveillance by, 15 The League, 191, 192 Leary, Timothy, 204 Leif Erickson Day, 180 Leisure; see Recreation Lesbians, 171 Levin, Jack, 182 Liberation theology, 120 Life First, p11 Lifting New Voices, 265, 271 Linkage, 187; skinheads and, 199 Literacy: ALKQN and, 124; nature of, 124–25; see also Illiteracy Lofland, J., 170 Lofland, L. H., 170 London: danger in, 31–43; territorial demarcations in, 33, 34 Los Angeles street gangs: beliefs in, 109–11; divorce and, 100; engagement in, 103–6; poverty in, 99; racial segregation in, 103; single-parent families in, 99; social control in, 96–111 Lumpenproletariat, 77 Machetes, 34, 35, 137 McVeigh, Timothy, 210, 211 Males, Michael, 275 Manson, Charles, 203 Mara Salvatrucha, p4 Marginality: of girls, 147, 163; of minorities, 103; of street gangs, 96–97, 120; of whites, 211; see also Multiple marginality; Social exclusion Masculinity, 37; skinheads and, 188; violence and, 181–82; whites and, 181–82 Mathews, Robert, 197–98, 200n11–201n11 Mauer, M., 126 Max Resist, 181, 195, 198 MeCha; see National Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán Mediation, 34 Melbourne: law enforcement in, 25–26; leisure opportunities in, 26; street gangs in, 26–27; surveillance in, 24–27; unemployment in, 26 Menino-de-rua, 68 Meninos e meninas, 62

Index Methamphetamine, 243 Metzger, Tom, 181, 188, 191, 194 Michigan Militia, 211 Midwest Homeless and Runaway Adolescent Study, 245 Militia of Montana, 211 Militias, 211, 212; in Columbia, 139; Los Muchachos and, 140; in Russia, 77, 81–84 Million Man March, 176 Minorities: arrests of, 18; in Australia, 17, 18; in Beverly Hills High School, 172; discrimination of, 23; education and, 103, 107; engagement and, 105; in Georgia, 169; high school graduation rates of, 8; hitchhiking and, 49; identity of, 42; imprisonment of, 18; incarceration of, 120; injustice and, 23; law enforcement and, 17, 20; marginality of, 103; nomadism and, 48–49; poverty of, 153; prisons and, 18; in public places, 21; racial profiling of, 1; racism within, 33–34; range of, 169; status of, 174; in street gangs, 26–27; surveillance of, 15; whites and, 175; in youth clubs, 174 Minority to Majority Transfer, 169 Mobile phones; see Cell phones Modernism, 204 Mohawk hairstyles, 189 Montana Freemen, 211 Moscow Centre for Temporary Isolation of Underage Delinquents, 78 Movimento Nacional de Meninos e Meninas de Rua, 73n1 MS-13, 116 Los Muchachos, 6, 134; community relationship with, 142; conflict resolution by, 141–42, 143; entry into, 141; ideology of, 140–41; militias and, 140; as prosocial organization, 141–45; rise and transformation of, 139–45; violence in, 140 Mugging: in São Paulo, 71; by street youth, 70 Multiculturalism, 173, 174; in schools, 175; whites and, 175 Multiple hustles, 74n7 Multiple marginality, 96–97; education and, 96; family and, 96; street gangs and, 109 Music: hip-hop, 179; rap, 179; skinheads and, 181, 189, 190; street gangs and, 118; WPM and, 196–99

Musick, Judith, 244 Muslims, 7, 37, 40–41 Narcotics Anonymous, 123 The National Alliance, 170, 181 National borders, transparency of, 90 National Liberation Army, 139 National Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MeCha), 177–78 Nazi Low Riders, 200n9 Nazism, 6; punks and, 190–91; skinheads and, 186, 189 Needle exchange, 258n26 Neformali, 84 Neglect, 38, 123; of girls, 147–48; in New York City, 69; in Russia, 79–80 Neo-Marxism, 119 Neo-Nazis, 6 Ñetas, 2, 121 Networking: nomadism and, 57; in Russia, 89; with street youth, 72 New Left, 121 New World Order; see Globalization New York City: child abuse in, 69; drug dealing in, 62; foster care in, 69; homelessness in, 6, 48–49; juvenile detention centers in, 74n8; neglect in, 69; peace education in, 7; prostitution in, 62, 70; resistance in, 114–30; runaways in, 62; street organization in, 114–30; street youth in, 62–73; subcultures in, 114–30; surveillance in, 18–21; see also Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation New Youth Conservationists (NYC), 274, 283, 284n5 Newman, Katherine, 242 NF; see British National Front Nichols, Terry, 210, 211 Nomadism: age of, 49; capitalism and, 51; choice and, 50; cultural enrichment and, 51; drug dealing and, 54, 70; employment and, 54; family and, 49–50, 57; fluidity of, 54; freedom of, 52; globalization and, 50–54, 58; hitchhiking by, 47, 49; homelessness and, 47–58; hometown regions of, 53; invisibility of, 54; networking and, 57; panhandling and, 70; peer groups with, 54; prostitution and, 54; romance of, 50; selfawareness and, 52

