2009/05/14 by John Muncie · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Crime Patterns and Interventions #Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance #Crime, Deviance, and Social Control
paper · doi:10.1093/bjc/azp025
openalex publication_date 2009/05/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
The conventional wisdom is that the ‘violent youth gang’ is more of an American than a British phenomenon. In addition, gang research appears perennially hampered by continually disputed definitions of what exactly constitutes a ‘gang’. Despite this, the search for gang formations in the United Kingdom appears unrelenting, in part driven in this case by an apparent upsurge in teenage homicides in 2007 and 2008. Most pre-existing research has, however, tended to remain circumspect about the existence of gangs in the United Kingdom, especially when considered as long-standing communities of identity with hierarchical structures and as centres of illegal enterprise. In the late 1990s, Bill Sanders (2005), an American academic, moved to Brixton, London, to ‘discover’ the United States-style gang in the United Kingdom. However, he could find no evidence for any such existence in either the past or the present. Research for the Youth Justice Board (2007) also warned of ‘talking up’ the existence of youth gangs, claiming that, while there are gangs that use serious violence and threats to assert control locally (often in competition with similar groups), these are more likely to involve young adults. Moreover, Home Office homicide figures for recent years suggest that teenage killings have remained largely stable. It is these ‘orthodoxies’ that John Pitts attempts to refute through his insistence that the ‘face of youth crime’ is indeed changing—and for the worse.