ABSTRACT
This book is about youth and social policy and as such it will outline some of the major problems being faced by young people in contemporary Britain and highlight what policy makers could, and should, do to help. It is a theoretical as well as an empirical book in that it attempts both to develop a theoretical framework for a social policy of youth and to describe the ways in which the condition of youth has been substantially transformed in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As we shall see, youth policy in Britain has developed in a largely piecemeal and uncoordinated way, with each different Department of State addressing only those aspects of “youth problems” which it sees as falling within its domain. To counteract this, some writers have called for a Minister for Youth to co-ordinate better the disparate activities of various arms of government (Coleman & Warren-Adamson 1992), while others have argued for a more holistic approach to the study of youth to be made by academic researchers, policy makers and practitioners (Jones & Wallace 1992). The academic study of youth certainly has mirrored state policy in its uncoordinated and “atomistic” approach, with separate branches of the social sciences focusing on different facets of young people’s lives. The problems of adolescence have received most attention in psychology (Coleman & Hendry 1992, Hendry 1983, Noller & Callan 1991), while social work has focused on the issue of child protection and caring for children (Fox-Harding 1991, Parton 1991). The social inequalities of educational attainment and the problems of transition from school to work have dominated the interests of sociologists of education (Brown 1987, Gleeson 1989, Raffe 1988). Since the 1980s, labour market scholars and youth specialists have concentrated their attention on a shrinking youth labour market, the growth of youth unemployment and the impact of a plethora
of training schemes on young “careers” (Ainley 1990, Coles 1988, Finn 1987, Gleeson 1989, Hollands 1990, Lee et al. 1990, Wallace & Cross 1990) while delinquency, hooliganism, deviance and young offenders have figured prominently in criminology (Becker 1963, Little 1990, Marsh et al. 1978, Muncie 1984, Parker et al. 1981). In the 1970s, sociologists of youth focused their attention on the development of youth subcultures and distinctive youth life styles (Brake 1980, Hall & Jefferson 1976, Hebdige 1979). More recently, others have addressed the more specific issues of youth suicides, changes in sexual behaviour, drug and alcohol abuse and the threat of HIV/AIDS (Aggleton et al. 1991, Brannen et al. 1994, Plant & Plant 1992, Woodroffe et al. 1993). Many of these themes will be brought together in the pages of this book.
