Está en la página 1de 14

Journal of Adolescence 2000, 23, 463476

doi:10.1006/jado.2000.0331, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

The dangerousness of youth-at-risk: the possibilities


of surveillance and intervention in uncertain times
PETER KELLY
This paper will explore the dangerous possibilities provoked by the popular and
promiscuous construction of the category of ``youth-at-risk''. In an age of large-scale
and profound social changes, narratives of uncertainty and risk dominate popular,
political and theoretical discourses about youth. Under these social conditions, the
discourse of youth-at-risk is mobilized from a variety of intellectual and political
positions in various attempts to regulate the behaviors and dispositions of youth. The
paper will argue that these discourses provoke dangerous possibilities for the increased
surveillance of, and intervention into, young people's lives by regulatory authorities
(schools, police, health services, and juvenile justice systems) and the forms of
expertise recruited by these agencies.

# 2000 The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescents

Introduction
If it is true that young people are the nation's most precious resource, then the nation needs
better means of measuring the overall effectiveness of the socialization process. Systematic efforts
are needed to assess the adolescent population over time. Such efforts will require multifaceted
measures that examine a range of adolescent attributes, including perceptions, behaviors and
accomplishments. . . The need to adequately monitor adolescents from low-income families is
especially urgent. Relatively little is known about the exposure of the adolescent population to
high-risk settings on a national and regional basis. In addition, studies do not adequately sample
by race or ethnicity, and hence little is known about some of the most vulnerable populations
(Panel on High-Risk Youth, 1993, pp. 255256).

The question of youth, of what to do with them, of how to school them, or police them, or
regulate them, or house them, or employ them, or prevent them from becoming involved in
any number of risky (sexual, eating, drug (ab)using or peer cultural) practices are questions
which have a substantial historical aspect.* In the liberal democracies at the start of the
millennium, the crisis of youth-at-risk is a key marker in debates about youth among
intellectuals, social commentators, politicians, bureaucrats and experts in various domains of
expertise. Swadener and Lubeck (1995) have argued that the truth of youth-at-risk
rehearses, in part, the historical truths of youth as delinquent, deviant and disadvantaged.
However, a historically novel aspect of the truth of youth-at-risk is that, potentially, every
behavior, every practice, every group of young people can be constructed in terms of risk
(Tait, 1995).
At a quite fundamental level this paper is not about the risky practices, behaviors and
dispositions of young people. Nor is it my concern to identify or argue for appropriate
Reprint requests and correspondence should be addressd to: Peter Kelly, Faculty of Social and Behavioural
Sciences, University of Queensland, Ipswich, Qld 4305, Australia (E-mail: peter.kelly@mailbox.up.edu.au)
*For an Australian perspective on these histories, and the ways in which class, gender and race have been
significant in conceiving youth as deviant, delinquent and/or disadvantaged, see Beasley (1991), Bessant (1991),
Carrington (1991), Collard and Palmer (1991), Irving (1991), Maunders (1991), Sherington (1991) and Wyn
(1991).
0140-1971/00/040463+14 $3500/0

# 2000 The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescents

464

P. Kelly

practices of intervention and treatment for youth-at-risk. Rather, my interest is with the ways
in which institutionally structured processes of expert knowledge production construct the
truths of youth-at-risk. I am concerned with the processes by which these largely
autonomous systems of expertise mobilize categories of risk in diverse attempts to regulate
the behaviors and dispositions of certain populations of young people under the conditions of
``reflexive modernization'' (Beck et al., 1994).
In this analysis I will argue for the possibilities of a productive convergence between
theories of ``reflexive modernization'' (Beck et al., 1994) and ``governmentality'' (Foucault,
1991). This convergence enables youth-at-risk to be examined at two interconnected levels.
In the first instance, risk will be understood as constituting a metanarrative in an age of
``manufactured uncertainty'' (Giddens, 1994). Secondly, the identification of risk factors and
populations-at-risk will be understood as techniques mobilized in diverse attempts to ``make
up'' rational, choice-making, autonomous, responsible citizens within various projects of
government (Rose, 1996a).
My purpose is to highlight the dangerousness of risk discourses; a dangerousness which can
be understood in the context of intellectual, political and popular concerns about the
uncertainty of our times, and in the intellectual projects of various forms of expertise which
construct youth-at-risk in relation to certain preferred futures. Risk discourses are dangerous
in the sense that these discourses promise that the risks, the uncertainties and the
contingencies of human behaviors, dispositions and interactions in complex settings can be
objectively, scientifically or criticially identified. Once identified, various programs and
interventions can then be mobilized to regulate the dangers, the uncertainties and the
contingencies of an age of ``manufactured uncertainty'' (Giddens, 1994). Youth-at-risk
discourses are, in this sense, an instance of modern technologies of ``prevention'',
technologies which are ``overarched by a grandiose technocratic rationalizing dream of
absolute control of the accidental, understood as the irruption of the unpredictable'' (Castel,
1991, p. 289).

