ABSTRACT
Newham was in a permanent state of flux, its youth were no longer able to enjoy the relative luxury of subcultural membership before joining mainstream working-class society. With one notable exception, youth gangs in the UK are a newly noticed kind of human behaviour'. Youths no longer enjoy the type of benign relationship with their parent culture that had been pivotal to British subcultural studies, and which had provided a model for assimilation. Gangs were being addressed via vague and unhelpful definitions, and the term is often used as veiled expressions of bourgeois disapproval', towards a diverse range of transgressive youthful behaviours. The growth of the gang problem in Newham corresponded to the growth of the Olympic infrastructure. The majority of these youths were black and visible minority ethnic (VME), and their behaviour was encapsulated by the term Serious Youth Violence (SYV).
