ABSTRACT
In a country where the extreme Right has been ready to challenge democracy over the past 15 years, what role does ethnicity play in street violence and especially in juvenile street gangs, who embody the climactic form of street violence in France? This chapter is meant not only to discuss whether juvenile street gangs (under the Eurogang definition) exist in France or not, but also to address the question of what might link juvenile street gangs in Paris suburbs and the ethnic concerns that turn out to be a characteristic feature of suburban areas around Paris and other major French cities. Over the past ten years in France, the issue of juvenile repeat offenders has become a worrying one, among the public as well as policymakers. Although they are far from numerous, they usually commit offences in groups. Thus, examining peer groups as criminal structures for juvenile offenders can be a promising path of research. However, are those groups real ‘gangs’? The question is heavily debated, since most French researchers deny the very existence of ‘gangs’ among juveniles. The implicit reasons for this denial are mostly political: policymakers and experts agree not to claim that France is gradually becoming like the USA and pretend that the situation is under control (e.g. Macé 2002: 33–41; Vilbrod 2000: 9–17), since there seems to be no room for political error; moreover, admitting the existence of juvenile gangs as a new phenomenon might lead to questioning the efficiency of French social workers (Esterlé-Hédibel 2000, 2001, 2002), with political consequences that are unpredictable. Furthermore, the issue of juvenile street gangs in France becomes taboo when the issue of ‘ethnicity’ is raised in regard to that particular topic (Martiniello 1995; Poutignat and Streiff-Fenard 1995).