Constructing youth-at-risk

The youth-at-risk literature is extensive.{ Swadener and Lubeck (1995), for instance, claim
that in the U.S.A. since 1989 over 2500 articles and conference papers have focused on the
issue of children, families and youth-at-risk. Withers and Batten (1995, pp. 56) provide one
avenue for entering the vast discursive terrain of youth-at-risk. Their review of the at-risk
literature identifies two central and often ``competing'' concerns within at-risk discourses.
They identify, in the first instance, a ``humanistic intention'' which structures the
identification and intervention processes enabled by constructing youth-at-risk. This
intention is grounded in concerns about harm, danger, care and support for those young
people who might be at risk. In the second instance, an ``economic intention'' legitimates
these attempts to regulate youthful identities. This intention foregounds the costs and the
benefitsto young people and families, but primarily to communities and the nationof
identifying risk factors and populations-at-risk, and of mobilizing certain interventions on the
basis of these identifications. Withers and Batten (1995, pp. 56) suggest that these two
{

The discussion which follows draws on my reading of a selection from this literature. In addition to the texts I
cite, see Freeland (1991, 1992, 1996), Davidson and Linnoila (1991), Putnins (1997), Department of Education,
Victoria (1996), Department of Employment, Education and Training (1992), Education Department of South
Australia (1976), Gross and Capuzzi (1993), Kushman and Kinney (1993), McWhirter and McWhirter (1993),
Meggert (1993), Moore (1997), Nardini and Antes (1992), Palmo and Palmo (1993) and Robinson (1993).

The dangerousness of youth-at-risk

465

intentions are not necessarily ``conflicting or contra-distinctive''. Rather, their review of the
at-risk literature suggests a ``competition for primacy'' between these humanistic and
economic concerns; a competition which can be identified in any number of interventionist
programs which take as their object youth-at-risk.
One example of where these concerns coexist and compete in at-risk discourses can be
found in English's (1988) foreword to Ogden and Germinario's (1988) The at-risk student.
Here, English suggests that occasionally it is necessary to ``explain why a book has been
written. This one requires no such justification'' (p. xiii, original emphasis). The problems
that at-risk students present for ``parents, teachers and school administrators'' are selfevident in statistics which English cites ``from news articles and editorials in the nation's
press''. These U.S. statistics suggest that: ``Student suicide has increased 140 percent.
Teenage homicide increased 232 percent. Juvenile delinquency rates rose by 131 percent.
The illegitimate birth rate increased by 141 percent'' (p. xiii).{ Against this backdrop of
youth in crisis, English highlights nationwide calls ``for dealing with at-risk students'', as a
matter of urgency lest this ``most compelling agenda'' threatens ``America's position as a world
economic power'' (p. xiii, original emphasis).
A report from the Panel on High-Risk Youth for the U.S. Commission on Behavioral and
Social Sciences and Education (National Research Council) (1993, p. 1) also argues that
Americans are ``alarmed'' by the increases in the ``numbers of adolescents who engage in high
risk behaviors'' and/or who ``adopt `risk lifestyles', lifestyles characterized by drug use,
unprotected sexual behavior, dropping out of school, delinquency and violence''. The
commission argues that these behaviors of a population (adolescents) who ``naturally''
experiment and ``take risks'' ``compromise their health, endanger their lives, and limit their
chances to achieve successful adult lives''. Colthart (1996) canvasses similar themes when he
cites a Western Australian government report which positions youth as being at risk ``if their
life circumstances threaten physical, psychological or emotional well-being and preclude or
limit the normative developmental experiences necessary to achieve healthy adult
functioning'' (p. 31). A major concern for the legislators who authored this report is that
population of young people ``who have multiple risk factors''. These at-risk young people are
often ``seriously troubled'' and ``alienated from mainstream society'' (p. 32).
As a construction of diverse forms of expertise, the discourses of youth-at-risk are
potentially encompassing of all youthful behaviors and dispositions. Indeed, the expert
literature is unselfconsciously explicit on this very point. Ogden and Germinario (1988,
p. xvii), for instance, in their attempt to identify ``high risk'' student populations argue that
``All children are at times students-at-risk''. Withers and Batten (1995) and Batten and
Russell (1995), in extensive reviews of this literature, also point to this ``central'' theme in atrisk discourses. Mobilizing a developmental psychology understanding of adolescence,
Withers and Batten (1995, p. 1) argue that the psychological, physiological and ``social
stresses and tensions'' experienced during adolescence mean that ``all youths are in some
sense at risk''. The view that all young people are potentially at-risk signals a historically
novel development in attempts to regulate youthful identities. At-risk discourses constitute,
in part, a historical continuity in the construction of certain youthful populations in terms of
{

English does not reference the sources of these statistics, or indicate the time frame in which these increases
occurred, or provide definitions of concepts such as ``delinquency''. Further, there is no reference, in an academic
text, to the possibilities of media sensationalism or manipulation in the reporting of these issues. They are selfevident. At the time of publication English was the chair of the Department of Educational Administration, College,
of Education, University of Cincinnati.

