Youth Deviance Flashcards
Merton
Functionalist Deviance:
Individuals experience a strain between goals/values of society and what they are able to achieve
This results in deviant responses
Conformity, Innovation, Ritualism, Retreatism, Rebellion
Coward and Ohlin
Functionalist Deviance:
Blocked opportunities
Develops Merton’s ideas but focuses on opportunities to commit crimes
Young working class males find themselves in local areas with high crime
Denied status through legitimate means, must join one of these subcultures:
Criminal Subculture
Conflict Subculture
Retreatist Subculture
Matza
Deviant Career:
Criminality is a phase you drift in and out of rather than a deviant career
Cohen
Functionalist/Media Deviance:
WC boys are aware of mainstream value but lack means to success in education
They join deviant subcultures as a form of dealing with this status frustration
Miller
Functionalist Deviance:
Suggests WC boys are socialised into a number of distinct values that mean they were more likely to be deviant
Focal concerns:
Excitement, toughness, smartness, trouble, autonomy, fate
Lea and Young
Class and Deviance:
Three main explanations for youth deviance
Relative deprivation, marginalisation, subcultures
Murray
Class and Deviance:
Youth in deviant subcultures have not received appropriate socialisation into value consensus
Underclass don’t want to work and are dependent on welfare
Sees entire underclass as a deviant subculture
Those in single Mother households have a greater chance of criminality as boys have no role model and girls seek substitutes like sex
MacDonald
New Right Deviance:
Summarised several studies of youth undertaken to test Murray’s ideas
Found there is no dependency culture and ‘underclass’ youth want to work
Jacobson et al
Jacobson et al
Class and Deviance:
Multiple disadvantages in 200 people in custody they studied
75% absent fathers, 50% deprived households, disrupted education
Farrington
Class and Deviance:
Cambridge study in delinquent development sampled 400 young males
Suggested socioeconomic deprivation was a key predictor of criminality
Becker
Interactionist Deviance:
Labelling relates to power
We all label but some have the power to make it stick
Leads to a self fulfilling prophecy as people internalise label and change behaviour to live up to it
Young, Class and Deviance
Class and Deviance:
Bulimic society encourages us to worship money, status and success
This causes an ‘intensity of exclusion’ for those who are deprived
Are deviant as they are driven to be included
Harding, Class and Deviance
Class and Deviance:
Like a casino, gangs are a social arena of competition
Members struggle for distinction, position, status and survival
Success is determined by accumulating ‘street capital’ like chips in a casino
Decker and Van Winkle
Class and Deviance:
Reasons for joining youth gangs are ‘pulls’ and ‘pushes’
Pulls: Attractiveness of gang, status, excitement, money
Pushes: Soc/eco/cultural disadvantages, feeling excluded and desire for protection
Willis
Class and Deviance:
Studied an all-boys school in Birmingham of WC lads
They saw themselves as failures and formed anti-school subcultures which gave them status
Didn’t value education and waited to inevitably get jobs in factories like Dads
O’Donell and Sharpe
Class and Deviance:
Predicted disappearance of a cocksure attitude towards employment
MacDonald and Marsh
Class and Deviance:
Support findings found on young WC people in Teesside
Still reject academic success and formed anti-school subcultures
Brown
Class and Deviance:
Three responses to education from WC youths
Getting in: low achievers wanting manual jobs
Getting out: high achievers using education to improve social position
Getting on: just comply and get on
Lacey
Class and Deviance:
Study of secondary school found pupils arrive with pro-school norms and values
Setting for ability and competition led to demoralisation among WC
Develops an anti-school subculture
Cicourel
Interactionist Deviance:
The process of dealing with potential deviant involves three stages:
Police search an individual based on interpretations of behaviour as suspicious
Police arrest the individual
Probation officer has a picture of a typical delinquent and assesses suspect based on that
Justice can be ‘negotiated’ based on class as if the individual is ‘apologetic’ or has an ‘apologetic’ family they may be let off
Delinquents are constructed by agencies of social control
Alexander
Ethnicity and Deviance:
Studied group of Bengali youth in inner-city London during the moral panic of ‘Asian Gangs’
