The idea that Britain, the US and other western societies are witnessing the rise of an underclass of people at the bottom of the social heap, structurally and culturally distinct from traditional patterns of "decent" working-class life, has become increasingly popular in the 1990s. Anti-work, anti-social, and welfare dependent cultures are said to typify this new "dangerous class" and "dangerous youth" are taken as the prime subjects of underclass theories. Debates about the family and single-parenthood, about crime and about unemployment and welfare reforms have all become embroiled in underclass theories which, whilst highly controversial, have had remarkable influence on the politics and policies of governments in Britain and the US. This text addresses the underclass idea in relation to contemporary youth. It focuses upon unemployment, training, the labour market, crime, homelessness, and parenting. It should be of interest to students of social policy, sociology and criminology.

How are youth cultural identities rooted in gender, ethnicity and place? What resources do young people from ethnic minorities use in creating their cultural identities? Drawing upon interdisciplinary research, Ulrike Ziemer's case study demonstrates the different ways in which young people from ethnic minorities respond to the social, political, and cultural transformations of post-Soviet Russia and provides a detailed analysis of how local vs. global relations are experienced outside the West. Relying on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Ziemer explores the complex processes of identity formation and cultural experiences among young Armenians in Krasnodar krai and young Adyghs in the Republic of Adyghea. Both ethnic groups, Armenians and Adyghs, have a minority status in Russia, yet Adyghs are indigenous to the region while Armenians constitute a diaspora people. Ulrike Ziemer is the first to examine specifically Armenian and Adygh youth identities in the context of everyday life experiences in post-Soviet Russia.

Traces historical constructions of adolescence and considers coming of age in the late 20th century Young adults in the modern era face a completely differently set of challenges from previous generations. Tracing historical constructions of adolescence and their role in maintaining social order, James E. Cote and Anton L. Allahar persuasively argue that young people today constitute one of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable groups in society. Today, for the first time, teenagers and young adults in the United states, Canada, Japan, Scandinavia and Western Europe can expect to have a lower standard of living than their parents. Youth are conditioned to stay young linger and have, as a result, become socially and economically marginalized. Many young people amass credentials regardless of employment prospects and continue to live at home, often dependent on their parents, into their thirties. With fewer jobs available, young people are ironically targeted increasingly as consumers, rather than as producers. As new technologies continually reduce the work force and alter the social fabric, an entire generation of young people has struggled to keep up. What then does it mean to come of age in an advanced industrial or post-industrial society?

Covering a key topic in nearly every sociology course, this book is a thorough and lively introduction to the role and importance of youth and employment in contemporary British society. The book looks at the momentous changes that have occurred in the nature of youth employment in recent years. Examining the range of young people's experience of employment and unemployment, Professor Roberts highlights the importance of class, gender, ethnic divisions, and geography in explaining these differences. He assesses the huge impact of educational changes on the patterns of youth employment, and compares the British experience with the rest of Europe. The book will be an invaluable introduction and point of reference for students of sociology, human geography, and economics. The Oxford Modern Britain series comprises authoritative introductory books on all aspects of the social structure of modern Britain. Lively and accessible, the books will be the first point of reference for anyone interested in the state of contemporary Britain. They will be invaluable to those taking courses in the Social Sciences. Series Editor: Professor John Scott, Department of Sociology, University of Essex

The lure of drugs and alcohol is capturing today's youth in its fatal grip and may ultimately destroy our nation's future generations. The vicious cycle of abuse is one that parents, teachers, counselors, and other citizens decry on a daily basis. Dr. Thomas Milhorn, an expert on adolescent drug abuse, provides crucial information on all the major drugs of abuse - including depressants, narcotics, stimulants, cannabinoids, inhalants, steroids, and hallucinogens - and their lethal consequences. Dr. Milhorn contends that in order to confront the monster that is destroying our children's health and quality of life, we must first understand the psyche of drug and alcohol abusers and the natural progression of the disease of addiction. This respected physician and physiologist reveals the harmful combinations currently in vogue in the drug world and the shortand long-term effects they have on the body, and discusses ways to recognize and pinpoint the telltale signs of a user. He explores the question of why adolescents abuse drugs, as well as special issues affecting young female addicts. This powerful book also examines the fatal relationship between drugs and AIDS, and includes a brief history of AIDS, and lifesaving advice on AIDS prevention. Dr. Milhorn skillfully assesses the various inpatient and outpatient treatment choices. He realistically portrays the intense physical and emotional stages the user will pass through before becoming drug free, as well as the stresses placed upon families during the recovery process. As this valuable book relates, both parents and teachers have clearly defined roles, and each can use his or her own brand of influence to aid the adolescent on the journey back to a healthy mind and body. Finally, Dr. Milhorn presents a list of successful options available if a first treatment attempt should fail. We live in a society wh ere 12-year-olds are budding alcoholics and children are bombarded in school hallways with solicitations to ex

