ABSTRACT
Youth gangs in France are often the cause of moral panics, as they are depicted in the media and the political discourse as ethnic groups from the banlieues that are well organized, disruptive, and violent. Informed by the international literature on gangs, our chapter seeks to briefly review what the literature says, and does not say, about French gangs. We identify a colorblindness that disregards the racial dimension of gang formation in France and see the emergence of French gangs as a public problem, that is, the stigmatization of minorities and the rise of public and political concerns about “insecurity.” Finally, we examine French gangs, going beyond the public problem and the subsequent moral panic and basing our analysis both on the existing sociological literature and our own work.
