UCC hosts seminar on youth justice
Stock picture: Larry Cummins
When five teenagers lost their lives while driving down the wrong side of the M9 motorway, there was widespread shock and horror that an innocent family on their way to the airport had their lives torn apart after colliding with the car load of boys.
The loss of five teenage lives in the August tragedy failed to garner nearly as much sympathy and concern, with the focus of the Irish public firmly shone on the innocent family who had been travelling to attend a family wedding.
The incident led to UCC sociology and criminology researcher Katharina Swirak to organise a seminar on youth justice at the university in recent weeks.
She explained: “There was a lot of moral panic and drama around the recent horrific road crash with the five teenagers who died as a result.
“There was of course justified sympathy for the victims [the family who were injured] and also some understanding for the teenagers but there was a lot of vilification of the teenagers as well and that gave us an impetus to organise this seminar.
“That is because youth work is a lot about looking beyond the individual young person and looking more at the systemic harm that we all create as policy makers, as politicians, as society more generally.
“That puts young people into situations where they even risk their own lives.”
Also in the background is the looming expiration next year of the current Youth Justice Strategy.
The aim of the strategy is to set out actions targeting children believed to be most at risk of becoming serious offenders.
Read More
Ms Swirak said: “There will be a new one drafted and I think it is important to get different voices heard to make sure there is a very progressive approach to youth justice in Ireland which is based on diversion and prevention, and does not become more punitive.”
Reformed offender Robert Cullen, who lives in Cork, agrees that the focus needs to be on prevention and on recognising the systemic causes of young people turning to crime for validation.
Last month, Zachary Hecht, TikTok’s global head of policy in trust and safety, addressed the Oireachtas committee on media and told its members that the video-sharing platform had identified 1,600 videos in Ireland showing highly risky driving, vehicular theft, or related behaviours since the fatal M9 crash.
Mr Cullen, who spent time in prison for an armed robbery but who has now begun a PhD at UCC on violence and masculinity, told the : “I became fascinated about trying to understand violence, trying to understand why I had become the person that I had.
“I had done a long prison sentence and I had no solid sense of identity. I could not make sense of the things that had happened to me, the things I had done.
“So I went on this journey trying to understand violence and throughout that journey, I landed on some feminist literature by Bell Hooks and Angela Davis in the black feminist movement. They were centring patriarchy in the conversation.”
He said he started to think about and understand his own life through that lens.
“I began to understand how the world I grew up in had shaped my sense of masculinity and what it meant to be a man in ways that actually promoted the perpetration of harm and leaning into harmful beliefs like homophobia, the sexual objectification of women, the belief that men should be wholly self-reliant, that in order to be successful, we need to have material things — and that becomes more difficult when you are in a situation where you don’t have access to a lot, where you have been out of school early.”
Mr Cullen explained that he himself left school at Junior Cert level.
From his studies in sociology, he has developed an understanding that masculinity has always existed — long before social media.
He said the traits associated with masculinity include the expectation of a man being the boss, as well as dominance, control, homophobia, sexual objectification, extreme self-reliance, and emotional suppression.
He added: “Social media does also play a part and I think when I was a teenager and I wanted my friends to think I was tough, I had to impress the people in my peer group.
“Now for young people, the audience is so much bigger with so many people looking in at them that they have this pressure to perform for everyone, to meet the expectations of this vast audience.”
He said this can contribute to them engaging in even more erratic behaviour.
“It is like a competition for status, for significance, for a sense of belonging and trying to generate some meaning,” Mr Cullen said.
“When you have people who have grown up in neglect and disadvantage, they feel that insecurity there and that can be the thing that can propel them in engaging in riskier behaviour because they are almost desperate for this validation.”
He said the appeal of prison as a solution is attractive because it is simplistic.
“The research shows that it increases young people’s chances of going on to commit more crime so actually what we are doing is making people less safe.”
Read More
He added: “What we need to do now is to engage in the complex conversations that are needed in order to really untangle this stuff and develop policy that can actually bring us to a sense of safety and create a sense of safety and meet the needs of everyone, not just the people that want harsh punishments.
“It is about bringing people together and just giving everyone a chance, and using policy to shape the environment that people are growing up in in order to prevent people becoming people who harm other people.
“If we prevent that, we prevent people from becoming harmed.”
During the recent seminar, Mr Cullen was in conversation with London-based social worker and researcher Luke Billingham, who said there is a commonality between Ireland and the UK relating to the “demonisation of young people”.
He continued: “There is a lot of ephebiphobia — which means the irrational fear or hatred of teenagers.
“It gets us nowhere and gains us nothing in terms of the understanding the lives of young people in order to prevent them from causing or experiencing harm.”
Mr Billingham said that what he sees in his work is not just the need for more youth workers or more provision for young people but more work done to address the more fundamental systemic problems because there are social conditions that predictably breed violence.
He quoted Lee Dema who runs the St Matthew’s Project in Brixton, south London, who said: “There are young men literally dying to be someone or something, anything but no-one and nothing.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
