The gang today is seen as Britain's public enemy number one. This book tackles this gangland thesis head-on and refutes it, questioning how we think about and interpret violent street worlds and how and why we need to think about them in very different ways, pushing the boundaries of critical enquiry and providing a range of new ways of looking at disturbing realities. Through the novel use of authoethnography, the book contests the widely held thesis that urban gangs today represent a serious, novel and developing threat. In this guise, they have been blamed for causing the riots of 2011, most gun related crime, the sexual violation of women, and outbreaks of dangerous dogs. Hallsworth argues that when subject to critical scrutiny, there is always an excess to the violence blamed on gangs that is not gang related and explanations for problems blamed on gangs can be advanced without needing to evoke the gang as an explanatory factor. In light of this, the book considers how best we might understand the nature of violent street worlds without falling into the pitfalls of the discourse of gang talk, exploring questions such as 'How do we have a gang problem?' and 'How best do we avoid one?'This book is provocative, polemical and theoretical and one that seeks to make a significant intervention into both gangs studies and studies of urban violence more generally, commanding significant social attention in the academy and beyond.

Challenging the widely held conjecture that gangs represent 'the new face of youth crime' this book repudiates claims which situate the gang at the heart of sexual violence, mass shooting and control of the illegal drugs trade. It pushes the epistemological, methodological and ontological borders of cultural criminology in order to understand violent street worlds and the informal organisations that operate within them. In part polemic, in part theoretical treatise, the book deciphers the gang talk now mediated by a developing industry of gang-talkers and explores how street realities have become lost in a collectively induced fantasy where gangs are regarded as public enemy number one.