Draw on gang relationships to tackle youth offending

When I first wrote about The Milltown Boys – my lifelong study of a group of men who were young offenders in the 1970s – I was determined to avoid portraying them as a “gang”. An earlier study of a gang in Glasgow had completely taken the researcher in, though this was not conceded until many years later. I elected to portray the boys as a loose-knit network of overlapping friendship groups, some more prone to instrumental criminality (burglary and theft), others more likely to get involved in expressive offending (fighting and criminal damage).

At that time, perhaps with the exception of Glasgow (that did have a long history of gang violence), there was little in the way of gang life as it was understood in America, though it has certainly emerged since in a number of English cities, especially London. Elsewhere, gangs are harder to find, even if troublesome youth groups are depicted as such: for media purposes, the “gang” is a more attractive label.