313

314

Index Nonformal education, 279–80 Northside Firm, 191, 192 Nuestros Derechos (Our Rights), p2 Nurge, Dana, 6 NYC; see New Youth Conservationists Obschak, 86 Odinism, 6, 180; racism and, 180–81; white supremacists and, 180 OECD; see Office for Economic Cooperation and Development Office for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 237, 256n4 O.G.s (Original gangsters), 102, 110 Omnipolis, 51 On the Road (Kerouac), 50 The Order, 211, 212 Order Skins, 192 Organized crime: in Columbia, 139; danger and, 86; in Russia, 85–87; street gangs and, 87 Original gangsters; see O.G.s Orthodox Jews, 125 Outsourcing, 163, 182 Pagan Front, 181 Paganism, 180 Palomilla, 104 Pandilla mogruesos, 101 Panhandling, 48, 52; nomadism and, 70; by street youth, 70 Panzerfaust Records, 197 PAR; see Participatory action research Paraguay, 63 Paramilitary; see Militias Parents: physical abuse by, 122, 123; prostitution by, 64; revenge toward, 158–59; as role models, 37, 96; substance abuse by, 49, 64, 80, 122, 123, 160 Participatory action research (PAR), 18–19 Peace builders, 273–85; definition of, 277; motivation of, 280–83 Pedophiles, 82 Peer groups, 32, 108; delinquency and, 151–52; as family, 57; with nomadism, 54; street gangs and, 101 Perambulando, 62 Perry, Pamela, 176, 183

Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, 254 Phillips, Susan, 126 Phineas Priests, 212 Physical abuse, 6; delinquency and, 159; in foster care, 122; of girls, 147–48, 154, 163; homelessness and, 49; by parents, 122, 123; runaways and, 64, 154; in Russia, 79 Pierce, William, 197 Pierpoint, Anthony, 197 Pimps, 149 Pink Floyd, 195 Piqueteros, 9 Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco (Babenco), 62 Plunder & Pillage, 195 Pluralism, 172 Pluton Svea, 195 Police; see Law enforcement Politrix, 268–69 Positivism, 117, 119 Posse Comitatus, 212 Postincarceration reentry, 6 Postmodern culture, 203–6 Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 150; anxiety with, 150; depression with, 150; flashbacks and, 161; in girls, 150 Poverty: in Boston, 153; in Columbia, 136–37; in family, 159–60; of girls, 147; Los Angeles street gangs and, 99; of minorities, 153; public places and, 16; in Russia, 79; street gangs and, 99, 106; street youth and, 64–65; surveillance and, 15; War on Poverty, 98, 105 Powell, Colin, 175 Pregnancy, 236, 251; from rape, 150 Pre-pinta, 104 Pride movements, 173 Prisons: continuation schools and, 104; minorities and, 18; in Russia, 85–87; street gangs and, 120, 129 Privatization, 15; democracy and, 28; of surveillance, 27 Progresso Latino, 283 Prostitution: in Columbia, p12; by girls, 68, 148, 149; in New York City, 62, 70; nomadism and, 54; by parents, 64; in Russia, 82; by street youth, 68, 70 PTSD; see Posttraumatic stress disorder

