I first met Ross Deuchar in 2015 at an international conference on youth outreach organised by the City University of Hong Kong. Ross and I were invited plenary speakers and spent our days and nights being ushered between presentations, meetings, dinners – and even a midnight outing on the streets to interview local gang members and observe social service providers in action. We had stunning vistas and gracious hosts, good food and great conversation, but with the jet lag (there is a 14-hour time difference between Minneapolis and Hong Kong), much of that week remains a blur.
One moment of clarity from my trip overseas was Ross’ plenary speech. In a talk titled ‘Scottish Youth Gangs, Territoriality and Street Violence’, Ross shared insights from a decade of working with young offenders. Two things stood out from that talk. First, Ross wasn’t one of those esoteric armchair theorists who claim to have all the answers about gang members despite never having asked them any questions. No, Ross was a true pracademic – he’d paid his dues as a schoolteacher and was using that real-world knowledge and experience to inform his scholarship, which was data-driven and practice- and policy-focused. Second, Ross really cared about the lives of the people he researched. They weren’t just his ‘participants’ and ‘subjects’; they were human beings with stories to tell.
The talk was built on Ross’ 2009 book Gangs, Marginalised Youth and Social Capital and its 2011 sequel, Policing Youth Violence: Transatlantic Connections. I’d read both books, as most criminologists had, but it was only after hearing Ross speak and spending time with him that week that I truly came to appreciate them. There we were, 6,000 miles from home, and voices from the streets of Glasgow and West Scotland were resonating. I finally understood what made that great ‘city of gangs’ different from other places (Davies, 2013), but also the same – how poverty, sectarianism and violence had shaped the city’s past and present.
Well, here we are now in the future. And with Gangs, Drugs and Youth Adversity: Continuity and Change, Deuchar returns to the people and places he
The trio learns that Glasgow and West Scotland are different now. By treating violence as a disease, police and community partners have presided over a miraculous decline in knife crime and territorial fighting that has significantly improved young people’s life chances and life expectancy. Add to this smart phones and social media, which removed the street imperative, and a modern celebrity and consumer culture, which redefined masculine distinction, and more youth today choose looking good over acting bad.
Drugs are another big change. They are so abundant and accessible and affordable that using and/or dealing them is now routine. For an entrepreneurial few, drugs are a route to riches, but for so many more they are the road to ruin. The book captures both sides of the equation, with careful consideration given to the catastrophic social and emotional consequences of offending and addiction. Mental health and trauma are new themes examined here that help broaden the appeal of this book to beyond just criminologists.
Of course, some things never change. Sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics is still hiding in plain sight, shaping community norms and expectations. Social exclusion and structural disadvantages are still creating conditions conducive to crime by constraining life choices and incentivising self-destructive behaviours. Who you are and where you are from still contribute to intergenerational continuity in gang participation. However, it’s the voices of the young people in this book that make even the old feel new again. Every chapter is fresh, the findings urgent.
Since Thrasher’s (1927) sweeping, seminal work nearly 100 years ago, continuity and change have been key themes in gang research (for a review, see Decker et al, 2021). They are typically studied at the individual level, using longitudinal survey data to parse the onset, duration and termination of gang membership in the life-course (eg Pyrooz, 2014). Today, studies of continuity and change at the group or community levels are few and far between (eg Valasik, 2014; Ouellet et al, 2019), especially qualitative studies (eg Densley, 2014). This really is the major contribution of the book and something to be celebrated. Gangs, Marginalised Youth and Social Capital (2009) and Policing Youth Violence: Transatlantic Connections (2011) now are less snapshots in time and more signs of what was coming.
Like Whittaker et al’s (2020) recent ‘revisit’ of Pitts’ (2008) research in London, this book looks back to move forwards. It finds that many elements of gangs, gang members and gang crime present today were present years ago. Yet many of the characteristics of gangs, gang members and gang crime have
Don’t change.
