By Susan McVie
This report presents key findings on gang membership and knife carrying amongst a cohort of young people based on data collected by the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime (ESYTC). The analysis was commissioned in light of a lack of quantitative data measuring the extent of gang membership and knife crime in Scotland.
Edinburgh: Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (SCCJR), 2010. 50p.
By John Pitts
This book provides an account of the emergence, nature and impact of armed youth gangs in an East London Borough over the last decade. It describes the challenges these armed young men and women pose to their communities, those charged with preventing crime and those struggling to vouchsafe 'community safety'. While the focus of the book is 'local', the processes it outlines and the effects it chronicles have both a national and international relevance.
It argues that the main reason behind the emergence of the armed youth gang has been the coalesence of two previously discreet socially deviant groups; the rowdy, episodically criminal, adolescent peer group on the one hand and the locally-based organized criminal network on the other.
The book analyses the impact of the globalisation of the drugs trade and the consequent shift in the focus of local organized crime from the 'blag' to the 'business'. It also discusses how socio-economic and cultural factors, as well as family and neighbourhood histories and loyalties and localized racial antagonisms all play their part in the emergence of the armed youth gang.
Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan Publishing, 2008. 188p.
By Jaideep Gupte, Dolf te Lintelo and Inka Barnett.
Much of Africa is urbanising fast and its young population is projected to constitute the largest labour force in the world. While urbanisation can be linked closely with economic development, we also know that it is the least developed countries that have younger populations than the rest of the world. This duality implies that understanding the nature of risks and vulnerabilities faced by urban youth, how they are impacted by them, as well as how they respond to and may be resilient against them, continue to be important questions for furthering development in sub-Saharan Africa. A key conceptual debate surrounds how the category of ‘youth’ is understood, as several definitions of the term exist, ranging from age bands to social or cultural framings. In this paper we look to review how the various definitions of ‘youth’ relate to three dominant discourses about poverty and vulnerability in urbanising Africa: (1) food insecurity; (2) unemployment/joblessness; and (3) violence/insecurity. By doing so, we seek to identify if and when these are responsive to youth needs and practical in terms of policy efforts aiming to reduce poverty and vulnerability in urban areas.
Brighton UK: Institute of Development Studies, 2014. 26p.
