ABSTRACT
There are growing assertions that more and more young people are being systematically propelled to the edges of conventional and legitimate pathways to adulthood (Aspire Consultants 1996; Wilkinson 1995; Williamson 1993). Quite who these young people are, and how they are being excluded and marginalised remains open for discussion; it is easy for the academic debate – in order to serve particular objectives – to slip into the same kinds of rhetorical and polemical devices for which politicians who do the same are rightly criticised. Both ‘youth’ (specifically allegedly ‘disaffected’ youth) and the assumed ‘underclass’ have remained powerful metaphors for societal decay and the focus for ‘respectable fears’, often with limited, or mythical, justification (Davis 1990; Pearson 1975, 1983).
