ABSTRACT
While the previous chapters have argued that adults produce public space as an environment that young children are too incompetent or too vulnerable to negotiate alone, their spatial hegemony is more openly contested by teenagers struggling to assert their independence. Hanging around on street corners and larking about in public space become (deliberately and unintentionally) a form of resistance to adult power. A strategy of resistance that is often read as a threat to the safety of young children, adults and to the peace and order of the street. This chapter therefore switches the book’s focus of attention from preadolescent children to young people. It begins by exploring the contemporary ‘othering’ of teenagers. It then goes on to consider how a moral panic about ‘dangerous’ youth has led to popular claims that liberal approaches to children’s welfare and children’s rights have eroded young people’s deference to adults, so undermining the subtle regulatory regimes by which adults maintain their hegemony in public space. The chapter concludes by showing how these arguments in turn have been used to win consensus for spatial and temporal restrictions on, and tighter surveillance and policing of, young people’s activities in an attempt to (re)draw the boundaries between adults and children in public space.
