ABSTRACT
Youth is said to differ from other age categories in its relationship to a number of key institutions. A wide theoretical spectrum of writers argue that what makes youth different is that it is less tightly attached to the institutions of family and work than are adults, and less tightly attached to education and the family than are younger children. Children are firmly integrated into the family in subordinate roles, adults through their dominant roles. One overriding difficulty with this massive amount of literature is that serious doubts have been raised about its applicability to the British experience. Whether Thrasher's conception of the gang 'integrated through conflict' or Yablonski's 'near-group' or the various positions in between, there seems very little evidence that gangs of any sort exist in any numbers in Britain. The early 'Youth Subculture' literature was overly concerned with emphasizing the unity of youth as a category and thus its distinctiveness from parents.