Index Public Enemy Number One, 200n9 Public places, 25; commercialization of, 27; impoverished in, 16; minorities in, 21; poverty and, 16 Puerto Rico, ALKQN in, 128, 129–30 Punk rock, 192 Punks: in California, 190–91; in Great Britain, 189; Nazism and, 190–91; racism and, 190; street gangs and, 191; see also Nomadism Quiche, p1 Racial assimilation, 172 Racial profiling: by law enforcement, 1; of minorities, 1 Racial segregation: Los Angeles street gangs and, 103; in Russia, 84; with street youth, 69–70 Racism, 174–75; globalization and, 175–82; within minorities, 33–34; Odinism and, 180–81; punks and, 190; skinheads and, 170, 192; whites and, 177 Racist Redneck Rebels, 197 Rahowa, 197 Rambo (movies), 211–13 Rap music, 179 Rape: alcohol abuse and, 151; anxiety and, 150; depression and, 150; incarceration and, 148; pregnancy from, 150; recovery from, 151; runaways and, 161; sleep disorders and, 150; suicide and, 150–51 Real Deal, 285n5 Recovery: ALKQN and, 121–24; capitalism and, 121; from rape, 151; from substance abuse, 121–24; violence and, 121 Recreation, 37; commercialization of, 27; joyriding as, 42; in Melbourne, 26; in Russia, 81; street gangs and, 109; street youth and, 81 Redundancy, 224–28, 230; employment and, 226 Reintegration, 126–28; by ALKQN, 127–28 Rejection, 118 Religion, 34; see also Christianity; Jews; Muslims Renaming, ALKQN and, 124–26 Re-placement, in Russia, 80–82

Resistance: by ALKQN, 120–28; by girls, 147–64; in New York City, 114–30; by street gangs, 117; to victimization, 163 Resistance Magazine, 187, 197 Resistance Records, 197 The Rheedlen University for Community Education (TRUCE), 274, 283, 285n5 Rice, Condoleezza, 175 Richards-Schuster, Katie, 7 Rituals: of ALKQN, 125; of street gangs, 117 Robbery; see Stealing Rodrigues, Benedito, 6 Role models: family as, 108; parents as, 37, 96; see also Peer groups Romance: interracial, 98; of nomadism, 50; of street gangs, 86, 98 Roots, 274, 284n5 Roper, Billy, 181 Rowe, Michael, 252 Ruby Ridge, 211 Runaway and Homeless Act of 1974, 69, 249 Runaways, 47; abuse and, 154; in Denver, 241; divorce and, 64; drug abuse by, 50; emotional abuse and, 64; exploitation of, 149; family and, 64; girls as, 149–50; motivation for, 66; in New York City, 62; physical abuse and, 64, 154; rape and, 161; in Russia, 80; self-esteem with, 49–50; sexual abuse and, 64, 154; single-parent families and, 64; sleeping by, 77; street youth and, 64; verbal abuse and, 64; victimization and, 149–50 Russia, 5–6; communism in, 78–79; criminal justice system in, 81; danger in, 82–83; education in, 81; employment in, 79; family in, 80–82; leisure in, 81; militias in, 77, 81–84; neglect in, 79–80; networking in, 89; organized crime in, 85–87; physical abuse in, 79; poverty in, 79; prisons in, 85–87; prostitution in, 82; racial segregation in, 84; re-placement in, 80–82; runaways in, 80; single-parent families in, 79; street gangs in, 83–85; street youth in, 77–91; vagrancy in, 86–87; violence in, 79 Safety pins, 189 São Paulo: girls in, 74n4; juvenile detention centers in, 74n8; mugging in, 71; street youth in, 62–73

315

316

Index Sassen, Saskia, 3 Scandlyn, Jean, 7 The Scapegoat Generation (Males), 275 Schaffner, Laurie, 244 School shootings, 16; see also Columbine High School Schools; see Education Scott, James, 3 Se virar, 74n7 Self-awareness, nomadism and, 52 Self-esteem, 226; abuse and, 151–52; ALKQN and, 124; with runaways, 49–50; street gangs and, 128 Self-mutilation, by girls, 155 Sex Pistols, 189 Sex work; see Prostitution Sexual abuse, 6; cliques and, 162; delinquency and, 159; in family, 160; flashbacks of, 161; of girls, 147, 154, 163; homelessness and, 49; runaways and, 64, 154; self-esteem and, 151–52; see also Rape Sexual assault, 82 Sexual harassment, by law enforcement, 20–21 Sexual liberation, 171 Sexual predation, 82, 123 Sexually transmitted diseases (STIs), 251; see also HIV / AIDS Shades of White (Perry), 176 Shelters, 63; homelessness and, 67; Urban Peak and, 248–55 Shively, Michael, 6 Shoplifting, 71, 97, 104, 149, 153 Sickle cell anemia, 160 Sigrdrifa, 180 Silver, Tony, 126 Simi, Pete, 6 Single-parent families: Los Angeles street gangs and, 99; runaways and, 64; in Russia, 79; street gangs and, 100–101, 153–54 Situationism, 120 Skinheads, 6; clothing of, 189, 193; convergence and, 199; gays and, 189; globalization and, 185–201; in Great Britain, 189; immigration and, 189; international organization of, 193–96; Internet and, 196–99; linkage and, 199; masculinity and, 188; music of, 181, 189, 190; Nazism and, 186, 189; origins of, 189–90; racism and, 170, 192; street

