ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the British state committed a series of civilising offences against young people from the late 1970s, subsequently reinforcing and refining these offences in an ongoing attempt to make young people accept a new set of obligations. Similar actions were carried out in a number of other countries at around the same time as governments began to roll out a neo-liberal political agenda. The chapter suggests that Norbert Elias's work on the civilising process and Robert Castel's work on changes in the organisation of labour and social welfare from medieval to industrial society help us to locate our analysis historically and frame it sociologically. In the chapter, the civilising process described by Elias involves changes in the nature of obligations between privileged and subordinate social actors that are held in place by the symbolic violence that underpins civilising offences.
