Is the official political silencing of children in a democracy rational and just, or is it arbitrary and capricious? How might democratic polities benefit from the political engagement and activism of young people? Michael Cummings argues that allowing children equal political rights with adults is required by the basic logic of democracy and can help strengthen the weak democracies of the twenty-first century. A good start is for governments to honor their obligations under the ambivalently utopian UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children's political views differ from those of adults on issues such as race, sex, militarism, poverty, education, gun violence, and climate change. Young activists are now sparking change in many locations around the globe.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This expansive, lively introduction charts the connections between international youth cultures and the development of global media and communication. From 1950s drive-ins and jukeboxes to contemporary social media, the book examines modern youth cultures in their social, economic, and political contexts. Exploring the rise of young people as a distinct media market, the book examines the relation of youth to modern consumerism, marketing, and digital technologies. The chapters are packed with analysis of media representations of youth, debates about the media's 'effects' on young audiences, and young people's use of the media to elaborate identities and negotiate social relationships. Drawing on a wealth of international examples, the book explores the impact of globalisation and new media technologies on youth cultures around the world. Assessing a profusion of worldwide research, the book shows how modern youth cultures can only be understood as part of an international web of connections, exchanges, and experiences. With an ideal balance between detailed examples and engaging analysis, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in youth cultures and the modern media.

This expansive, lively introduction charts the connections between international youth cultures and the development of global media and communication. From 1950s drive-ins and jukeboxes to contemporary social media, the book examines modern youth cultures in their social, economic, and political contexts. Exploring the rise of young people as a distinct media market, the book examines the relation of youth to modern consumerism, marketing, and digital technologies. The chapters are packed with analysis of media representations of youth, debates about the media's 'effects' on young audiences, and young people's use of the media to elaborate identities and negotiate social relationships. Drawing on a wealth of international examples, the book explores the impact of globalisation and new media technologies on youth cultures around the world. Assessing a profusion of worldwide research, the book shows how modern youth cultures can only be understood as part of an international web of connections, exchanges, and experiences. With an ideal balance between detailed examples and engaging analysis, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in youth cultures and the modern media.

This book focuses on the social and intersectional determinants of mental health among youth. The innovative and cutting edge text arises out of multidisciplinary fields of academic, researchers, policy makers, practitioners, artists, and youth. Contributions from Canada, Germany, Portugal, South Korea, Burkina Faso, Afghanistan, and Jamaica addresses the complexities and the opportunities for youth across contexts. Each chapter entails an introduction to the topic, literature review and research findings, discussion, and implications in regard to research, policy, and practice. A unique aspect of the book is the inclusion of a critical response to each chapter's content from diverse stakeholders (such as policy makers, front line workers, practitioners, community activists, artists and youth).The book is a critical and current contribution to exploring youth mental health and, specifically, the ways in which youth learn, live, and resist in a world around them. Topics examined include youth social engagement, civic integration, and political participation at multiple local, regional, and transnational levels.

An effective new therapeutic model that integrates the client's and therapist's values

This groundbreaking book offers therapists and counselors an effective new therapeutic model based on hermeneutics--the art and science of interpretation. It recognizes that the clinician is not a neutral observer in the therapeutic process but brings to the interaction his or her own values, judgments, and prejudices.

Grounded in theory yet deeply inspirational, the book is filled with rich personal reflections from real-world clinicians who have used this model and found the process to be deeply transformative. This new approach not only deepens the therapeutic relationship but has proven to be especially effective with young clients at risk for negative outcomes.

What do the stories youth in state care tell about life in their family of origin? What stories do they tell us about coming into care, living in care, and relationships with foster-parents and social workers? This book presents the stories of youth in care, though not in splendid isolation, but as interactively produced, turn by turn in interviews, and in conversations with other youth. By using tools from conversation analysis (CA), the author examines interviews with youth in care and social workers, to unfold the essential and incorrigible reflexivity of story production. CA allows us to grasp the ways that a youth's story emerges turn by turn, and is an artefact of a social relation between a youth and an interviewer. This text provides social work readers with a sense of art, artistry, and ambiguity at the heart of social interaction. It will be required reading for all social work students and academics looking for a deeper, more philosophical understanding of the profession.

This book-containing contributions from scholars who are well-known for their research on gangs, and selected as experts on the assigned topics-examines youth gangs from a developmental/life-course perspective, exploring a myriad of issues related to gang membership, its causes, its consequences, and various intervention efforts to both prevent gang membership and reduce the problematic impact of gangs. Beginning with research exploring the intergenerational continuity in gang membership and examining the causal processes leading to gang membership, the structure of the book reflects the developmental sequence of gang membership. The consequences of gang membership for youth are examined, as are intervention strategies. The book also presents the first conceptual framework on female gang involvement, taking into account the differences in the paths and roles that women and girls may take into the gang. The book concludes by exploring how gang membership affects job possibilities for young adults. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Crime and Justice.