gangs and, 191–93; study methods on, 188; territorial demarcations of, 192–93 Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, 200n2 Skrewdriver, 190 Slaves, 176 Sleep disorders: rape and, 150; victimization and, 150 Sleeping, 56–57; homelessness and, 67–68; by runaways, 77 Small Town in Mass Society (Vidich and Bensman), 209 Smith, Benjamin, 182 Social change, 170 Social control: beliefs and, 109–11; breakdown of, 97–98; from education, 107; engagement and, 103–6; from family, 107; in Los Angeles street gangs, 96–111; street gangs and, 96–111 Social exclusion, 221–24 Social movements, 120 Social policy, 41 Social reproduction, 115–20; values and, 117 Socialization, 96–97, 111; street gangs and, 108 South Bronx, Youth Force in, 262–71 Spaces of hope, 120 Spain, ALKQN in, 128 Spanging, 246 The Spot, 252 Spousal abuse, 123 Spunt, Barry, 6 SSI, 160 STAR; see Starting Transition and Recovery Starting Transition and Recovery (STAR), 248, 258n22 Statute of the Child and Adolescent Act, 69 Stealing, 34; by girls, 148, 149; by street gangs, 107; by street youth, 70; see also Shoplifting Stefanic, J., 183 Stephenson, Svetlana, 5–6 Stereotypes, 21 STIs; see Sexually transmitted diseases Stop-and-search, by law enforcement, 38 Street gangs: arrests of, 153; in Boston, 152–55; clothing of, 109, 118, 157; in Colombia, 133–45; conformity and, 111; criminal justice system and, 98; dangers of, 33; education and, 107; enculturation and, 109; engagement and, 103–6; exploitation

Index by, 149; as family, 101–2, 108, 161; family crowding and, 106; fighting and, 37, 87; foster care and, 154; girls in, 147–64, 152–55; globalization of, 8; graffiti and, 118; guns and, 156; historical forces with, 118, 119; homelessness and, 74n2; housing and, 154; initiation into, 158; involvement and, 106–9; language of, 118; marginality of, 96–97, 120; in Melbourne, 26–27; minorities in, 26–27; multiple marginality and, 109; music and, 118; norms of, 111, 117; organized crime and, 87; peer groups and, 101; population of, 116; poverty and, 106; prisons and, 120, 129; as prosocial organizations, 134; punks and, 191; recreation and, 109; rehabilitation of, 116; resistance by, 117; rituals of, 117; romance of, 86, 98; in Russia, 83–85; safety from, 149; self-destruction of, 120; self-esteem and, 128; single-parent families and, 100–101, 153–54; skinheads and, 191–93; social control and, 96–111; socialization and, 108; stealing by, 107; substance abuse and, 129; support from, 163–64; territorial demarcations of, 118, 192–93; terrorism by, 6; unemployment and, 152–53; as urban terrorists, 163; values of, 98, 111, 117; victimization and, 151, 163; War on Poverty and, 105; wars between, 139; see also Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation; Cliques; Los Angeles street gangs; Los Muchachos Street Outreach, 266 Street University, 267 Street youth: age of, 68–69, 74n6; car washing by, 71; in Colombia, 63; drug dealing by, 70; education and, 81; girls as, 68; hustling by, 70; leisure and, 81; mugging by, 70; networking with, 72; in New York City, 62–73; outreach with, 235–59; panhandling by, 70; in Paraguay, 63; poverty and, 64–65; prostitution by, 68, 70; racial segregation with, 69–70; in Russia, 77–91; in São Paulo, 62–73; self-perception of, 72; stealing by, 70; territorial demarcations with, 67; windshield cleaning by, 71 Stress Magazine, 267 Structural violence, 284n1; youth and, 274–77

