Content area
Full Text
This book about the stigmatization of youth in Canadian society begins on a theoretically intriguing note, takes up some potentially radical explanatory themes, but unfortunately obscures more than it clarifies at the finish.
Schissel argues that children (usually adolescent street youth) have become "perfect scapegoats" for the shortcomings of the political and economic system in Canada. Despite evidence that youth crime is not epidemic, and is not even on the increase, a continuation of privileged interests -- government, police management, moral entrepreneurs, and professional experts -- have combined to portray youth as the "new enemy of the state" (p. 8), arguing for harsher law reform measures. This is done, presumably, in order to strengthen the interests of controlling elites in Canadian society, largely white, male, professional members of the capitalist class. The principal legitimating agent of this punitive discourse is the mass media, which generates moral panics about youth crime by simplifying and distorting the meaning of their acts for public consumption, thereby reconceiving street youth as "folk devils." This, in turn, fuels the generalized lobby for increased social control at all levels. The media adopt this approach in part because they are complicit in the "politics of stratification," and...