Children and development II: 'youth', violence and

Progress in Development Studies 8, 4 (2008) pp. 345–48

Progress report

Children and development II: ‘youth’, violence and juvenile justice Gareth A. Jones Department of Geography & Environment, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK

The high street near my house in South London has experienced a crime wave in recent years. Armed gangs of mostly young males have killed hundreds of people in an orgy of violence, apparently prompted by their involvement with drugs, their social exclusion, and need to defend their territory. Thankfully, this ‘youth violence’ is limited to my cinema, as City of God, La Virgen del Sicario, Tsotsi and, most recently, Ghosts of Cité Soleil demonstrate the harsh ‘realíty’ of growing up in Rio de Janeiro, Medellín, Johannesburg and Port au Prince. Youth violence has become a global image that sells, wins prizes for the filmmakers, and engages cinemagoers through a voyeuristic glimpse of imagined lives thousands of miles distant. In the social sciences, too, we are increasingly representing and seeking to understand young people in relation to the socially determined concept of ‘youth’, and, in turn, understand youth through a relationship with violence (Koonings and Kruijt 2004).1 This move challenges the standard framework that regards ‘children’ as the victims of violence, and only occasionally as its perpetrators. According to UNICEF, in the past decade two million children have been killed in conflict and six million have been injured. However, UNICEF

© 2008 SAGE Publications

also points to 300,000 ‘child soldiers’, some of whom are responsible for the most brutal instances of violence, including the killing and maiming of other children. Not surprisingly, child soldiers have become part of a distinctive genre of literature. Recent contributions have stressed the multiple motives for involvement, the role of communities in rebuilding the soldiers’ lives (Honwana 2007; Rosen 2005; Wessells 2007), and the role of international organizations and legal frameworks in prevention and rehabilitation (Boothby et al. 2006; Kuper 2005). Others have posed provocative questions on how far the identification of a child soldier challenges the conduct expected of young people, representing a member of the Lords Resistance Army in Uganda as a child ‘contaminated’ by experience, but a Palestinian throwing stones at an Israeli tank as a hero defending his community (Boyden 2003). The extent and form of violence involving young people appears to have changed in recent years, and gained increased attention from development agencies. In 2006, The United Nations Secretary-General’s Study on Violence against Children called attention to young people as the victims of domestic violence, rape, beatings by police and murder (Pinheiro 2006). The report showed the child murder

10.1177/146499340800800404

346

Children and development II

rate to be twice as high in developing countries, with boys aged between 15–17 as especially vulnerable. However, a weakness of the UN Study lies in the fact that young people are also perpetrators of murder, possibly increasingly so. As the United Nation’s own International Crime Research Institute has pointed out, 29 per cent of reported homicides in Latin America are committed by 10 to 19-year-olds, and a further 34 per cent by people aged between 20–29. In many parts of the developing world, the murder rate is high and increasing; it is now possibly higher than it was during the civil wars of the 1980s (Dowdney 2005; Jones and Rodgers 2009). Youth violence, therefore, is yet another contribution to what Michael Taussig (1984) once termed a ‘culture of terror’, in which violence dominates social, economic and political life, making people feel perpetually vulnerable. Although not all violence is committed by young people or by ‘youth gangs’, the latter has become the driving image of the ‘new violence’ in many developing countries. Some gangs are large, highly organized, and possess firepower in excess of most police forces and some militaries (Dowdney 2005). For some observers, youth gangs possess the potential for mutating into a terrorist threat, possibly under the tutelage of Al-Qaeda. Vital to these endeavours is the ability of gangs to link with transnational networks, sometimes coopting state actors or taking over the spaces abandoned by ‘failed’ states (Arana 2005; Manwaring 2005). Dramatic events, such as the ‘lock down’ of Rio de Janeiro which took place after the Comando Vermelho’s order that schools and shops should close, or the takeover of prisons and holding-up of shopping centres in Sao Paulo by the First Capital Com-mand, certainly demonstrate the control of gangs through the manipulation of disorder (Penglase 2005). More widely, concerns have been expressed that ‘youth bulges’ in states with poor economic performance might prompt disenchanted youths to violence nationally, or combined with the adoption of radical