466

P. Kelly

deviancy, delinquency and deficit. At-risk discourses, however, provide a technique and a
narrative for attempts to regulate the behaviors and dispositions of young people which is
potentially ``endless'' (Tait, 1995, p. 128). In this paper, risk is conceived as a metanarrative
of a more fully ``reflexive modernity'' (Beck et al., 1994) and as a technique of government
which promises the possibility of regulating youthful identities under these conditions.
Understood in this manner, the historically novel character of at-risk discourses becomes
evident in that no youthful relations, practices, behaviors and/or dispositions remain outside
of the domain of these discourses. As Tait (1995) argues, ``nothing'' in at-risk discourses ``remains
beyond governmental intervention. Since `risk' can be legitimately found anywhere, there is
therefore no one who is not at risk of something'' (p. 128, original emphasis).
It is important here to avoid any sense of total government by an all-powerful state which
through its activities represses the possibility of full human potential in the name of social
control. Rather, theories of governmentality construct government and regulation in terms of
historically contingent attempts to ``make up'' particular (ideal) types of person (Foucault,
1991; Rose and Miller, 1992). Moreover, these attempts at regulation are not the sole
province of a monologic state. Rather, government is structured by the diverse attempts of
various experts and centres of expertise to regulate the behaviors and dispositions of expertly
identified populations (Rose, 1996a). What is important in terms of the present discussion is
the ways in which power relations, conceived in terms of actions upon actions, have, in the
space of the modern nation state, become ``governmentalized''. Foucault (1983, p. 224)
argues that the forms of the ``government of men by one another in any society are multiple''.
These actions upon actions can be ``superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits,
sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another''. However, what is of
concern with understanding the nature of government in the liberal democracies is that ``the
state is not simply one of the forms or specific situations of the exercise of powereven if it
the most importantbut that in a certain way all other forms of power relation must refer to
it''. Here, Foucault's argument rests not on the notion that these other specific relations of
power are derived from the state. Instead there is a sense in which other forms of power
relationsin schools, in the justice system, in families, in economic relationsare
increasingly regulated, deregulated and re-regulated by the state. These diverse relations
and settings, these various fields of actions upon actions, have become ``governmentalized,
that is to say, elaborated, rationalized and centralized in the form of, under the auspices of,
state institutions''. As Rose and Miller (1992, p. 175) argue, government in this mode of
analysis can be conceived as being:
intriscially linked to the activities of expertise, whose role is not one of weaving an all-pervasive
web of ``social control'', but of enacting assorted attempts at the calculated administration of
diverse aspects of conduct through countless, often competing, local tactics of education,
persuasion, inducement, management, incitement, motivation and encouragement.

Regulating the uncertainty of modernity

Early 21st century identity, as embodied, as grounded in place-determined relations of copresence, and in networks of increasingly globalized relations, is thoroughly penetrated by
distant influences (Giddens, 1990) and by attempts to regulate identities ``from a distance''
(Rose and Miller, 1992). Giddens (1990) argues that expertise and ``expert systems'' are
constitutive of the dynamism of modernity. Expert systems are ``systems of technical
accomplishment or professional expertise''. As such they are substantially implicated in the

The dangerousness of youth-at-risk

467

structuring and ordering of the ``material and social environments'' of modernity (Giddens,
1990, p. 27). The point which both Foucauldian genealogies of government and Giddens
emphasize in relation to expert systems and expertise is that such systems are highly
consequential in the ordering of ``social relations themselves and the intimacies of the self'';
the ``doctor, counsellor and therapist are as central to the expert systems of modernity as the
scientist, technician or engineer'' (Giddens, 1991, p. 181). Beck et al. (1994) argue that the
activities and practices of expertise assume novel levels of significance in a more reflexive
modernity.
Theories of reflexive modernization emerge from intellectual debates about the nature of
modernity and/or postmodernity (Beck et al., 1994). Processes of reflexive modernization are
characterized by institutional and expert reflexivity in which claims to certainty in knowledge
production become intensely problematic. The reflexivity of institutionalized expertise results
in a ``runaway world'' of ``dislocation'' and ``uncertainty'' (Giddens, 1994). Human existence
is not necessarily more risky in an age of ``manufactured uncertainty''. Rather, the origins of
risk and uncertainty have changed. Processes of intellectually grounded knowledge
production about the social and the natural, and the various attempts to apply this
knowledge in the quest for certainty in human interventions into, and interactions in, these
domains, constitute the motive forces of this manufactured uncertainty. This ``paradox of
human knowledge'' is central to understanding processes of reflexive modernization (Beck
et al., 1994). These processes are marked by the emergence of a degree of collective
awareness that our contemporary conditions of existence are characterized by the
thoroughgoing penetration of the social and the natural by reflexive human knowledge.
Such a situation leads, not to a position in ``which collectively we are the masters [sic] of our
destiny'', but rather to a series of settings in which we are confronted with the possibility
that, as a ``consequence of our own doings'', the future becomes ``very threatening'' (Beck
et al., 1994, p. vii). At the start of the millennium, as Beck (1994) argues, ``uncertainty
returns''.
The impulse to construct and calculate risk scenarios becomes energized within those
forms of expertise which appropriate the tasks of regulating this uncertainty via discourses of
risk. Watts (199394) provides a means to link this discussion of the uncertainty of our times
to the dangerousness of attempts to regulate this uncertainty. For Watts (199394, p. 108),
thinking about the problem of government, and the problematics which structure attempts
to regulate, in this instance, the behaviors and disposition of young people, means
constructing the problem as a discursive phenomenon within the ``transformative dynamics
of the modernizing project''. Watts (199394, p. 126) is concerned with understanding what
it is about the conditions of modernity that has called up new forms of governmentality. The
``true pathos'' of modernity can be found in the ``response of the chief architects of modernity
to what they have helped to make''. Governmentality, in its historically variable
manifestations, is an ongoing process marked by ``attempts to manage the fragmentation
endemic to modernity'' (p. 126). What is at issue here is that, over the past two hundred
years in particular, ``scientific and professional discourses about our bodies, our minds and our
relationships to each other and society'' (p. 120) have worked to produce ``distinctive forms
of governmentality'' (p. 126). Doctors, health professionals, lawyers, social (youth) workers,
teachers, statisticians, ``psy'' scientists and many other experts in various centres of expertise
have, in these processes of ``intellectually grounded'' knowledge production, reflexively
reformulated ideas about, among other things, ``badness, madness, youth, health, education
and sexuality''all this in a manner determined by the ``application of certain tenets and

