Eyes wide open: stranger hospitality and the regulation of youth citizenship

Abstract

Across the Anglo-American world, a pervasive sense of wariness and concern about strangers continues to haunt influential discourses and practices that regulate and shape youth citizenship. In particular, (1) media-centred accounts of ‘stranger danger’, (2) dominant citizenship discourses taught in schools and (3) government policies regulating young people's civic lives, remain significant in shaping how strangers are made meaningful for youth. Through these discourses and practices, the stranger increasingly comes to be a fetish figure, a body and symbolic form whose very figurability is rendered a problem in the first instance. These developments are problematic, in large part because strangers are a necessary and enabling feature of modern democracies. Accordingly, in this paper, I examine the three aforementioned fields of discourse and practice as they have operated broadly over the past decade in Canada, Britain and the United States. I show how strangers are made difficult and dangerous others for youth and make clear how these constructions regulate and threaten a vibrant public world. I conclude by hinting at how stranger hospitality might be taken up differently in schools (and other public fora) as part of nurturing our collective democratic futures.

Keywords:

• youth citizenship
• stranger hospitality
• public life
• moral regulation
• the state

Notes

1. The EU Kids Online study (Livingstone et al., 2011), for instance, suggests that fewer than 10% of young people have received unwanted sexual comments online, while fewer than 9% of youth across the EU have met an online contact offline. In North America, while stranger danger fears centre on worries that children are now more vulnerable to sexual exploitation, both sex crimes against children (down 33%) and the sexual abuse of children (down 61% according to FBI statistics) declined dramatically in the USA between 1992 and 2009 (Finkelhor 2011, p. 5). Regarding bullying, while we know this kind of abuse was not invented with the Internet, it is of note that crimes committed by young people have declined significantly in both the USA and Canada since the mid-1990s (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention 2010a). Moreover, “School violence reported in the National School Crime Survey was down 60% [between] 1995–2005 (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention 2010b). Hate comments reported by school children [was] down 27% from 1999 to 2007 (Child Trends 2010a) … [and the] per cent of teens who feared attacks at school or on the way to school declined … 55% from 1995–2007” (Child Trends 2010b) (Quoted in Finkelhor 2011).

2. The YCC was appointed by the minister responsible for Youth Engagement and was made up of 13 commissioners, including young people, academics, teachers and others working in the third sector.