Those in trouble are mainly working class, male and/or ethnic minority; those who are troubling or at risk are predominantly female,

Minimal attention is given to the contexts in which young people live. The behaviour of some youth was attributed to individual biomedical causes, increasingly seen as amenable to individual treatment using drugs. The assumption that youth everywhere are characterised by biologically determined storm and stress has, however, been widely critiqued, beginning with the work of Margaret Mead, who found that girls in Samoa did not experience adolescence as a turbulent time (Finn 2001).

Socialisation of children Developmental psychology is not the only discipline that has sought to explain how immature, irrational, incompetent, asocial [and] acultural children are transformed into mature, rational, competent, social and autonomous adults (Prout and James 1990: 13, after Mackay 1973). Sociologists have been more conscious of the diversity of childrearing practices, and have suggested that, rather than developing naturally, children are socialised into different societies through the different ways societies treat them. In Talcott Parsons (1951) structural functionalist world-view, socialisation is a mechanical process in which children respond to external stimuli provided by adults. Children passively receive and reproduce the culture of the society in which they grow up, gradually acquiring adult social roles (Caputo 1995). Society shapes the individual, and in the process reproduces itself: there is no role for agency, even among adults, and society may therefore be

Children who do not conform, or become deviants, are seen as having failed to become socialised. Youth subculture Anthropologists have long shown an interest in rites of passage and cultural practices marking the transition to adult status (Griffin 2001), but not from the perspectives of young people (Wulff 1995). In the 1950s, sociologists began to recognise that youth were not simply enacting part of adult culture, but participating in the production of specific youth culture, including through resistance and deviance. Criminologists, psychologists and sociologists became interested in working-class gangs of youths, perceived as delinquent (Valentine et al. 1998). Through the concept of subculture in the 1960s, such gangs were studied as tribes (James et al. 1998). Subsequent work sought to identify the structural conditions that gave rise to gang cultures. This was formalised in the 1970s by members of Birmingham Universitys Centre for Contemporary Cultura