Description
The position of young people within 'law-and-order' discourges has been one-way-traffic in postwar Britain: young people as actual or potential offenders, with the thin-blue-line of the police offering protection to the wider community against a generation of teenage vandals and tearaways.
In a decisive break with these assumptions, lan Loader reminds us that young people are also the victims of crime. Mobilising theoretical arguments from Jurgen Habermas on democratic forms of communication, together with ethnographic fieldwork from the streets of modern Britain, he suggests that young people might be both over-controlled and under-protected. Large areas of tension certainly exist between young people and the police, but they are not 'anti-police' and understand a valid role for law enforcement, built around their experience of 'good' and 'bad' policing.
This book is a truly innovative achievement. It offers a new voice in an old debate which points the way towards a better under- standing of the youth question, and the possibility of a more democratically accountable approach to the troubled relations between young people and the police."