468

P. Kelly

procedures which claim reason or reality as their guide'' (p. 120). Government is thus
a process of meaning-making in which ``the meaning of social power hinges on the power to
mean'' (p. 121). Under these conditions it is ``hardly surprising'' that ``the distinctive
ontology of modernity that is itself a product of the increasing authority of the intellectually
trained is also the field of action in which the same group `discover' the problem of social
integration and order'' (p. 126).
Modernity is dynamic, unsettling and disintegrative of traditional modes of social
organization; including the modes of sociality distinctive of modernity. Yet it is so largely
through the practices of abstraction and intellectuality where these practices penetrate and
colonize all areas of life, natural and social. The problems of social order and integration, of
the regulation of populations of young people in this instance, which are endemic as a
consequence of modernity then become the field of action in which forms of abstraction and
intellectuality are deployed as distinctive modes of government.

Regulating youth-at-risk in uncertain times

Youth, as a means of constructing, in particular ways, certain populations, is an artefact of a


history of diverse ways of thinking about the behaviors and dispositions of those who are
neither child nor adult. Indeed, as an artefact of expertise, youth is principally about
becoming: becoming an adult, becoming a citizen, becoming independent, becoming
autonomous, becoming mature, becoming responsible. There is some sense in which all
constructions of youth defer to this narrative of becoming, of transition. Moreover, there is a
sense in which becoming automatically invokes the future. Youth, as it is constructed in atrisk discourses, is at-risk of jeopardizing, through present behaviors and dispositions, desired
futures. The discourse of youth-at-risk mobilizes a form of probabilistic thinking about certain
preferred or ideal adult futures and the present behaviors and dispositions of youth. This sort
of probabilistic thinking attempts to construct statistically valid, causal relationships between
these different configurations of time and space, between these different constructions of
adolescent and adult. These possible futures, as additional artefacts of the activities of
expertise, are fundamentally normative. There is a strong sense here that there are preferred
futures awaiting these populations in transition. The narrative of risk provokes this
normative epistemology. These preferred futures, whatever they might be, are placed at-risk
through the present behaviors and dispositions of certain populations of youth and,
importantly, of their families.
As a technique which promises to render government operable, risk works to
``responsibilize'' (Burchell 1996) both youth and the family. Youthful subjects are constructed
as responsible for future life chances, choices and options within institutionally structured
risk environments. These processes of responsibilization, in which the subject is compelled to
prudently manage the institutionally structured and dependent risks of her/his own do-ityourself project of the self (Beck, 1992), produce a ``field characterized by uncertainty,
plurality and anxiety, thus continually open to the construction of new problems and the
marketing of new solutions'' (Rose, 1996c, p. 343). The choices and practices, behaviors and
dispositions of young people are their responsibility. The future consequences of these
choicesabout schooling, diet, sexuality, substance (ab)useare outcomes which young
people are responsible for. However, they are not solely responsible. The family, as the setting
of nurturance, care and child/adolescent development, is increasingly responsibilized for the
care of the youthful self. This process of responsibilization of the family is of a different order
to the narrative of traditional family values which structures the political rhetorics of the

The dangerousness of youth-at-risk

469

New Right. New forms of prudentialism in uncertain times indicate deeper transformations
in the ways in which subjects are conceived as autonomous, choice-making and responsible.
These transformations are not solely the province of political rhetorics. They are structured
by the activities of various experts who restlessly monitor and problematize the nature and
truths of youth and families and the forms of regulation which promise to ``make up'' these
subjects. The pedagogic family (Donzelot, 1979), with the assistance of the truths produced
by various forms of expertise (about the raising of children and adolescents), is responsible for
making the right choices for the sake of the children. Youth and families, by adopting freely
and by choice the practices for the responsible self, can attempt to ward off the uncertainty
and risks structured by processes of reflexive modernization. Those families and youth whose
behaviors and dispositions fall outside of the regulatory boundaries rendered knowable via
the practices of expertise are those at-risk in these settings. Tait (1995, p. 133) argues that
``in effect, the character of the `at-risk youth' is used as the pretext for modifying and
expanding the boundaries and responsibilities of the pedagogic family''.
Within transformed practices and spaces of regulation there are moves to normalize youth
as rational, choice-making citizens (to-be) who are responsible for their future life chances
through the choices they make with regard to school, career, relationships, substance
(ab)use. At the same time there are increasingly sophisticated attempts to differentiate
among youthful populations via the identification of risky behaviors and dispositions (factors)
which place at-risk those practices and capacities of the self which can effect a secure
transition to these preferred futures. Risk, as the double of (social, private) insurance, is a
technique which promises to make these new practices of prudentialism concrete (O'Malley,
1996). This is a powerful promise. The techniques of risk, its objective, scientific
identification, measurement and calculation, and its competing humanistic and economic
concerns, promise to render uncertain (future) realities thinkable in ways which provoke
prudent, choice-making subjects to be responsible for the consequences of their own
behaviors and dispositions.
Here, there is a sense that identification and intervention (via education, counselling, psy
diagnosis), as techniques facilitated by narratives of risk and enabled by the activities of
expertise, recode institutionally structured relations of class, gender, ethnicity, (dis)ability
and geography as complex, but quantifiable, factors which place certain youth at-risk. Once
identified, measured and quantified within probabilistic rationalities, modes of intervention
can be designed and implemented to enable regulatory projects which promise to minimize
the harm of these factors. In this context it becomes possible to argue that the narrative of
risk, and the techniques which both facilitate and are facilitated by conceiving of youth-atrisk, signal a historically novel development in attempts to regulate youth. At-risk discourses
rehearse historical truths which construct youth in terms of deviancy, delinquency and
deficit. However, at-risk discourses and techniques also promise potentially endless
justifications for the surveillance of populations of youth.