Islam and use migrant networks to travel undetected, and threaten the ‘West’ (UNDP 2006; Urdal 2004). Youth involvement in violence, then, forms a dimension of the ‘dark side of globalization’ (Appadurai 2006). States, in a few cases supported by international development agencies, have responded to this threat with militarized policing and abatement policies that ‘sweep up’ young people into detention, often operating on the margins of human rights laws (Ganapathy and Fee 2002; Hume 2007; Samara 2005; Vankatesh and Kassimir 2007). States have also condoned the emergence of community vigilantism, repressing these organizations only once they become too powerful (Desai 2006; Monaghan 2004; Smith 2006). We also witness the proliferation of private security companies, leading to a privatization of public violence and the appropriation of private violence by gangs conducting criminal activities and protected by politicians (Katumanga 2005). Just as few governments have researched the effectiveness of these tactics, few researchers have looked deeply at the motives and tensions for their application within the state (Macaulay 2007; Rocha 2007). Nevertheless, circumspect assessments cast doubt on the veracity of the gang-toterrorist claims, and view the state response to the ‘gang threat’ more generally as overreaction. Studies reveal that youth gangs rarely venture outside their territory, within which they act as the local ‘authority’ (Nibbrig and Hart 2002; Rodgers 2006; Salo 2006). Even young members of gangs such as Mara-13 or the Latin Kings are far less transnationally mobile or involved in ‘networks of violence’ than is feared (Adamson 2005; Papachristos 2005). In a thoughtful article, Cuadra (2003) has argued that our understanding of the epidemiology and sociology of violence through globalization is flawed. Cuadra suspects that the logic of violence is as an action to obtain an end, making for thousands of unintelligible acts that lack intrinsic understanding as a singular concept. Although globalization,


Gareth A. Jones 347 including deportations to ‘foreign’ lands through gang abatement policies, are part of the context, studies suggest that violence is related to the complex, piecemeal, and often contradictory processes of identity formation (Ibid.; Hage 2003; Kristiansen 2003; Zilberg 2007). Beyond the rhetoric of ‘global threat’, the few studies that show how young people experience violence reveal people’s remarkable resilience, but also demonstrates how violence contributes to limited life chances (Barker 2005; Goldstein 2003; Kovats-Bernat 2006; Moser and McIlwaine 2004), and leaves longlasting memories that may outlive the original acts or legitimate further violence (Argenti 2007; Riano-Alcala 2006). As the strap line for Ghosts of Cité Soleil proclaims, ‘This ain’t no Hollywood movie’. Note 1.

‘Youth’ is commonly defined as people aged between 12–25, but in many countries official definitions go up to 29, and cultural norms may establish a higher limit based on employment, marriage and respect.

References Adamson, F.B. 2005: Globalisation, transnational political mobilisation, and networks of violence. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 18(1), 31–49. Appadurai, A. 2006: Fear of small numbers: an essay of the geography of anger. Duke University Press. Arana, A. 2005: How the street gangs took central America. Foreign Affairs 84(3), 98–110. Argenti, N.P. 2007: The intestines of the State: youth, violence and belated histories in the Cameroon grassfields. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barker, G.T. 2005: Dying to be men: youth and masculinity and social exclusion. Routledge. Boothby, N.D., Strang, A. and Wessells, M., editors. 2006: A world turned upside down: social ecological approaches to children in war zones. Kumarian Press. Boyden, J. 2003: The moral development of child soldiers: what do adults have to fear? Peace and Conflict 9(4), 343–62. Cuadra, S. 2003: Globalization and the capacity of violence to transform social spaces: some critical points about the Latin American debate. Crime, Law and Social Change 39, 163–73. Desai, A. 2006: The Cape of Good Dope? A post-apartheid story of gangs and vigilantes. In Ballard, R., Habib, A. and Valodia, I., editors, Voices of protest: social