The concept of moral panic has received considerable scholarly attention, but as yet little attention has been accorded to panics over children and youth. This is the first book to examine this important and controversial social issue by employing a rigorous intellectual framework to explore the cultural construction of youth, through the dissemination of moral panics. It is accessible in manner and makes use of the latest contemporary research by addressing some of the pressing recent concerns relating to children and youth, including cyber-related panics, child abuse and pornography, education and crime. A truly international collection, this volume features new global research focusing on the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and France as well as the United States. Genuinely multidisciplinary in approach, it will appeal to researchers and students across the social sciences and humanities - from sociology and social theory, to media, education, anthropology, criminology, geography and history.

This book examines the lives of the sentenced to argue that 'sentencing' should be re-conceived to consider the human perspective. It combines a range of modern criminological and legal theories together with interviews with prisoners in New South Wales, to examine their lives during and beyond completing the terms of imprisonment, for a more continuous and coherent perspective on the process of 'sentencing'. This book makes a strong argument for the practical advantages of listening to the voices of the sentenced and it is therefore a useful tool for the correctional community engaged in providing services and programmes to reduce recidivism. A methodological and well-researched text, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of criminal justice and the penal system, as well as policy makers and practitioners.

An updated and revised edition of the controversial classic--now more relevant than ever--argues that boys are the ones languishing socially and academically, resulting in staggering social and economic costs. Girls and women were once second-class citizens in the nation's schools. Americans responded with concerted efforts to give girls and women the attention and assistance that was long overdue. Now, after two major waves of feminism and decades of policy reform, women have made massive strides in education. Today they outperform men in nearly every measure of social, academic, and vocational well-being. Christina Hoff Sommers contends that it's time to take a hard look at present-day realities and recognize that boys need help. Called "provocative and controversial...impassioned and articulate" (The Christian Science Monitor), this edition of The War Against Boys offers a new preface and six radically revised chapters, plus updates on the current status of boys throughout the book. Sommers argues that the problem of male underachievement is persistent and worsening. Among the new topics Sommers tackles: how the war against boys is harming our economic future, and how boy-averse trends such as the decline of recess and zero-tolerance disciplinary policies have turned our schools into hostile environments for boys. As our schools become more feelings-centered, risk-averse, competition-free, and sedentary, they move further and further from the characteristic needs of boys. She offers realistic, achievable solutions to these problems that include boy-friendly pedagogy, character and vocational education, and the choice of single-sex classrooms. The War Against Boys is an incisive, rigorous, and heartfelt argument in favor of recognizing and confronting a new reality: boys are languishing in education and the price of continued neglect is economically and socially prohibitive.

"Linguistic Variation as Social Practice" is a study of the speech of the adolescent population of a midwestern high school, relating individuals' subtle patterns of pronunciation and grammar to participation in the peer social order.

Based on two years of sociolinguistic and ethnographic fieldwork in one school, supplemented by shorter periods of fieldwork in three other schools, the study focuses on the polarized social categories, the "jocks" and the "burnouts," that dominate social organization in all of these schools. This book describes the social categories, networks, and practices that constitute the local adolescent social order, relates these to wider patterns in the urban-suburban area, and ultimately to wider societal patterns.

"Linguistic Variation as Social Practice" is an ideal text for advanced students of sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics.

Youth are one of the fastest growing segments of the homeless population. Although there has been much research on how youth become homeless and survive on the streets, we know very little about their pathways off the street and the many challenges that present during this process. This book relates the lived experiences of homeless youth as they negotiate the individual, sociocultural, and economic tensions of transitioning out of homeless and street contexts and cultures. Through interviews the authors gained privileged entry into the lives of youth in Toronto and Halifax over a year-long period. Through rich qualitative prose, quantitative elaboration, and comic-book narratives, participants spoke of courage, fortitude, strength, adversity, and at times, simple bad luck. Ultimately this became a story of fragility, complexity, living "on the edge," and the (re)-building of identity.