Found they did get involved in fighting but that the gang was often tenuous and fragile
Argued Asian Gangs were a myth created by media fueled by Islamophobia
Stereotypes were picked up by teachers who projected this gang label onto friends with a common identity/ethnicity
Messerschmidt
Gender and Deviance:
Gangs act as a location for ‘doing masculinity’ that has to be proved
Campbell
Gender and Deviance:
State has unleashed extreme forms of masculinity through abandonment of communities
Antisocial behaviour has become a means for young men to express masculinity
Result of being denied legitimate means through education and employment
Harding, Gender and Deviance
Gender and Deviance:
How masculinity is accomplished depends on environment
Those without paid employment will find other means to achieve masculinity
Mac an Ghaill, Gender and Deviance
Gender and Deviance:
Found a number of fluid groups with different responses to school
Ordinary lads: not academic but indifferent to school
Academic achievers: pro-school and worked hard
Macho lads: formed anti-school subculture where they valued acting tough
Archer and Yamashita
Gender and Deviance:
Studied boys in inner-city London with anti-school values
Attached to a bad boy image related to hyperheterosexuality and saw academics as ‘soft’
Committed to staying local with aspirations but also saw themselves as having to be tough in this area
Lees
Gender and Deviance:
Controlled by the peer group in terms of ‘reputation’ stop them from being deviant
Heidenson
Gender and Deviance:
Girls are subject to more social control in terms of peer group and family
Also controlled by the idea of staying in the domestic sphere and fear of going out at night
By choosing to be deviant, they face ‘double deviance’
Harding, Gender and Deviance 2
Gender and Deviance:
Girls in gangs use social skills to carve a role, they don’t become ‘leaders’ but ‘fixers’
Girls can become an important part of operations using these social skills
Violence is used to ‘keep them in line’
Sewell
Ethnicity and Deviance:
African-Caribbean male street culture values instant gratification and not education
4 reactions to school: conformists, innovators, retreatists, rebels
Rebels accounted for only 18% of them but they got the most attention so generalisations made
Mac an Ghaill, Ethnicity and Deviance
Ethnicity and Deviance:
Class and gender intersect with racial stereotypes creating different responses
Rasta Heads, Warriors and Black Sisters
Archer
Ethnicity and Deviance:
Asian/Muslim boys demonstrated masculine/religious identities in peer groups to hide from islamophobia
Gained status and protection through bullying in these anti-school subcultures
Mirza
Ethnicity and Deviance:
African Caribbean girls resented teacher labelling/racism and expectational failure
Conformed and worked hard but rejected teaching methods
Used ‘strategic rationalisation’ to find other ways to succeed despite racism
Stand and Winston
Ethnicity and Deviance:
Found negative peer relationships were an issue in the underachievement of African-Caribbean boys
Whereas white boys was low self-esteem and lack of parental aspirations
Asian boys tended to have positive peer groups that were pro-school
Nightingale
Ethnicity and Deviance:
Studied young black males in Philadelphia
Argued they consumed mainstream US culture through media like everyone else and therefore shared the same values
However, they were excluded, racially and economically, from fully participating in mainstream means of achieving society’s goals
Some turned to deviance because of this
Bourgois
Ethnicity and Deviance:
Studied latino and African-American drug dealers in New Yorks’ El Barrio Area
Discussed ‘anguish of growing up poor’ in the richest country in the world
Argued it created an inner-city street culture in which deviant practice became a norm
Young, Interactionist Deviance
Interactionist Deviance:
Police tended to see hippies as dirty, scruffy, idle pot-heads
The result was drug taking started to become a central part of their identity
Led to a more cohesive identity among the hippies
Young, Interactionist Deviance 2
Interactionist Deviance:
Deviancy Amplification Spiral
First stage, translation of fantasy in which police accept media stereotypes as they are isolated
Second stage, negotiation of reality in which police negotiate evidence to fit preconceived stereotypes
Third stage, amplification in which labelling leads to self-fulfilling prophecy that may amplify deviance