Bringing together a wealth of evidence drawn from court records, coroner's rolls, literary sources, and books of advice, this book weaves a rich tapestry of the life of London children during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Identity: Youth and Crisis collects Erik H. Erikson's major essays on topics originating in the concept of the adolescent identity crisis. Identity, Erikson writes, is an unfathomable as it is all-pervasive. It deals with a process that is located both in the core of the individual and in the core of the communal culture. As the culture changes, new kinds of identity questions arise—Erikson comments, for example, on issues of social protest and changing gender roles that were particular to the 1960s.

Representing two decades of groundbreaking work, the essays are not so much a systematic formulation of theory as an evolving report that is both clinical and theoretical. The subjects range from "creative confusion" in two famous lives—the dramatist George Bernard Shaw and the philosopher William James—to the connection between individual struggles and social order. "Race and the Wider Identity" and the controversial "Womanhood and the Inner Space" are included in the collection.

Originally published in 1990, Youth in Transition addresses the issue of large-scale policy intervention, related to problems of employment in Britain's youth. The book reflects the changes within sociology from studying youth as self-contained instigators of change, to examining the role they have come to play as the target of official, rather than popular or media attention. Changes in youth experience are affecting family relations and dependence or creating homelessness, regional economic disparities, demographic changes and training and employment opportunities, present a new model of youth and re-define its status. The book brings together original work in the field of youth and youth policy in the '80s and '90s.

How do we respond to harm faced by young people beyond their front doors? Can practitioners keep young people safe at school, in their neighbourhoods or with their friends when social care systems are designed to work with families? The Contextual Safeguarding approach has transformed how policy makers, social care leaders, practitioners and researchers understand harm that happens to young people in their communities and what is required to respond. Since 2015 it has been tested across the UK and internationally. This book shares stories from child sexual exploitation, child criminal exploitation and peer violence about what has been learnt on this journey. For anyone interested in how we safeguard young people beyond their front doors, this book shows how much we have achieved and raises big questions about what more we need to do to ensure young people are safe – whatever the context.

In this book, Charles R. Acland examines the culture that has produced both our heightened state of awareness and the bedrock reality of youth violence in the United States. Beginning with a critique of statistical evidence of youth violence, Acland compares and juxtaposes a variety of popular cultural representations of what has come to be a perceived crisis of American youth. After examining the dominant paradigms for scholarly research into youth deviance, Acland explores the ideas circulating in the popular media about a sensational crime known as the "preppy murder" and the confession to that crime. Arguing that the meaning of crime is never inherent in the event itself, he evaluates other sites of representation, including newspaper photographs (with a comparison to the Central Park "wilding"), daytime television talk shows (Oprah, Geraldo, and Donahue), and Hollywood youth films (in particular River's Edge). Through a cultural studies analysis of historical context, Acland blurs the center of our preconceptions and exposes the complex social forces at work upon this issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Acland asks of the social critic, "How do we know that we are measuring what we say we are measuring, and how do we know what the numbers are saying? Arguments must be made to interpret findings, which suggests that conclusions are provisional and, to various degrees, sites of contestation." He launches into this gratifying book to show that beyond the problematic category of "actual" crime, the United States has seen the construction of a new "spectacle of wasted youth" that will have specific consequences for the daily lives of the next generation.

Once a group of young people (reformed street robbers) had a vision. To transform their poor divided community. But the vision was tarnished by harsh reality, violent feuds and factional strife, corrupt and ineffective leaders, and youths involved in networks of criminality.
LTarnished Vision is the story of the rise and fall of a utopian community project told against a background of crime and delinquency in a troubled neighbourhood. This vivid and authentic account of life in Satellite City' is set in the 1980s, a decade when the promises of the enterprise culture failed to deliver, and the conditions were created for a generation hooked on crime.
Tarnished Vision depicts the 1980s inner city cycle of social tragedy followed by inept societal response, followed by social tragedy. But this is not only a story for the 1980s. The message is that programmes to save the inner cities, however well-resoourced, cannot afford to ignore the destructive frustrations of urban male youths wh are involved in crime. Community action programmes can be no more than window dressing to camouflage these realities.

