Another cause for delinquency being highly popularised is that of the media, creating morale panics about situations. Only one front page story can send the public into thinking that it is quite wide spread, however there are two ways f looking at it, you could ask a person when was the last time they saw say a major terrorist act concerning the Taliban before September 11th, especially concerning Britain, in the headlines of the papers. Since September 11th there is at least one article about the Taliban or al-Qa’ida in the paper everyday. Although horrific one article on the front page of the news can send ripples through society creating moral panics. But only a few cases like the Stephen Lawrence and September 11th are remembered, maybe to the large scale publicising of the issue. Eadie and Morley write from a criminological perspective summarising the re-emergence of moral panics in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s “The deepening of the recession from the late 1980’s coincided with official crime statistics published at the beginning of 1993 which showed figures for the previous year as being the second highest on record. An already disillusioned electorate sought a scapegoat. Crime, particularly that of young people, was back on the agenda.” “Just as the response to young people’s offending in the 1960’s had been to impose more treatment, the response in the 1990’s was to impose more punishment”
One area of delinquency associated with youth is that of football hooliganism, and the moral panics surrounding it. Hooliganism has in fact been going on since at least the mid-nineteenth century. This serves to show that the media can also have an influence on the ideas of delinquency, as it takes certain aspects that have been going on for some time, and blows them all out of proportion, creating a moral panic surrounding the subject in question.
However, David Matza (1964) believes that delinquency is a normal part of youthful behaviour. He believes that it does not indicate future criminal tendencies, nor does it point to the offenders as becoming ‘hardened criminals’ in later life. He instead believes that young people are constantly drifting in and out of delinquent behaviour on a regular basis. Matza says that those who have been caught and defined as delinquents by the police are simply those who were caught, and that in fact most teenagers engage in this sort of behaviour as they are growing up. Matza also believes that young people hold two distinct and separate values at different time in their life. The first one is the ‘normal’ and dominant values of society, and the second is the ‘subterranean values’, which are the ones that lead on to delinquency. So, what Matza is trying to say is that delinquency is a normal, standard part of youth culture, but it is not a major part of youth culture, as the teenagers within the youth cultures are constantly shifting in-between delinquent and ‘normal’.
Like delinquency, youth sub-cultures and ‘neo-tribal membership’ gang culture is seen to provide a meaningful worldview and a stable sense of reality for those involved. Therefor, those who are members of these ‘gangs’ may well endorse the delinquent values that the gangs exhibit, but joining these gangs is supposed to theoretically help teenagers to find their place in the world. One of the most classic examples of a moral panic created involving gangs to promote the idea that delinquency is a major factor in youth culture is the media reporting of the mods and rockers riots in Clacton in 1964. The newspapers told stories of horrific terror, chaos and large scale rioting. Clacton was pictured in the media as being at the mercy of the gangs that roamed within it. Although these images became more familiar as time went on, this in no way represented the first ‘meeting’ of mods and rockers. Cohen argues that the reason why the mods and rockers took on this heavily delinquent behaviour was because of the moral panic that was created around their meetings, and so subsequently they began to behave in a delinquent way. This points to the possibility that delinquency is not a major factor within youth culture, but a major factor within the media about youth culture, and so youth cultures find themselves adapting to fit in with this view of youth cultures.
Studies into the nature of delinquency were also conducted by the Chicago school, which refers to what was the first large-scale and lasting Anglo-American sociology department, opened in 1892 and based at the University of Chicago. Over the years people at the Chicago school have come up with the idea that there is a system to delinquency, calling it the ‘ecological perspective’ or ‘urban ecology’, borrowing the idea of ecology in that plants, animals and other lifeforms exist together, and that some crops grow better when nearer to others, and some insects develop in habitats where others die. This idea stayed within the thinking of Functionalists and their ideas and beliefs in sociology. This idea was taken by a student of the Chicago school Robert Park, and used to come up with the concentric ring model, stating that the city could be understood as a series of concentric circles or zones, a theory which is also used by geographers.
The Chicago school concentrated their research into deviance in the zone of transition, supposing it to contain the highest amounts of deviant, criminal and delinquent activity. The slum-style cheap housing and rapid patterns of migration and immigration were imagined to contribute to a lack of community feeling in this zone. This lack of community was in turn thought to contribute to increased levels of crime. So, what the Chicago school is trying to say is that delinquency is only a major part of youth culture for those people going through the transition zone, generally those who are within working class families, and so those who are not travelling through the learning zone do not have as much delinquency within their youth cultures, as they are living near other people who benefit them, as the theory of ecology that has been applied to this dictates.
