Solving the Youth Crime ‘Problem' | Stephen Case | TEDxLoughboroughU

Hello, my name is Professor Steve Case and I'm going to talk to you about the

problem

of

youth

crime

and how I think we can solve it. It's a pretty simple and pretty ambitious conversation. Now that juvenile

crime

is a

problem

,

youth

is coming into its own. The problem is a new problem, a growing problem: young people who commit crimes are being left unchecked in a society that desperately needs control, but nothing we have done in the past has worked adequately to try to solve this arm problem. youth and that is the message that we receive from government politicians, from the media, from some academics, that is the message that the general public receives, is it true that there is no youth crime and the problem of crime Youth is what we call a social construction that has been created, manipulated and exaggerated by them? interest groups has become a self-fulfilling prophecy created by the methods that we have used to understand it and the methods that we have used to address it and often to serve the interests of these groups and I'm going to tell you what do I mean by this?

We will take you on a five stage journey through the creation manipulation and hype of this problem. I'm going to start by talking about the creation of youth as a category and I'll go on to talk about the creation of the problem of juvenile delinquency, then I'll talk to you about how that problem of juvenile delinquency has been maintained and perpetuated, then how the actual maintenance of the problem It has been an illusion to serve the interests of the government and the media and finally I will give you my ideas based on my research on what the solution to this problem could be.

I'm going to use images in this movie from here The Wizard of Oz because I think they are very illustrative of the points I'm trying to make. Because these guys are in the movie, they went on a trip, they encounter a problem, a terrifying problem, that forces them to flee to a supposedly all-powerful being that can help them control and solve this problem, but the reality is when they go back As the curtain comes down they discover that this supposedly all-powerful being is working extremely hard to maintain the illusion of the problem the illusion of his own control over the problem when the real solution to the problem is quite simple it turns out to be a book of Water, I don't explore the ending if Has anyone missed the spoiler alert for the movie, so let's start with a bold statement. 200 years ago, juvenile crime did not exist.

There was no such thing in the UK, there was no such thing, so it certainly didn't exist. a problem of juvenile delinquency because we did not have a category called youth, they had not yet created what we had were children and adults, we had children who were increasingly visible in society because they no longer worked in factories after the Industrial Revolution. They were pushed into the streets, but they didn't have any mandatory formal education to attend, so they walked the streets all day in groups doing what Shield Rijn does, being different from adults in their appearance, in their behavior, in their language, in their boisterous and noisy and energetic and chaotic and noisy and problematic and annoying attitudes being children in other words and has caused adults in society great anxiety, how we understand this group and how we control them and what did was create a conflict and ambivalence about how to understand children that is illustrated there when the lion in The Wizard of Oz jumps onto the dangerous, threatening, noisy, boisterous road, gets hit on the nose and starts crying and turns away. childish, innocent and vulnerable, and these were contradictory opinions that reflected how children were understood in society because, on the one hand, because they were increasingly visible and different and in the bustling society in the media, the To the general public, politicians saw children as threatening and dangerous and somehow out of control, but on the other hand, we were beginning to construct visions of children in society as innocent and vulnerable and in need of support and protection, so social reformers and the middle classes were starting to see children as children for the first time, distinct from adults, so we had these parallel views of children. innocent threat and how do we resolve that which causes great ambivalence and ambiguity in the minds of the public so how is it resolved well?

One way to do it, one way to solve this problem was to create a new category of person called adolescence or youth is older than a child, so puberty is a teenager younger than an adult, so we created the category youth and we understood that this stage of development has been plagued by storms, stress, chaos and dramatic and rapid disorders and changes, physical, emotional, psychological, hormonal II. A period of chaos for an older child and a teenager or young person lent itself quite well to understanding children's behavior as threatening and, in particular, understanding children's behavior when they broke the law, so what we had was this dichotomy : We had innocent children and adolescence or dangerous and threatening young people.

We have socially constructed the category of youth and that is the first stage, the next stage is to create juvenile delinquency and exaggerate it until it becomes a problem and what happened in the mid-19th century, when adolescence was being created, were the official statistics of crime. were being created: for the first time in our society we began measuring crime to inform our responses to it. Initially, crime was measured based on the type of severity of the crime, but then it began to be measured based on age and a category, this new category of youth. gave us a new category of delinquency to measure juvenile delinquency, we could compartmentalize or categorize delinquency by stage of development, so we created juvenile delinquency, the response to this was special attention from the government, the media, the public, so the government began creating legislation to respond. to juvenile delinquency and reformatory structures and systems juvenile courts penitentiary institutions, for example, the government created new laws that only minors or young people could violate, called status crimes, precocity and school truancy, being two good examples that thus consolidated us in this idea of Juvenile delinquency is a creation in existence, we are legislating its existence through the creation of structures, official statistics, personalized responses and that influences the media representations of this vision of this new behavior on juvenile delinquency, but the problem here was than this special attention from media and criminal justice politicians.

Agencies like the police and the courts had a negative knock-on effect, so young people started to be targeted, they started to be labeled, they started to be criminalized by this special attention, so they made their way more and more into the statistics. crime officers, inevitably every year. The official statistics on juvenile delinquency increased year after year and year after year they increased to the point that eventually juvenile delinquency was considered a social problem because it increased year after year because it received special attention when in reality it was just a behavior because juvenile delinquency occurs. . I do not deny the existence of juvenile delinquency.