For some, life's introduction to death and grief comes early, and when it does it can take many forms. Not only does Dealing with Dying, Death, and Grief during Adolescence tackle them all, it does so with David Balk's remarkable sensitivity to and deep knowledge of the pressures and opportunities adolescents face in their transition from childhood to adulthood. In seamless, jargon-free language, Balk brings readers up to date with what we know about adolescent development, because over time such changes form the backstory we need to comprehend the impact of death and bereavement in an adolescent's life. The book's later chapters break down the recent findings in the study of life-threatening illness and bereavement during adolescence. And, crucially, these chapters also examine interventions that assist adolescents coping with these difficulties. Clinicians will come away from this book with both a grounded understanding of adolescent development and the adolescent experience of death, and they'll also gain specific tools for helping adolescents cope with death and grief on their own terms. For any clinician committed to supporting adolescents facing some of life's most difficult experiences, this integrated, up-to-date, and deeply insightful text is simply the book to have. David E. Balk is professor in the department of health and nutrition sciences at Brooklyn College (CUNY), where he directs the graduate program in thanatology. He is the author of Adolescent Development: Early Through Late Adolescence, Helping the Bereaved College Student, and several other books on death and bereavement. He is also co-editor of the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Thanatology (Routledge, 2013).

What happens when kids are held captive to an endless stream of MTV-like television commercials? Armed with a tape recorder, Roy F. Fox, a language and literacy researcher, spent two years interviewing over 200 students in rural Missouri schools. Why? Because more than eight million students in 40% of America's schools, every day, watch TV commercials as part of Channel One's news broadcast. Students read commercials far more often than they read "Romeo and Juliet." These ads now constitute America's only national curriculum.

In this ground-breaking study, Fox explores how these commercials affect kids' thinking, language, and behavior. He found that such ads do indeed help shape children into more active consumers. For example, months after a pizza commercial had stopped airing, students reported that one brief scene showed a couple on an airplane. The plane's seats, students noted, were red with little blue squares that have arrows sticking out of them. Also, kids blurred one type of TV text with another, often mistaking Pepsi ads for public service announcements. Kids replayed commercials by repeating or reconstructing an ad in some way--by singing songs, jingles, and catch-phrases; by cheering at sports events (one crowd at a school football game erupted into the Domino's Pizza cheer); by creating art projects that mirrored specific commercials, and even by dreaming about commercials (the product, not the dreamer, is the star).

The Handbook of Juvenile Forensic Psychology is a comprehensive handbook for mental health professionals working with juveniles in the criminal justice system and in family and dependency courts. Written by a panel of experts in the field, the book focuses on the proactive prevention, accurate evaluation, and progressive treatment for delinquent juveniles and for juveniles caught in the web of a contentious divorce or in the foster care system.

This book challenges and revises existing ways of thinking about leaving care policy, practice and research at regional, national and international levels. Bringing together contributors from fifteen countries, it covers a range of topical policy and practice issues within national, international or comparative contexts. These include youth justice, disability, access to higher education, the role of advocacy groups, ethical challenges and cultural factors. In doing so it demonstrates that, whilst young people are universally a vulnerable group, there are vast differences in their experiences of out-of-home care and transitions from care, and their shorter and longer-term outcomes. Equally, there are significant variations between jurisdictions in terms of the legislative, policy and practice supports and opportunities made available to them. This significant edited collection is essential reading for all those who work with young people from care, including social workers, counsellors, and youth and community practitioners, as well as for students and scholars of child welfare.

Many contemporary armed conflicts are fueled by young people, who, after peace accords are signed, remain both potential threats to peace and significant peace building resources. Troublemakers or Peacemakers? explores the contributions of youth and their multidimensional roles as political activists, soldiers, criminals, economic actors, peace activists, and community-builders. This volume breaks new ground in the importance it assigns to the political agency of children and youth in war zones. Contributors support their arguments and conclusions with original research based on intensive fieldwork in places such as Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Guatemala, Colombia, Angola, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Israel-Palestine. The leading scholars who have contributed to this volume contend that the puzzle of why peace accords succeed and fail can be better understood with the use of a multidimensional youth lens. Troublemakers or Peacemakers? is a vital resource for anyone interested in conflict resolution and the peace building process.

This book takes a global perspective to address the concept of belonging in youth studies, interrogating its emergence as a reoccurring theme in the literature and elucidating its benefits and shortcomings. While belonging offers new alignments across previously divergent approaches to youth studies, its pervasiveness in the field has led to criticism that it means both everything and nothing and thus requires deeper analysis to be of enduring value. The authors do this work to provide an accessible, scholarly account of how youth studies uses belonging by focusing on transitions, participation, citizenship and mobility to address its theoretical and historical underpinnings and its prevalence in youth policy and research.

Substance Misuse and Young People: Critical Issues is a comprehensive source of information on young people's requirements for assessment, treatment and other interventions because of their misuse of substances. It highlights approaches that enhance understanding of the routes that lead young people to substance misuse and also the routes away from it. The emergence of new substances and methods of misuse makes this ever more relevant. The authors are international experts in the fields of psychiatry, paediatrics, medicine, psychology, genetics, resilience, neuropharmacology and epidemiology. This book acknowledges how widespread both substance misuse and psychiatric disorders are and explores the complex, challenging links between co-occurring conditions. Use of substances is associated with illness and premature mortality, and more so for people who have combined disorders. The authors critically assess the vital need for intervention during adolescence and early adulthood. They provide detailed clinical views of the psychosocial interventions and medications currently available and illustrate them with case studies that emphasise adolescents' experiences and thoughtful lifestyle-specific interventions. This book provides theoretical knowledge and indicates the practical skills that practitioners require for work with young people who misuse substances. It is highly applicable to medical practitioners, psychologists, pharmacists, social workers, police officers, probation officers, educationalists and related social and healthcare professionals.

