Juanjo Medina

Who needs enemies with friends like these? The importance of place for young people living in known gang areas

Despite a growing concern about gangs in Britain, academic research that focuses on gangs remains scarce. Drawing on data from the ESRC-funded ethnographic research YOGEC (Youth Gangs in an English City) project, this paper explores the negotiation of space and place by young people living in inner-city areas affected by gangs. Using a combination of fieldwork observations and focus group and interview data, this paper charts the experiences of non-gang-involved young people living in known gang areas. These young peoples restricted use of space, arising as a result of gang rivalries and the policing of inner-city areas, results in exclusion, marginalization and victimization. We illustrate how young people are identified as ‘high risk’, and how they continually negotiate a range of risks bound up with the territory that they inhabit and subsequent spatial boundaries that are formed. In doing so, we provide an understanding of the lives of young people who reside in places and spaces inhabited by gangs.

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.

The problem of proliferation: guidelines for improving the security of qualitative data in a digital age

High profile breaches of data security in government and other organizations are becoming an increasing concern amongst members of the public. Academic researchers have rarely discussed data security issues as they affect research, and this is especially the case for qualitative social researchers, who are sometimes disinclined to technical solutions. This paper describes 14 guidelines developed to help qualitative researchers improve the security of their digitally-created and stored data. We developed these procedures after the theft of a laptop computer containing highly sensitive data from the home of a fieldworker. This paper introduces the ‘principle of proliferation’: digitally-created and stored files (like voice recordings of interviews and text files of their transcriptions) tend to proliferate during the course of a research project by virtue of fact that they can and are copied and shared as research progresses from data collection through to analysis and archive. Our guidelines were designed as concrete strategies that researchers embarking on a project can employ, particularly researchers working in teams, to accommodate this proliferation and reduce it where possible.

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...

Hidden behind the gunfire: young women's experiences of gang-related violence.

This article uses data from a 3-year multisite ethnographic research study of gangs within an English city, to explore the different ways that “gang culture” shapes the victimization experiences and everyday lives of (young) women. Victims of lethal gang violence in Research City are almost exclusively young men, rendering invisible the ways in which gangs have an impact on the lives of women living in neighborhoods with a gang presence. The article also discusses how the adoption of a transdisciplinary approach could be useful in developing a holistic picture of the impact of gang-related violence on the lives of women.

Homicide in Spain

This chapter will use public health, police and court record data to examine temporal and geographical variations on homicide in Spain since the transition to democracy to today. This will include analysis of trends in mechanism of injury. This information will be complemented with informal interviews with key police analysts. Particular attention will be devoted to four scenarios of homicide that are relevant in the Spanish context: terrorism-related homicide, intimate partner homicide, organised crime homicide and youth homicide.