Adolescence And Youth Deviance

Adolescence is a developmental period characterised by suboptimal decisions in which a consistent pattern of increased incidence of risky behaviours such as gang activity, violence, and substance abuse tends to take place during this period. As such, the issue of youth deviance has received considerable media, political and police attention in Australia in recent years. Deviance is a complex social issue, and the study of deviance has developed many varied theories and perspectives. Therefore, the contention that youths are able to resist deviance themselves has been critically discussed over the past few decades. However according to the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC; 2014), it was reported that persons aged 15 to 19 years old are more likely to be processed by police for the commission of crime than were members of any other age group. Furthermore, the rate of juvenile offending has been consistently higher than that of adult offending over the past few years (AIC, 2014). If youths are able to resist deviance themselves, the rate of youth offending should not be consistently higher than that of adult offending. Therefore, this paper will be arguing against the idea that youths are able to resist deviance themselves, and by narrowing the issue of youth deviance to youth street gangs, this paper will reference Bengtsson’s (2012), Pacheco (2010) and White’s (2009) article as case studies in this argument. In addition, this paper will review theories and examine youth street gangs from a developmental perspective to argue that the socioeconomic environment in which a child grows up in can shape their idea of deviance during their vulnerable teenage years. In order to understand how the connection between youths and deviance is impossible to resist, it is necessary to look at the structure of neurological explanations. The growth of developmental neuroscience in the last decade has produced significant findings that adolescents’ risky behaviours reflect the joint contribution of two brain systems that affect decision making. Firstly, the incentive processing system involving the Orbitofrontal Cortex (OFC) in the brain region, biases decision-making based on the valuation and prediction of potential rewards and punishments. Secondly, the cognitive control system involving the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) of the frontal lobe provides control that is optimal for adolescents’ behaviour. Neuroimaging studies in the past decades found that impulsive or risky choices often coincide with the increased engagement of incentive processing system and decreased involvement of cognitive control activity (Chein et al., 2012). Both of these brain systems undergo considerable modification during adolescence, but on different timetables. The incentive processing system undergoes dramatic remodelling in early adolescence which usually results in heightened sensitivity to rewards (Giedd, 2008). However, cognitive control system undergoes gradual and protracted maturation from preadolescence to mid-20s (Giedd, 2008). Since the executive …show more content…
Empirical research have confirmed that neighbourhood environment has an influence on important outcomes for children and adolescents (Ellen & Turner, 1997). Thus neighbourhood environment is a crucial factor which shapes the children and adolescents’ idea in the decision of joining and participating in gang-related activities. Firstly, gangs tend to thrive in socially and economically disadvantaged communities due to the relationship between low socioeconomic status and gang development to differential opportunity (Huang & Ida, 2004). In other words, young people from poor neighbourhood turn to gangs to achieve success because social barriers are obstructing them from legitimate opportunities outlined by middle-class norms. As evident in Bengtsson’s (2012) article, the interviewee who felt unfairly neglected both in terms of material resources and future opportunities targeted people in the middle-class through violence so as to justify his feelings of despair, rage and failure. Moreover, neighbourhoods with higher number of gang members generally produce higher rates of interaction between gang members and juveniles susceptible to influence. As a result, an environment facilitative of gang behaviours increases the risk for youths to join a gang. Secondly, innocent youths residing in neighbourhoods that are known for gang-crime involvement tends to get approached by police due to the assumption that they are affiliated with local gangs (Esbensen & Maxson, 2012). According to Lemert’s (1951) labelling theory of secondary deviance, individuals are much more likely to align him or herself with others who have been similarly labelled, thus becoming part of a subculture that stands outside the framework created by norms of the original social group. In White’s (2009) paper, one of the interviewees reported