The dangerousness of youth-at-risk


My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the
same as bad. If everything is dangerous then we always have something to do (Foucault, 1983,
pp. 231232).

In conceiving risk as a metanarrative of an age of ``manufactured uncertainty'' I am


concerned with foregrounding the dangerousness of our times, a dangerousness indicated by

470

P. Kelly

the widespread sense of unease, anxiety and uncertainty in Anglo-European liberal


democracies. Here uncertainty attaches to the future outcomes for/of the planet, the nation
state, national (mono/multi) cultural identity, the economy, relationships, diet, sexuality,
gender relations, the self. When the endless possibilities for government which risk
techniques promise are situated in the context of the transformations structured by processes
of reflexive modernization, the dangerousness of risk becomes more evident, particularly in
the regulation of youth as a population constructed in terms of transitions to preferred
futures. Here the enhanced capacities for electronic, computerized and audio-visual
surveillance of populations, developments in biogenetic (social) engineering and the
possibilities of/for cyborg futures (Haraway, 1985, 1991) structure new spaces and relations in
which regulation can occur.
In these settings, powerful narratives of risk, fear and uncertainty structure a variety of
emergent processes and practices aimed at regulating the behaviors and dispositions of
populations of young people. In Australia and other liberal democracies, these practices
include:
. An increasingly widespread use of electronic surveillance technologies (video,
audio) in spaces such as shopping malls, streets and schools;
. The proposed and actual introduction of state and local government laws and bylaws allowing night curfews, zero tolerance policing and electronic tagging of young
offenders; and
. By-laws which set limits on the number of young people who may gather in certain
public spaces and which allow police (public and private) to move young people on if
they cause others anxiety.
In association with these more direct policing practices, increased levels of anxiety and
uncertainty provoke new forms of adult interventions into young people's lives on the basis of
professional concerns about their welfare. Again, these practices include:
. The involvement of youth, community and health workers in street work with young
people on projects which attempt to regulate antisocial practices;
. Various education programs which target the risky sexual, eating and drug practices
of young people, or the nature of their transitions to adulthood; and
. A general concern for any youth activity which gives the appearance of being
beyond the management or surveillance capacities of various agencies. These
concerns are evidenced in the countless research projects which seek to better
understand all aspects of youth in a manner which promises to develop more
sophisticated ways of identifying, differentiating and naming populations of young
people with regard to diverse professional and lay concerns.
Bauman (1990b, p. 165) argues that the ``history of modernity'' is a history of attempts to
``exterminate ambivalence: to define preciselyand to suppress or eliminate everything that
could or would not be precisely defined''. The costs of attempting to exterminate
ambivalence have, indeed, been high. The historical legacy of past attempts to impose order
on disorder, to pursue, rationally and scientifically, the quest for order indicate that countless
millions of humans have paid these costs with their lives, their liberty and their diverse
potentialities. Throughout this discussion I have foregrounded the dangerousness of the
practices and activities of expertise (grounded in narratives of scholarship, science and
reason) which promise certainty in an age of ``manufactured uncertainty'', an age where

The dangerousness of youth-at-risk

471

widespread anxieties, uncertainties and tensions enable the articulation of youth-at-risk to


function as a powerful truth.
Bauman (1990a), from a position better able to judge than many of us, is particularly wary
of modernity's attempts to ``exterminate ambivalence'' and the dangers (even horrors) of the
means mobilized to achieve this end (of uncertainty, of history).} A Polish Jew and a former
Communist academician, Bauman was exiled from Poland in 1968. He experienced ``actually
existing'' Communism as the ``kingdom of reason''. For Bauman (1990a, p. 36) modern
Communism, with its philosophical and political indebtedness to the late 19th century
``eruption of social engineering hopes'', demonstrates the ``genocidal potency that the grand
vision of perfect and rationalized society reveals when conjoined with the awesome powers of
the modern state''. Bauman's (1990a) investigations of the Holocaust, and histories of the
Holocaust, provoke, further, a sense of being ``struck by the evidence that the theoretical
consequences which would follow from the scrupulous investigation of the case are seldom
followed to the end and hardly ever accepted without resistance: too drastic and far-reaching
seems the revision which they force upon the self-consciousness of our civilization'' (p. 18).
What is resisted by these histories is the recognition that in modernity's war on ambivalence
(made so murderously real in the practices of National Socialism) there has been a profound
convergence between the ``practical tasks posited by the modern state'' and the ``legislative
reason of modern philosophy and of the modern scientific mentality in general'' (p. 26). As
Bauman (1990a) argues: ``Modern rulers and modern philosophers were first and foremost
legislators; they found chaos and set out to tame it and replace it with order'' (p. 24, original
emphasis). The modern project of the Enlightenment was, argues Bauman (1990a),
motivated ``by the dream of a masterful humanity'', a humanity which was ``collectively free
from constraints'' and thus able to ``respect'' and ``preserve'' human ``dignity''. The realization
of this dream was to be facilitated via the elevation of ``[r]eason to the office of supreme
legislator'' (p. 26, original emphasis). Notwithstanding this attachment to the narrative of
human sovereignty there was, Bauman (1990a, p. 26) suggests, a certain ``elective affinity''
between the ``strategy of legislative reason and the practice of state power bent on imposition
of designed order upon obstreperous reality''.
The lessons of history ought to force us to confront ``the end of innocence'' (Flax, 1993)
with respect to the uncertain consequences (the dangerousness) associated with the
production and appropriation of intellectually grounded knowledge, knowledge which
secures legitimacy through its objective, scientific, reasoned characteristics. History ought
also to alert us to the dangerousness of the mobilization of scholarly work in modernity's
attempts to ``exterminate ambivalence''. Between 1907 and 1928, for instance, 20 states in
the U.S. enacted sterilization laws grounded in the science (truth) of race and eugenics.
These technologies of government targeted bodies (populations) rendered knowable as
``criminals, rapists, idiots, feeble-minded, imbeciles, lunatics, drunkards, drug fiends,
epileptics, syphilitics, moral and sexual perverts and diseased and degenerate persons''
(cited in Bauman 1990a, p. 36) In Australia the indigenous population, constructed as
Other, as less than White (as the measure of normality), as living ``lives devoid of value''
(Bauman 1990a), were systematically, rationally and on the basis of sound scientific, ethical
and moral principles, subjected to governmental practices which removed them from their
}
See Kilminster and Varcoe (1998), Morawski (1988) and Smith (1998) in a special section of Theory, Culture and
Soceity, 15, for commentary on Bauman's life and the legacy of his intellectual and political work. See also Bauman
(1997, 1998).

