Exploring the Lived Experience of Social Class through Institutional Responses to Youth Deviance and Parenting Styles

• In Event: Institutional Responses to Troubled and/or Marginalized Young People and their Families

Abstract

This paper considers how young people at risk of offending and their parents experience institutional responses to their challenging behaviour and childrearing in the U.K. context. It draws on case file analysis of referral forms, participant observation of parenting courses, focus groups with pupils in secondary schools and semi-structured interviews with troublesome young people, their parents and the professionals who work directly with families within youth justice, broadly defined, to explore the decisions that are made about interventions and whether these are influenced by a young person’s socioeconomic background. It conceptualizes the findings in light of institutional discourses on the intersections between youth deviance, childrearing and social class to develop knowledge about the fairness of responses to youth troubling behaviour and parenting, focusing particularly on possible indirect discrimination based on social class. To encourage class sensitive and socially fairer treatment of young people and their parents, it merges concepts of procedural justice, calls for diversion and a nonlinear and structurally conscious understanding of desistance from delinquency to propose alternative ways of theorizing- and responding to youth deviance and parenting in the U.K.

Author

• Jasmina Arnez, University of Oxford