The title of Geoffrey Ben-Nathan's book, I'm Adult! Aren't I! expresses a sentiment I was familiar with as a youth worker and which I saw simply as the natural assertion of a young person's will to grow up. For Ben-Nathan, that phrase, uttered to him in 1976 by a teenager in a London probation office, set in motion a train of thought that culminated in this "case for a rite of passage". It's based on the premise that western society has no formal way of maturing children into adults, leading to a "rite of crime".
What makes this book different is the author's anthropological perspective. He focuses on highly ritualised societies for theoretical inspiration and explores how the African Maasai and the Japanese acknowledge the move from childhood to adulthood as a life stage and organise formal change between the two.
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