472

P. Kelly

lands, isolated and restricted them (discursively and materially) to the margins of mainstream
(White) society, and dismantled their family and cultural traditions via practices such as the
forced removal of children from their parents, a practice of salvation grounded in the
sciences of eugenics and social biology and the morality of Christian redemption.} Historical,
sociological and cultural studies of youth suggest that youth too, as a population, as a signifier
of apparent ungovernability, has a history of emerging from, of indeed occupying, certain
``wild zones'' in the collective imagination of modernity (Kelly, 1999).k In these spaces, the
poor, the promiscuous, the violent, the abusive, the illiterate, the idle, the addicts, the binge
drinkers, the joy-riders, the homeless, the dropouts, the unemployed, the at-risk have
provoked anxiety and a warrant for intervention in expert discourses. Here, in the practices
and activities, the dreams and ambitions of intellectuals and the ``educated classes'', can be
found traces of the promise of order to be delivered by interventionist and transformative
logics and practices, logics which promise perfectibility in human interactions, behaviors and
dispositions if only we could produce more and better knowledge of these processes.
Bauman's critique is not unique. Postmodern and feminist critiques of modern ``legislative
reasons'' rehearse similar arguments. These critiques have informed the structure of this
paper and my engagement with theories of reflexive modernization and governmentality. The
promise of legislated reason, a promise to be delivered via the activities and practices of
expertise, is not the sole province of the police states of history. The same hopes and visions
structure the identification of future research objects in countless reports, by various centres
of expertise; reports such as the one prepared by the Panel of High-Risk Youth. In these sorts
of reports can be found the ``normative, engineering ambitions that are inherent in all
scientific enterprise. . . and that may lend themselves easily and joyously to political uses
anytime and everywhere'' (Bauman, 1990a, pp. 4041, original emphasis).

Conclusion
The modern ideologies of prevention are overarched by a grandiose technocratic rationalizing
dream of absolute control of the accidental, understood as the irruption of the unpredictable. In
the name of this myth of absolute eradication of risk, they construct a mass of new risks which
constitute so many new targets for preventive intervention. Not just those dangers that lie
hidden away inside the subject, consequences of his or her weakness of will, irrational desires or
unpredictable liberty, but also the exogenous dangers, the exterior hazards and temptations from
which the subject has not learnt to defend himself or herself, alcohol, tobacco, bad eating habits,
road accidents, various kinds of negligence and pollution, meteorological hazards, etc. Thus, a
vast hygienist utopia plays on the alternate registers of fear and security, inducing a delirium of
rationality, an absolute reign of calculative reason and a no less absolute happiness for a life to
which nothing happens. This hyper-rationalism is at the same time a thoroughgoing pragmatism,
in that it pretends to eradicate risk as though one were pulling up weeds. Yet throughout the
multiple current expressions of this tranquil preventive conscience (so hypertrophied at the
moment in France, if one looks at all the massive national preventive campaigns), one finds not a
trace of any reflection on the social and human cost of this new witch-hunt (Castel, 1991,
p. 289)

Castel (1991) captures the dangerous possibilities provoked when, as Rose (1996b, p. 20)
argues, ``we allow all cultural practices to be `vivisected at the micro-level' and give our
}

See for instance Cuneen (1994) and Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1997).
See for instance Cohen (1972), Hall et al. (1978), Gilroy (1987), McRobbie (1994) and the tradition of the
``moral panic'' in British cultural studies of youth.
k

The dangerousness of youth-at-risk

473

experts the duty of defining and managing them in order to eliminate or minimize
any possible features that might prove dangerous''. In this paper my purpose has been to
reflect on the dangerous possibilities provoked by the mobilization of risk discourses in
attempts to regulate youthful identities and to problematize the practices of intervention
and surveillance which emerge from conceiving youth as being at-risk. At the close of the
20th century, the liberal democracies are characterized by profound social, economic
and cultural transformations. In these settings, adult anxieties about the public and
private behaviors and dispositions of young people mean that youth looms large
and threateningly in community perceptions and in various policy areas and academic
disciplines.
Cultural and policy contexts which are framed by uncertainty, fear and anxiety provoke
dangerous possibilities in the regulation and surveillance of young people. In such contexts,
the promise of safety, security, order and certainty which frames many of these surveillance
and management practices can only be delivered via more sophisticated and powerful
techniques of regulation and intervention. It is not possible to conceive of unregulated
spaces. It is possible, however, that some forms of regulation, even those framed
by concerns for the safety and wellbeing of young people, require school, local and
national communities to give up more than is promised in the name of certainty, order
and safety. In contemporary settings of uncertainty and fear, there is a strong warrant
for popular, political and intellectual practices which foreground the dangerous possibilities
provoked by a widespread concern to regulate the behaviors and dispositions of young
people via the mobilization of more sophisticated techniques of intervention and
surveillance.

