Dangerous youth and the dangerous class

This book constitutes the first concerted attempt by British social scientists to grapple with the idea of the underclass in relationship to contemporary youth. It considers both how youth as a time of transition can be dangerous for young people themselves, leading to social exclusion, and how excluded youth – as a social category has been constructed as dangerous and threatening for the comfortable majority of middle-aged, middleclass society. ‘Dangerous youth’ refers, then, both to processes of social exclusion that affect vulnerable young people and to the groups so excluded. The chapter commences with a review of the underclass idea – of the various debates and issues which shape contemporary theories of a dangerous class. It then shows how and why young people have become the prime subjects in discourses of the underclass, before describing the specific contributions to these debates made by the subsequent chapters.