Abstract
Our work contributes through a cultural criminological perspective to a contextualised knowledge of street violence and its constructed meanings; uncertainty, familiarity and strangeness in spaces of urban disadvantage as perceived by Scottish white youths are examined. Youth criminal and anti-social behaviour associated with knife-carrying is widely reported and structures political and media discourses which classify street culture. In our article we argue that a particular symbolic construction of social space, as experienced and constructed by weapon-carrying young white men in Glasgow, informs the landscape of violence judged in terms of official statistics and fear of crime. Signal crime theory as a particular type of cultural criminology affords insights about why weapons are carried. Links with a hierarchical codification of consumer culture inform the findings and resonate with the penetration of capitalism in the lives of the marginalised street youth.
Highlights
Our work contributes through a cultural criminological perspective to a contextualised knowledge of street violence and its constructed meanings; uncertainty, familiarity and strangeness in spaces of urban disadvantage as perceived by Scottish white youths are examined
In our article we argue that a particular symbolic construction of social space, as experienced and constructed by weapon-carrying young white men in Glasgow, informs the landscape of violence judged in terms of official statistics and fear of crime
Cultural influence helps construct interpersonal relations and social judgement and it is to the analysis of urban spaces where the marginalised live on the detritus of consumer society that cultural criminology engages and studied the apparent irrationalities of that social space (Cohen 1972)
Summary
Cultural criminology engages with the ontological fragility of late-modernity, structural inequality, uncertainty, and how these haunt the included and excluded, impacting their fear and vindictiveness (Ferrell and Hayward 2014). Attention should focus on the ‘‘compressed spaces’’ of their lives to understand gang formation and violence as cultural phenomena that develop in specific ways in response to socially constructed scripts In that vein both Raban and de Certeau highlight transgression as an underlife of the city, not pathology. Fraser’s (2013) participant observations explored the social constructions of teenage white males about their street lives, many of whom admitted to committing violent and anti-social actions and affiliations with their local ‘gang’ Fraser argues their ‘gang’ identity is ‘‘fluid and context specific’’ To that end our research engages with research participants who are weaponcarrying young men It is their particular constructions of space, time and their social settings that we endeavour to understand better and, by implication, add to our knowledge about why weapons are carried in the contemporary urban street
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