I deny that it should be seen as a problem, but juvenile crime does happen, but it had received so much national attention that it was perpetuated to the level of a problem and once it was seen as a problem in the public eye and in the eyes of the media and the eyes of politicians, deserved more special attention that exaggerated the problem or the perception of the problem and so it continued and has continued for more than 200 years, so the youth currency problem is a self-fulfilling prophecy that has been created and legitimized, if you will, by the methods we have used to respond to it, so we no longer have this innocent versus threatening view of children in society, whether it is the problem of youth crime on the streets that seen on the streets is uncontrolled use committing crimes a danger to society that causes fear among the general public we should all run away from it who do we turn to for support to control and address the problem?

Well, we turn to the government, but the government has helped consolidate and exaggerate the problem in the first place, creating this fear of young people in our minds by creating itself as a kind of agent of social control that has power over this problem. the government defines the parameters of juvenile delinquency decides what a youth is the government has historically decided how old people can be to be considered juvenile delinquents or youthful offenders what is the age of criminal responsibility and is it 10 in our country right now, but historically it has been as low as 7, so the government extends the category of juvenile crimes to cover children who were never considered young adolescents from 7 years to 12 years from 10 years to 12 years now and not use their children, but when they break the law they are seen as defenders of youth, so what we are doing there is artificially expanding the category of youth crimes to include more and more people within it, which artificially exaggerates the scope or perception of a problem, okay, what it also does is exaggerate the illusion that the government has any kind of control over this problem because they also define the certain way, they dictate the strategies and priorities of the criminal justice agencies that deal with this problem, They are assigned the task of addressing it.

They mandate the police to prioritize youth crime They mandate other criminal justice agencies and the courts to deal with youth crime Okay, so the government has control over the magnitude of the problem and the magnitude of the issue they address. the government wants to be seen to be doing something about it. social problems regardless of the extent to which the government has collaborated in creating these social problems, wants to be seen as having control of these problems and having power over them, creates that image of dependency among the general public to There are many reasons, including winning votes and maintaining public trust, but if you pull back the curtain and look at the reality of the situation, you will find a government in which politicians have historically collaborated with the media. communication and certain academics to maintain and exaggerate the extent of the problem to maintain their own illusion of control over it by working frantically behind the scenes so that this problem does not disappear or the perception of this problem does not disappear by creating mechanisms to respond to it to legitimize it legislation and structures and organizations and laws and legislation, but I can say it again because it emphasizes the scope of the problem because governments will create more legislation on top of legislation to exaggerate their level of control or perceived control over the problem and the media collaborates and the means when what the government is doing here is called a straw man attack, they are misrepresenting a social problem at the level of a problem that they can be seen to solve and really the problem does not exist, it is very, very easy to do , they represent the problem as bigger than it is more often than it is more serious than it is they misrepresent their own level of control and ability over the problem to maintain public dependence to serve their own interests to solid newspapers to gain an audience to gain trust of the public to justify their own existence and the existence of the responses that they implemented to address this issue and represent it as a problem, so what do we do about it?

It is as simple as pouring cold water on the problem, we need to change our perspective on juvenile delinquency so that we no longer see it as a problem, we understand the problems and we know that it exists and we do not deny it but we do not see it as a problem we see the government politicians media academics are working together to not only originally create a whole category of youth and juvenile delinquency but also generate this problem perpetuate this problem consolidate this problem and exaggerate this problem no, we see the problem itself as a social construction because the problem of juvenile delinquency is a red herring the real problems we have Problems created by adults Social deprivation and disadvantages Poverty Unemployment Unmet needs Health problems Psychological problems experienced by children and young people Adults need to support them with juvenile delinquency no It is a problem in itself, it is a manifestation of a series of other problems that we should focus on children and young people are not the problems themselves, they are part of the solution to the problem and my research has developed a model called positive juvenile justice that responds to children who break the law as children first, they are children in their status at their age in their relative lack of maturity and lack of developmentresponsibility and understanding and that must be recognized and prioritized in everything we do in response to youth crime we do not problematize seeing children and young people as dangerous or threatening to you The problem of youth is a problem in itself as a reality in which we can all agree we address real issues everything we do with children and young people must be appropriate and child-friendly must involve them must be carried out in partnership I' We have generated a wealth of evidence by working in partnership with children, young people, families, juvenile justice agencies, politicians to demonstrate that these approaches are much more effective than government approaches in

solving

some of these problems that lead to youth crime and put them much more into perspective because that is what we need to prove the reality of these children as part of the solution to the problems they face and that have been generated by adults we must now promote positive outcomes and positive behaviors for these children and young people while

solving

the problems that have led them to juvenile crimes we should not punish too much , stigmatize, label, attack or do all the things that have happened helped create, manipulate and perpetuate this problem in the first place, so this change in practice may also lead to a change in perspective on how we view youth crime and how we see the use and young people so that we no longer see them as a problem and We start to address the real problems through positive juvenile justice in children first and that's what I think.