This book, now available in paperback, explores the development of youth policy and youth work in Ireland from the mid-nineeenth century to the present day. Based on original research, funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS), it looks at the social construction of youth, the emergence of the early youth movements and the nature and scope of contemporary youth work. Key issues include: the shift from mainstream to targeted provision, the professionalisation of the sector and the increased partnership between the state and voluntary sector. A second major theme is the treatment of young people in industrial and reformatory schools, with particular reference to the findings of the Ryan Report on child abuse (2009). This is the only book which combines an exploration of the history and current scope of youth work and youth policy, and which is based on comprehensive original research. It will be essential reading for lecturers and students in youth work, social sciences, social history and related fields. -- .

This edited collection focuses on different aspects of everyday violence, harassment and threats in schools. It presents a number of in-depth studies of everyday life in schools and uses examples and case studies from different countries to fuel a discussion on national differences and similarities. The book discusses a broad range of concepts, findings and issues, under the umbrella of three main themes: 1) Power relations, homosociality and violence; 2) Sexualized violence and schooling; and 3) Everyday racism, segregation and schooling. Specific topics include sexuality policing, bullying, sexting, homophobia, and online rape culture. The school is young people's central workplace, and therefore of great importance to students' general feeling of wellbeing, safety and security. However, there is no place where youth are at greater risk of being exposed to harassment and violations than at school and on their way to and from school. Threats are a relatively common experience among school students, but some aspects of these mundane and frequent harassments and violations are not taken seriously and are, therefore, not reported. Harassment and violations often have negative effects on youth and children, and increase their risks of such adverse outcomes as school dropout, drug use, and criminal behaviour. Contemporary research has shown that gender is of great importance to how students handle and report, or do not report, various violent situations. Studies have also revealed how the notions of masculinity and of being a victim can be conflicting identities and affect how students handle situations of threat, violence and harassment. The importance of gender is also particularly evident with regard to sexual harassment. Female students generally report greater exposure to sexual harassment than male students do.

Drawing on interviews and focus groups with young mothers and fathers, their parents and other relatives, this book provides a rich exploration of the experience of being a teenage parent now, and for earlier generations, closely examining teenage pregnancy and parenting in families where two or more generations have been teenage mothers. Brown also explores the cultural and social contexts of teenage parenting by including the views of people who have many years' experience of working with young parents in health, social and welfare settings. The book challenges policy contexts which focus on negative aspects of teenage parenting, and shows that for many young people, parenting can be a positive experience. It will appeal to academics, policymakers and professionals with an interest in teenage pregnancy and parenting.

This original and fresh approach to the emotions of adolescence focuses on the leisure lives of working-class boys and young men in the inter-war years. Being boys challenges many stereotypes about their behaviour. It offers new perspectives on familiar and important themes in inter-war social and cultural history, ranging from the cinema and mass consumption to boys' clubs, personal advice pages, street cultures, dancing, sexuality, mobility and the body. It draws on many autobiographies and personal accounts and is particularly distinctive in offering an unusual insight into working-class adolescence through the teenage diaries of the author's father, which are interwoven with the book's broader analysis of contemporary leisure developments. Being boys will be of interest to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences and is also relevant to those teaching and studying in the fields of child development, education, and youth and community studies. -- .

Alcohol and other drugs of abuse cause significant physi ological changes, especially during development. The effects on the infant and child range from severe mental retardation to mild changes in activity and neurological functions. Although the level of intake needed to cause fetal damage is not clear, the magnitude of the problem is significant, with many long-term sequelae. As a result, it becomes critical to better diagnose and manage drug and alcohol use during pregnancy. This must involve special training for health care professionals. In addi tion, recognition of the psychosocial factors affecting alcohol use, especially by youth and young adults, is critical to modi fying behavior, and thus reducing fetal alcohol exposure. Cultural considerations can also come into play in modi fying alcohol and drug use by women so as to reduce fetal damage. The trends in alcohol and drug use by youth forecast rising levels of damage to infants. These children will need extensive medical and educational care for years to decades. Clearly, understanding of the role women must take in modifying their alcohol and drug use during pregnancy will facilitate changes in our cultural and educational practices that will help reduce fetal trauma from alcohol.