Ceryl Teleri Davies' research in female-only spaces informs this illuminating guide to young women's experience of intimate relationships. Essential reading for those working with young people, the book makes a vital contribution to the study of gender-based violence. Her research reveals young women's understandings of what it means to have a healthy relationship, and considers the influence of gendered social norms within both healthy and abusive relationships. While contributing to the debate on how young women negotiate the conflicts inherent in contemporary constructions of gender, the book then suggests a pathway towards gender equality.

This is a study of the debate on male youth in the period 1880-1920. During these years, male working-class youth was regarded as posing a serious problem, not only economically, but also morally and socially. Harry Hendrick investigates the `making' of this problem, examining attitudes towards youth and its behaviour, contemporary perceptions of `boy labour', and the `discovery' of the working-class adolescent. He goes on to consider the attempts to solve the problem and create adaptable and efficient citizens, by measures including philanthropy (the youth movement), collectivism (a juvenile labour exchange and vocational guide system), and further education (part-time day continuation schools). Images of Youth demonstrates the significance, long underestimated, of the male adolescent in British society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Dr Hendrick's carefully researched and thorough study illuminates such major issues as poverty, unemployment, race, class conflict, industrial unrest, and the nature of democracy. Drawing in a further dimension, he charts the development of child and adolescent psychology and its contribution to the definition and perpetuation of the youth problem. He argues that the images of youth forged in this period had important and far-reaching consequences for age and class relations. Today the study of youth is of major importance; this book provides us with a comprehensive picture of its beginnings.

This book takes as its focus America in the 1980s which, at the time, was undergoing massive demographic and economic changes. The bulk of the book deals with Latino demographic, social, and economic characteristics: labor force participation, income, education, health, and political participation. It advocates that, in order to improve their situation, Latinos must understand their position as a group and as a community. The authors offer grounded speculation about the future of society, given two very important trends occurring simultaneously: the aging of the well-educated, Anglo Baby Boomer generation; and the growth of the much younger, less-educated Latino population.

Levels of suffering among young people have always been much higher than governments suggest. Indeed, policies aimed at young workers have often been framed in ways that help secure conformity to a new employment landscape in which traditional securities have been progressively removed. Increasingly punitive welfare regimes have resulted in new hardships, especially among young women and those living in depressed labour markets. Framed by the ideas of Norbert Elias, Young People in the Labour Market challenges the idea that changing economic landscapes have given birth to a 'Precariat' and argues that labour insecurity is more deep-rooted and complex than others have suggested. Focusing on young people and the ways in which their working lives have changed between the 1980s recession and the Great Recession of 2008/2009 and its immediate aftermath, the book begins by drawing attention to trends already emerging in the preceding two decades. Drawing on data originally collected during the 1980s recession and comparing it to contemporary data drawn from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, the book explores the ways in which young people have adjusted to the changes, arguing that life satisfaction and optimism are linked to labour market conditions. A timely volume, this book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers who are interested in fields such as Sociology, Social Policy, Management and Youth Studies.

This Element examines recent documentaries depicting marginalized youth who are ostensibly redeemed by their encounters with Shakespeare. These films emerge in response to four historical and discursive developments: the rise of reality television and its emphasis on the emotional transformation of the private individual; the concomitant rise of neoliberalism and emotional capitalism, which employ therapeutic discourses to individualize social inequality; the privatization of public education and the rise of so-called "no-excuses" or "new paternalist" charter schools; and the emergence of new modes of address infusing evangelical conversion narratives with a therapeutic self-help ethos.

New Zealand children from 1840 to 1890 were subjected to an unusual combination of agrarian existence and an industrial social philosophy in the newly formed schools. When schools became more universal in the expanding industrial society, a new emphasis on the control of children developed, and from 1920 onward, adult supervision in the form of heavily organized sports and playgrounds encroached more and more on the untrammeled freedom of the rural environment. Returning to his home country of New Zealand, Brian Sutton-Smith documents the relationship between children's play and the actual process of history. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of informants from every province and school district of New Zealand, the author illuminates for the first time the various social, cultural, historical, and psychological context in which children's play occurs. He treats both formal and informal play, as well as the play of both boys and girls.