References
Batten, M. and Russell J. (1995). Students at risk: a review of Australian literature 19801994. Melbourne:
Australian Council for Educational Research.
Bauman, Z. (1990a). Modernity and ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity.
Bauman, Z. (1990b). Modernity and ambivalence. In M. Featherstone (Ed.). Global Culture, (pp. 143
170), Sage: London.
Bauman, Z. (1997). The work ethic and prospects for the new poor. Arena Journal, 9, 5776.
Bauman, Z. (1998). What prospects of morality in times of uncertainty. Theory, Culture and Society, 15,
1122.
Beasley, B. (1991). Transitions to nowhere: the effects of government policies on young working class
people's access to employment training. In R. White and B. Wilson (Eds). For your own good: young
people and state intervention in Australia, (pp. 6577) Melbourne: Latrobe University Press.
Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society. London: Sage.
Beck, U. (1994). Self-dissolution and self-endangement of industrial society: what does this mean? In
U. Beck., A. Giddens. and S. Lash, Reflexive modernization: politics, tradition and aesthetics in the
modern social order,(pp. 175183), Cambridge: Polity .
Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1994). Preface. In U. Beck., A. Giddens. and S. Lash, (Eds)
Reflexive modernization: politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order, (pp. viviii),
Cambridge: Polity.
Bessant, J. (1991). Described, measured and labelled: eugenics, youth policy and moral panic in Victoria
in the 1950s. In R. White and B. Wilson (Eds). For your own good: young people and state
intervention in Australia (pp. 828) Melbourne: Latrobe University Press.
Burchell, G. (1996). Liberal government and techniques of the self. In A. Barry, T. Osborne and
N. Rose (Eds). Foucault and political reason: liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities of government,
(pp. 1936) London: UCL Press.

474

P. Kelly

Carrington, K. (1991). Policing families and controling the young. In R. White and B. Wilson (Eds). For
your own good: young people and state intervention in Australia, (pp. 108117) Melbourne: Latrobe
University Press.
Castel, R. (1991). From dangerousness to risk. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (Eds). The
Foucault effect: studies in governmental rationality, (pp. 281298) Hemel Hempstead: Harvester
Wheatsheaf.
Cohen, S. (1972). Folk devils and moral panics: the creation of the mods and rockers, St Albans, Herts:
Granada.
Collard, L. and Palmer, D. (1991). Aboriginal young people in the southwest of Western Australia:
implications for youth policy. In R. White and B. Wilson (Eds). For your own good: young people and
state intervention in Australia, (pp. 7893) Melbourne: Latrobe University Press.
Colthart, A. (1996). At risk youth participation in sport and recreation. Youth Studies Australia, 15,
3137.
Cuneen, C. (1994). Enforcing genocide? Aboriginal young people and the police. In R. White and C.
Alder (Eds). The police and young people in Australia, (pp. 128158) Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Davidson, L. and Linnoila, M. (1991). Risk factors for youth suicide. New York: Hemisphere.
Department of Education, Victoria (1996). Students at risk program: 19951996. Melbourne.
Department of Employment, Education and Training (1992). Students at risk program: case studies.
Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service.
Donzelot, J. (1979). The policing of families. New York: Random House.
Education Department of South Australia (1976). At risk: schools or kids? Adelaide.
English, F. (1988). Foreword. In E. H. Ogden and V. Germinario, The at-risk student: answers for
educators. Lancaster, PA: Technomic.
Flax, J. (1993). Disputed subjects. New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1983). The subject and power. In H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (Eds). Michel Foucault:
beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, (pp. 208226) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (Eds). The Foucault
effect: studies in governmental rationality, (pp. 87104) Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Freeland, J. (1991). Dislocated transitions: access and participation for disadvantaged young people. In
Young people's participation in post-compulsory education and training: Vol. 3. (Appendix 2), (pp. 161
224). Canberra: Australian Education Council Review Committee.
Freeland, J. (1992). Education and training for the school to work transition. In T. Seddon and C. Deer,
(Eds). A curriculum for the senior secondary years, Melbrourne: Australian Council for Educational
Research.
Freeland, J. (1996, March). The teenage labour market and post-compulsory curriculum reform. Paper
presented at conference on Making it work: vocational education in schools, Melbourne.
Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA: Standford University Press.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, A. (1994). Beyond left and right. Cambridge: Polity.
Gilory, P. (1987). There ain't no black in the Union Jack: the cultural politics of race and nation. London:
Hutchinson.
Gross, D. R. and Capuzzi, D. (1993). Defining youth at risk. In D. Capuzzi, and D. R. Gross (Eds). Youth
at risk: a resource for counselors, teachers and parents, (pp. 318) Alexandria, VA: American
Counselling Association.
Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the crisis: mugging, the state
and law and order. London: Macmillan.
Haraway, D. (1985). A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s.
Socialist Review, 80, 65107.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women, (New York: Routledge).
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1997). Bringing them home: report of the National
Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families.
Sydney.
Irving, T. (1991). Youth policy as politics: the Dewar Committee and juvenile delinquency in
Queensland in the 1950s. In R. White, and B. Wilson (Eds). For your own good: young people and
state intervention in Australia, (pp. 4150) Melbourne: Latrobe University Press.

