Alternative post-16 transitions: examining the career pathways of young women ‘on road’

ABSTRACT

To understand why young women engage in the (sub)culture of badness whilst ‘on road’, as opposed to more conventional employment pathways, it’s imperative to consider their access (or lack of) to legitimate opportunities. Living in deprived urban areas creates a set of conditions which can impact on life chances, thus demonstrating the continued importance of intersecting factors class, gender, race and place in their lives as they navigate precarious transitions against a backdrop of neo-liberalism and racial disadvantage. The Teesside transitions literature, based on white young people from a deindustrialised area of the north-east of England, is considered in terms of its usefulness of thinking about young women ‘on road’ in London, given that the interest in capturing and analysing their experiences has been notably absent in the British criminological literature. Consequentlyvery little is known about those who are entrenched in road culture as the majority of what we know around crime and violence is focused on the experiences of young men, so experiences of young women of colour are even more limited. This paper has begun to make some headway in terms of addressing these gaps so they are more visible in marginalised urban spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Badness
• employment transitions
• race
• urban neighbourhoods
• young women

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is term is used by Ugwudike

2 The author is aware that there were female Teddy Girls, Mods, Rockers, and Punks, however literature about their lives is not forthcoming in the same way as their male counterparts. Black women have been particularly forgotten about, despite groups such as Polystyrene being influenced by Jamaican Ska music

3 See Choak (2020) for an exploration of the gang agenda as a colonial project

4 This is the term used by Trust for London

5 For other explanations of gendered pathways to badness, such as the allure of consumer society, and the kudos of being known as bad, see Choak (2019)