Teen TV explores the history of television's relationship to teens as a desired, but elusive audience, and the ways in which television has embraced youth subcultures, tracing the shifts in American and global televisual and teen media. Organized chronologically to cover each generation since the inception of the medium in the 1940s, the book examines a wide range of historical and contemporary programming: from the broadcast bottleneck, multi-channel era that included youth-targeted spaces like MTV, the WB, and the CW, to the rise of streaming platforms and global crossovers. It covers the thematic concerns and narrative structure of the coming-of-age story, and the prevalent genre formations of teen TV and milestones faced by teen characters. The book also includes interviews with creators and showrunners of hit network television teen series, including Degrassi's Linda Schuyler, and the costume designer that established a heightened turn in the significance of teen fashion on the small screen in Gossip Girl, Eric Daman. This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and teachers interested in television aesthetics, TV genres, pop culture, and youth culture, as well as media and television studies.

The new updated edition of Children, Youth and Development explores the varied ways in which global processes in the form of development policies, economic and cultural globalisation, and international agreements interact with more locally specific practices to shape the lives of young people living in the poorer regions of the world. It examines these processes, and the effects they have on young people's lives, in relation to developing theoretical approaches to the study of children and youth. This landmark title brings together the stock of knowledge and approaches to understanding young people's lives in the context of development and globalization in the majority world for the first time. It introduces different theoretical approaches to the study of young people, and explores the ways in which these, along with predominantly Western conceptions of childhood and youth, have influenced how majority world children have been viewed and treated by international agencies. Contexts of globalisation and growing international inequality are explored, alongside more immediate contexts such as family and peer relationships. Chapters are devoted to groups of children deemed to be in need of protection and to debates concerning children's rights and their participation in development projects. Young people's health and education are considered, as is their involvement in work of various kinds, and the impacts of environmental change and hazards (including climate change). The book introduces material and concepts to readers in a very accessible way and within each chapter employs features such as boxed case studies, summaries of key ideas, discussion questions and guides to further resources. This edition has been updated to take account of significant changes in the contexts in which poor children grow up, notably the financial crisis and changing development policy environment, as well as recent theoretical developments. It is aimed at students on higher level undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as researchers who are unfamiliar with this area of research and practitioners in organisations working to ameliorate the lives of children in majority world countries.

Young people are often at the forefront of democratic activism, whether self-organised or supported by youth workers and community development professionals. Focusing on youth activism for greater equality, liberty and mutual care - radical democracy - this timely collection explores the movement's impacts on community organisations and workers. Essays from the Global North and Global South cover the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental activism and the struggles of refugees. At a time of huge global challenges, youth participation is a dynamic lens through which all community development scholars and participants can rethink their approaches.

Youth has been represented on screen for decades and has informed many directors' visual, narrative and social perspectives, but there has not been a body of work addressing the richness and complexity of this topic in a French and Francophone context. This volume offers new insights into the works of emerging and well-established directors alike, who all chose to place youth at the heart of their narrative and aesthetic concerns. Showing how the topic of 'youth' has inspired filmmakers to explore and reinvent common tropes associated with young people, the book also addresses how the representation of youth can be used to mirror the tensions - political, social, religious, economic or cultural - that agitate a society at a given time in its history.

Explores the changes that occurred as young people of the 1920s broke with nineteenth-century traditions, and assesses the impact of those changes on American life, then and now.

The rise of the health, beauty and fitness industries in recent years has led to an increased focus on the body. Body image, gender and health are issues of long-standing concern in sociology and in youth studies, but a theoretical and empirical focus on the body has been largely missing from this field. This book explores young people's understandings of their bodies in the context of gender and health ideals, consumer culture, individualisation and image. Body Work examines the body in youth studies. It explores paradoxical aspects of gendered body work practices, highlighting the contradiction in men's increased participation in these industries as consumers alongside the re-emphasis of their gendered difference. It explores the key ways in which the ideal body is currently achieved, via muscularising practices, slimming regimes and cosmetic procedures. Coffey investigates the concept of 'health' and how it is inextricably linked both to the bodily performance of gender ideals and an increased public emphasis on individual management and responsibility in the pursuit of a 'healthy' body. This book's conceptual framework places it at the forefront of theoretical work concerning bodies, affect and images, particularly in its development of Deleuzian research. It will appeal to a wide range of scholars and students in fields of youth studies, education, sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, affect and body studies.

Focuses specifically on the treatment of adolescents and young adults.