movements in post-apartheid South Africa. University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Dowdney, L. 2005: Neither war nor peace: international comparisons of children and youth in organised armed violence. Coalition in Organized Armed Violence. Ganapathy, N. and Fee, L.K. 2002: Policing minority street corner gangs in Singapore: a view from the street. Policing and Society 12(2), 139–52. Goldstein, D. 2003: Laughter out of place: race, class, violence and sexuality in a Rio shantytown. University of California Press. Hage, G. 2003: ‘Comes a time we are all enthusiasm’: understanding Palestinian suicide bombers in times of exighophobia. Public Culture 15(1), 65–89. Honwana, A. 2007: Child soldiers in Africa. University of Pennsylvania Press. Hume, M. 2007: Mano Dura: El Salvador responds to gangs. Development in Practice 17(6), 739–51. Jones, G.A. and Rodgers, D., editors. 2009: Youth violence in Latin America: gangs and juvenile justice in perspective. Palgrave Macmillan. Katumanga, M. 2005: A city under siege: banditry and modes of accumulation in Nairobi, 1991–2004. Review of African Political Economy 106, 505–20. Koonings, K. and Kruijt, D., editors. 2004: Armed actors: organised violence and state failure in Latin America. Zed Books. Kovats-Bernat, J.C. 2006: Sleeping rough in Port-auPrince: an ethnography of street children and violence in Haiti. University of Florida Press. Kristiansen, S. 2003: Violent youth groups in Indonesia: the cases of Yogyakarta and Nusa Tenggara Barat. Sojourn 18(1), 110–38. Kuper, J. 2005: Military training and children: law, policy and practice. Martinus Nijhoff. Macaulay, F. 2007: Knowledge production, framing and criminal justice reform in Latin America. Journal of Latin American Studies 39(3), 627–51. Manwaring, M.G. 2005: Street gangs: the new urban insurgency. Strategic Studies Institute, www.carlisle. army.mil/ssi Monaghan, R. 2004: ‘One merchant, one bullet’: the rise and fall of PAGAD. Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement 12(1), 1–19. Moser, C.O.N. and McIlwaine, C. 2004: Encounters with violence in Latin America: urban poor perceptions from Colombia and Guatemala. Routledge. Nibbrig, N. and Hart, E. 2002: Rascals, the state, and civil society in Papua New Guinea. Pacific Studies 25(3), 37–56. Papachristos, A.V. 2005: Gang world. Foreign Policy 147(March–April), 48–55. Penglase, B. 2005: The shutdown of Rio de Janeiro. Anthropology Today 21(5), 3–6. Pinheiro, P.S. 2006: World report on violence against children. United Nations.


348

Children and development II

Riano-Alcala, P. 2006: Dwellers of memory: youth, memory, and violence in Medellin, Colombia. Transaction Publishers. Rocha, J.L. 2007: Mapping the labyrinth from within: the political economy of Nicaraguan youth policy concerning violence. Bulletin of Latin American Research 26(4), 533–49. Rodgers, D.W. 2006: Living in the sadow of death: gangs, violence, and social order in urban Nicaragua, 1996–2002. Journal of Latin American Studies 38(2), 267–92. Rosen, D.M. 2005: Armies of the young: child soldiers in war and terrorism. Rutgers University Press. Salo, E. 2006: Mans is ma soe: ganging practices in Manenburg, South Africa, and the ideologies of masculinity, gender and generational relations. In Bay, E.G. and Donham, D.L., editors, States of violence: politics, youth and memory in contemporary Africa. University of Virginia Press, 148–75. Samara, T.R. 2005: Youth, crime and urban renewal in the Western Cape. Journal of Southern African Studies 31(1), 209–28. Smith, J.D. 2006: Violent vigilantism and the state in Nigeria: The case of the bakassi boys. In Bay,

E.G. and Donham, D.L. editors, States of violence: politics, youth and memory in contemporary Africa. University of Virginia Press, 127–47. Taussig, M. 1984. Culture of terror-space of death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo report and the explanation of torture. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, 467–97. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 2006: Youth and violent conflict: society and development in crisis? United Nations Development Programme. Urdal, H. 2004: The devil in the demographics: the effect of youth bulges on domestic armed conflict, 1950–2000. Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Social Development Paper 14. World Bank. Vankatesh, S.A. and Kassimir, R., editors. 2007, Youth, globalization, and the law. Stanford University Press. Wessells, M. 2007. Child soldiers: from violence to protection. Harvard University Press. Zilberg, E. 2007: Gangster in Guerrilla face: a transnational mirror of production between the USA and El Salvador. Anthropological Theory 7(1), 37–57.
