‘Making a Raise’ and ‘Dusting the Feds’: Contextualising Constructions of Risk and Youth Crime

Abstract

This chapter challenges some of the assumptions which inform the contemporary policy trajectory and the risk research paradigm which underpins it. It draws on a piece of ethnographic research which was conducted over a 20-month period and involved observations, focus groups, and interviews with a range of professionals, including Housing Officers, Community Workers, Youth Justice Professionals and Community Safety practitioners, young people and members of the local community living, or working, in a community on the edge of a large northern city in England — the Estate. The research adopted an appreciative approach (Yates, 2006) which sought to give voice to the perspectives of young people in order to generate insights regarding their perspectives around risk and crime from their position in social structural hierarchies. In critically appraising risk, the chapter focuses on the ‘intersection’ between what Wright Mills referred to as the ‘personal troubles of the milieu’ and the ‘public issues of social structure’ (1959:7–8). As such the chapter highlights the importance of context not only in shaping the risks which young people face, in a manner which extends beyond the constructions of risk in the risk factor paradigm, but also how they negotiate them in situ in the context of the sub-cultural milieu they inhabit.