ABSTRACT
Youth has always been regarded as a dangerous age. Single parenthood, contempt for authority, theft and violence amongst young people are not recent phenomena. Shakespeare’s lament mirrors that of contemporary neo-conservative commentators, some of whom associate the tendencies of youth with the emergence of an even more dangerous phenomenon: the ‘underclass’ (see Chapter 1). What is perhaps new is the attempt by writers like Murray (1990, 1994) to link youth with the existence of an imagined ‘dangerous class’ and, in the process, to portray the rights of welfare citizenship as a corrosive rather than an enabling force in the lives of young people. The purpose of this chapter is to argue, first, that both ‘youth’ and the ‘underclass’ are symbolic social constructions; second, that attempts to undermine young people’s rights of citizenship may be profoundly counterproductive – a point I will illustrate using a study of social security fraud.1
