ABSTRACT
Empowerment emphasises personal agency and human dignity in the search to take one’s life into one’s own hands, in the confidence that one has the knowledge and skills to do so and against a background of respect for difference and diversity. Whatever the gender of the perpetrator, it is reasonable to argue that the exercise of physical and symbolic violence indicates at least a felt lack of individual or social empowerment and the search to achieve it by inappropriate means. Young people seeking a degree of re-empowerment by distinctive group public presence are using the classic strategies of demonstrative youth cultural power in much the same way as do indigenous cliques and gangs everywhere. The public boundary-setting used by minority youth cliques as an initially defensive re-empowerment strategy is likely to be interpreted as a potential threat by indigenous youth cliques, especially those whose members have themselves experienced relative weakness and marginalisation in the mainstream society.
