Jon Shute

Measuring gang membership in England and Wales: a latent class analysis with Eurogang survey questions

This paper examines the conceptual and empirical adequacy of the Eurogang Network’s survey measurement of gang membership. Using data from a nationally representative survey of young people in England and Wales, we employed a latent class analysis to model variation in the characteristics of peer groups. We found that while Eurogang survey items identified a distinct group of young people involved in more frequent and serious offending, this definition also extended to a separate group whose only ‘vice’ was recreational drug use. We discuss the conceptual validity of extending the ‘gang’ label to this latter group, together with the pressing need for more developmentally sensitive measures of peer networks in adolescence.

Proximal Adolescent Outcomes of Gang Membership in England and Wales

Objectives: This article aims to apply a “turning points” framework for understanding the developmental impacts of gang membership in a British sample of young people. The study explores the proximal impact of gang membership on offending, victimization, and a number of attitudinal and experiential outcomes that have been theorized to mediate the relationship between gang membership and offending. Method: The authors used data from the Offending Crime and Justice Survey, a rotating panel representative of young people in England and Wales that measured gang membership using the Eurogang definition. The effects of gang membership onset were tested using a propensity score analysis approach. Results: As previously reported with American data, gang onset has an impact on offending, antisocial behavior, drug use, commitment to deviant peers, and neutralization techniques. In addition, gang membership increases the probability of unwanted police contact, even adjusting for offending through a “double robust” procedure. Conclusion: Despite differences in social context, history of gangs and level of violence, we encounter more similarities than differences regarding consequences of gang membership. The impact on unwanted police contact deserves further research and policy attention.

Hunting gruffalo: ‘gangs’, unreason and the big bad coalition

But who is this creature with terrible claws/And terrible teeth in its terrible jaws?/He has knobbly knees and turned out toes/And a poisonous wart on the end of his nose/His eyes are orange, his tongue is black/He has purple prickles all over his back/Oh help! Oh no! Its a Gruffalo!(Donaldson, 1999)Youth violence, like most other forms of violence has been falling steadily in recent years. Despite – or perhaps because of this – recent policy responses have begun to rely increasingly on the spectre of ‘the gang’ as a trope for representing serious youth crime, invoking moral panic, and justifying greater police powers in socially marginalised communities (Hallsworth, 2013). The cynical disconnect between this and the growing weight of critical, empirical British youth gang research strains belief, and exposes the unreason at the heart of coalition policy. In this article, we analyse the release of several reports relating to the 2011 policy paper Ending Gang and Youth Violence (HM Government, 2011). Amid...

Moral discourse and action in relation to the corpse

In stable, late-modern societies, crimes are adjudicated breaches of morality formally defined in law. They are variable in content across place and time, and do not always have a readily identifiable victim or definitions that have the informal moral support of the population; however, many of the most serious offences against the person and property commonly evoke moral outrage in onlookers and deliver emotional trauma to victims.1 Their commission requires at least one perpetrator to be not bound by the moral–emotional content of the law at the time of the offence, nor by the likely consequences of their actions on the emotional life of others. The perpetrator will none the less spend most time conforming to most laws and, moreover, is statistic ally more likely to witness and experience the types of trauma associated with the victim;2 this points both to the dangers of essentializ ing and othering ‘the criminal’, and also to the complexities of the moral– emotional ‘work’ carried out in the service of crime. Regardless of one’s immediate status in the perpetrator–victim–onlooker nexus, immoral (criminal) action must be emotionally neutralized and/or cognitively reframed as con textually acceptable, and the emotional trauma of its consequences managed in order to minimize psychological harm.