The work of the Chicago school has had quite an influence upon the work of Robert Merton. Writing in the mid-1930’s, Merton understood crime and deviance to be a response to the inability to achieve ‘cultural goals’. This is often referred to as a ‘strain theory’ of crime, since Merton highlights the strain between the cultural goals of a society and the legitimate or institutionalised means of achieving these goals. Merton’s work is also influenced by the idea of the ‘American Dream’, that is to have a successful well paying job, good house and luxurious lifestyle. Merton argues that those who do not live within this dream feel tension within their lives, which leads to dysfunctionality. This is also said in Merton’s five ways in which people respond to this aforementioned ‘strain’, such as Innovation, involving things like robbery to get more money, ritualism, in that people stop striving to achieve their goals, and retreatism, where you retreat from society and turn to things like alcohol. So, to look at Merton’s data in relation to the title, he seems to be saying that delinquency is a major factor within youth cultures, in that the very idea of the ‘American Dream’, is that it is impossible for most people to achieve, and so delinquency becomes a major part of youth cultures as a result of not achieving this dream.
The key development leading to the emergence of Marxist subculture theory was the setting up of the Centre Contemporary cultural studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University. This group sought to distance themselves from notions that the working class had been brought off with a dominant ideology and had been turned into a passive mass addicted to bingo, sex, alcohol and TV. They utilised the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who argued that the contradictory ideas we all have in our head led to a struggle over ideas and behaviour in society that was fought over a cultural arena. He believed that these ideas led to hegemony and that Marxists and working class people should engage with popular culture to develop a cultural resistance and struggle against capitalism.
So, working class youth are believed by Marxists to actively indulge in delinquency because they are not constrained by the things that adults have to deal with that is tying them to capitalism, such as mortgages and loans, and so they are more likely to rebel against the capitalist structure, leading to regular acts of delinquency in youth.
Hebdige(1979), in Subculture: the meaning of style, particularly argues that working-class culture is about both coping with the situation and also actively resisting capitalism, through showing disdain for the dominant values of society. Such deviant and criminal behaviour as is involved can thus be analysed as part of the class struggle.
One key example of the study of youth utilising the neo-Marxist approach first developed by the CCCS was the study of East End culture by Phil Cohen (1972). He argued that there ahs been a lot of change, such as the loss of jobs on the docks, the decline of the extended family networks and the redevelopment of large areas leading to the removal of old ‘slums’ and the construction of large numbers of tower blocks. Two key subcultures arose out of this, the Mods and skinheads. It is believed that the reason why they involved themselves in delinquency is that they were aspiring to be greater than they were, because the recent collapse and change of the East End had resulted in many people becoming poor and in some cases unemployed. So what Cohen is basically saying is that delinquency in youth culture is a major factor in youth cultures, as youth cultures mostly only arise as a response to a change in situation, and that change prompts people to behave in a delinquent manner.
Stuart Hall, in his book Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Order (1978) suggests that official figures of crime can and are used as political weapons at times of economic crisis to justify a failing capitalist economy. So, what Hall is saying is similar to what was said at the beginning, in that people sometimes use statistics to create moral panics surrounding youth culture and delinquency, and so delinquency may not be as big a factor in youth culture as some people make it out to be.
McRobbie(1978) found that girls regarded school as a place to celebrate their culture of femininity by smoking, gossiping about the boys they fancied, playing up teachers, and so on. So, what McRobbie is saying is that girl youth cultures use delinquent behaviour as a way of celebrating this culture of femininity, and so delinquency is quite a major factor in female youth cultures according to McRobbie.
And so to conclude. It seems that Delinquency is quite a major factor in most youth cultures, though different theorists have different ideas as to why, be it the Marxist theory that it is just youth trying to break away from capitalism, or functionalists who believe that it is all a part of a pre-defined structure. However, it is also clear that the effect and severity of this delinquency has and does get blown out of proportion with reality, in a bid to either divert attention from other matters if you are to believe Marxists, or simply because adults today forget the blemishes of their past, and firmly believe that things are worse now, and want to set out to prove it.
However today most youth subcultures do not need violence or breaking trends to be part of a crowd. Today many youth cultures are built around trends, fashions and interests. In correspondence to the amount of youth subcultures there are there are not really any major delinquent groups, where there are considered to be some then these are usually exposed, made examples of and over publicised, resulting in delinquency frequenting the headlines, for those groups that do contain delinquency it is a major part of it. Even minor things to youths do have to be taken into account as delinquency such as under age drinking and minor drugs, these are still delinquent activities. But also delinquency is also part of youth subculture, it is not the focal point of it but a part of life, small offences that do not result in any harm apart to themselves are a part of their youth. Things such as the aforementioned. It is all up to them as to what they do with their lives, it is far more widespread and diverse across certain classes than it was, it is now spreading into middle and upper class and not only through working class. Within my personal group of friends we concentrate on forgetting most of life’s problems and enjoy each other’s company, if you like a release rather than conforming to what the group does. But we still participate in what we feel minor delinquency, it is still evident.