Substance abuse, 5; fundamentalist Christianity and, 243; by parents, 49, 64, 80, 122, 123, 160; recovery from, 121–24; street gangs and, 129; see also Alcohol abuse; Drugs Suburbs: globalization and, 171; hate crimes in, 182 Subversion, 118 Suicide: rape and, 150–51; victimization and, 150 Le Suicide (Durkheim), 170 Surveillance, 15–28; arrests and, 18; criminal justice system and, 15; for discipline, 16; of Internet, 28; by law enforcement, 15; in Melbourne, 24–27; of minorities, 15; in New York City, 18–21; poverty and, 15; privatization of, 27; in Toronto, Canada, 21–24; of women, 15 Suspensions, from schools, 17, 23 Swastikas, 181 Tabor Amendment, 256n9 Tap Up Here, 267 Teenage Runaways (Schaffner), 244 Teens ’n’ Tenants (TNT), 285n5 Territorial demarcations: in London, 33–34; of skinheads, 192–93; of street gangs, 118, 192–93; with street youth, 67 Texas Constitutional Militia, 211 TNT; see Teens ’n’ Tenants Toronto, Canada, surveillance in, 21–24 Tower Hamlets, 31–43 Trabucos, 137, 138 Travelers; see Nomadism Travessia Foundation, 74n4 Triangulation, 257n12 Trochman, John, 211 TRUCE; see The Rheedlen University for Community Education Turf; see Territorial demarcations Twelve-step programs, 121 Twenge, Jean, 222 Ujima Productions, 264 Unemployment, 230; in Boston, 152–53; in Melbourne, 26; street gangs and, 152–53 UNESCO, 73n1 UNICEF, 73n1; in Columbia, p12

317

318

Index Unionism, decline of, 187 United States; see America Urban Peak, 236; conflict resolution by, 251; shelters and, 248–55 Urban terrorists, street gangs as, 163 Vagrancy, in Russia, 86–87 Valley of the Einheria, 180 Values, 118; social reproduction and, 117; of society, 97; of street gangs, 98, 111, 117 Venezuela, 9 Verbal abuse, runaways and, 64 Veteranos, 102, 104, 110, 140 Victimization: delinquency and, 148–51, 159; depression and, 150; direct consequences of, 150–51; drug abuse and, 149–50; eating disorders and, 150; of girls, 147–64; incarceration and, 148–49; resistance to, 163; runaways and, 149–50; sleep disorders and, 150; street gangs and, 151, 163; suicide and, 150; violence and, 163; see also Physical abuse; Sexual abuse Vidich, A. J., 209 Vigil, James Diego, 6 Vigil, Richard, 111n1 Vinland Tour 2000, 195 Vinlandic Embassy, 181 Violence, 5, 33; in America, 16; anxiety with, 35–36; in Columbia, 138; cycle of, 151; in family, 160; girls and, 147–64; globalization and, 216–30; masculinity and, 181–82; in Los Muchachos, 140; recovery and, 121; in Russia, 79–80; structural, 274–77, 284n1; thrill of, 155; victimization and, 163; youth and, 274–77; see also Fighting Volksfront, 181 The Wall (Pink Floyd), 195 WAR; see White Aryan Resistance War on Poverty, 98; street gangs and, 105 War Resisters League (WRL), 284n5 WCOTC; see World Church of the Creator “We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism,” 120 We Interrupt This Message, 267 Weaver, Randy, 211

Welfare, 160; dismantling of, 235, 254 Western Hammerskins, 192 White Aryan Resistance (WAR), 181, 187, 193–94 White Fence, p3 “White Minority” (Black Flag), 190 White Nationalist Party, 182 White power movement (WPM), 185; globalization and, 186–88; Internet and, 198–99; Jews and, 200n6; music and, 196–99 White Student Unions, 175 White supremacists, 6; Odinism and, 180 Whites: anomie of, 179, 182; globalization and, 179–82; immigration of, 176; Jews and, 182; marginality of, 211; masculinity and, 181–82; minorities and, 175; multiculturalism and, 175; racism and, 177 Wicca, 180 Windshield cleaning, 71 Women: surveillance of, 15; see also Feminism; Girls Women’s Popular Movement, p6 World Church of the Creator (WCOTC), 170, 182, 187 World Health Organization, 73n1 WPM; see White power movement WRL; see War Resisters League Young, Jock, 221, 223 Young Lords, 125, 263 Youth: oppression of, 274–77; resilience and, 277–78; structural violence and, 274–77; see also Street youth Youth clubs, 37; condition of, 38; minorities in, 174 Youth Court, 264–65 Youth Force, 7, 274, 283; origins and activities of, 263–65; in South Bronx, 262–71 Youth workers, 38; compensation for, 9 Zero tolerance, 28, 70–71 Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG), 187, 194, 200n6 ZOG; see Zionist Occupational Government Zulu Nation, 121, 263