The dangerousness of youth-at-risk

475

Kelly, P. (1998). Risk and the regulation of youthful identities in an age of manufactured uncertainty.
Unpublished PhD thesis, Deakin University, Melbourne.
Kelly, P. (1999). ``Wild and tame zones'': regulating the transitions of youth-at-risk. Journal of Youth
Studies, 2, 193211.
Kilminster, R. and Varcoe, I. (1998). Three appreciations of Zygmunt Bauman. Theory, Culture and
Society, 15, 2328.
Kushman, J. W. and Kinney, P. (1993). Understanding and preventing school dropout. In D. Capuzzi,
and D. R. Gross (Eds). Youth at risk: a resources for counselors, teachers and parents, (pp. 344366)
Alexandria, VA: American Counselling Association.
Maunders, D. (1991). A youth service for Australia: the lobby for a national youth policy 194060. In
R. White, and B. Wilson (Eds). For your own good: young people and state intervention in Australia.
(pp. 2940) Melbourne: Latrobe University Press.
McRobbie, A. (1994). Postmodernism and popular culture. New York: Routledge.
McWhirter, J. J. and McWhirter, E. H. (1993). Poor soil yields damaged fruit: environmental influences.
In D. Capuzzi, and D. R. Gross (Eds). Youth at risk: a resource for counselors, teachers and parents,
(pp. 1943) Alexandria, VA: American Counselling Association.
Meggert, S. S (1993). ``Who cares what I think?'': problems of low self-esteem. In Capuzzi, D. and
Gross, D. R. (Eds). Youth at risk: a resource for counselors, teachers and parents, (pp. 97120)
Alexandria, VA: American Counselling Association.
Moore, S. (1997, December). Youth, sex and risk. Dean of the Faculty of Arts' Annual Lecture, Victoria
University of Technology, Melbourne.
Morawski, S. (1998). Bauman's ways of seeing the world. Theory, Culture and Society, 15, 2938.
Nardini, M. L. and Antes, R. L. (1991). An at-risk assessment: teachers rate their students on academic
skills and behavior. Clearing House, 65, 5662.
O' Malley, P. (1996). Risk and responsibility. In A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (Eds). Foucault and
political reason: liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities of government, (pp. 189208) London: UCL
Press.
Ogden, E. H. and Germinario, V. (1988). The at-risk student: answers for educators. Lancaster, PA:
Technomic.
Palmo, A. J. and Palmo, L. A. (1993). The harmful effects of dysfunctional family dynamics. In D.
Capuzzi, and D. R. Gross (Eds). Youth at risk: a resource for counselors, teachers and parents, (pp. 43
70) Alexandria, VA: American Counselling Association.
Panel on High-Risk Youth, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National
Research Council (1993). Losing generations: adolescents in high-risk settings. Washington, DC:
National Academy Press.
Putnins, A. (1997). ``At risk'' youth and tattoos. Youth Studies Australia, 16, 1315.
Robinson, S. E. (1993). ``Why say no?'': substance abuse among teenagers. In D. Capuzzi, and D. R.
Gross (Eds). Youth at risk: a resource for counselors, teachers and parents, (pp. 325344) Alexandria,
VA: American Counselling Association.
Rose, N. (1996a). Governing ``advanced'' liberal democracies. In A. Barry, T. Osborne, and N. Rose,
(Eds). Foucault and political reason: liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities of government, (pp. 37
64) London: UCL Press.
Rose, N. (1996b). Psychiatry as a political science: advanced liberalism and the administration of risk.
History of the Human Sciences, 9, 123.
Rose, N. (1996c). The death of the social?: Re-figuring the territory of government Economy and Soceity,
25, 327356.
Rose, N. and Miller, P. (1992). Political power beyond the state: problematics of government. British
Journal of Sociology, 43, 173205.
Sherington, G. (1991). Vocational guidance, training and employment of youth in New South Wales:
From Depression to post-war boom. In R. White, and B. Wilson (Eds). For your own good: young
people and state intervention in Australia, (pp. 5164) Melbourne: Latrobe University Press.
Smith, D. (1998). Zygmunt Bauman: how to be a successful outsider. Theory, Culture and Society, 15,
3945.
Swadener, B. B. and Lubeck, S. (1995). The social construction of children and families ``at risk'': an
introduction. Im B. B. Swadener, and S. Lubeck (Eds). Children and families ``at promise'':
deconstructing the discourse of risk, (pp. 116) New York: State University of New York Press.

476

P. Kelly

Tait, G. (1995). Shaping the ``at-risk youth'': risk, governmentality and the Finn Report. Discourse, 16,
123134.
Watts, R. (199394). Government and modernity: an essay in thinking governmentality. Arena Journal,
2, 103158.
Withers, G. and Batten, M. (1995). Programs for at-risk youth: a review of the American, Canadian and
British Literature since 1984. Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research.
Wyn, J. (1991). Safe from attention: young women, STDs and health policy. In R. White and B. Wilson
(Eds). For your own good: young people and state intervention in Australia, (pp. 94107) Melbourne:
Latrobe University Press.

También podría gustarte