Youth

Lectures: 17.04.03

Lecture One

Theoretical perspectives: early beginnings to present day

Lecture Two

Feminist challenges to youth and trouble: focus on teenage pregnancy and crime

The academic literature on 'delinquent youth’ arises in part from official concern over young people’s activities outside direct adult supervision by parents, teachers or employers.

Griffin, C. (1993) Representations of Youth: The Study of

Adolescence in Britain and America, Cambridge: Polity

Press.

and:

A set of concerns about the activities of young people and their supervision by

institutions or individuals representing the social order.

Johnston, L. (1993:96) The Modern Girl: Girlhood and Growing Up, Sydney: Allen & Unwin

Youth and trouble: theoretical perspectives

Biological determinism

Psychological theories

Sociological theories

Blumer’s symbolic interactionism rests on three premises:

humans act towards things on the basis of meanings that the things have for them

the meaning of things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows

these meanings are handled in and modified through an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters.

Hester & Eglin, 1992.

In relation to criminal behaviour, symbolic interactionists concentrate on processes of social interaction in which:

certain behaviour is prohibited by law, i.e. the process