Street Gangs, Migration and Ethnicity

297 Pages·2013·6.077 MB·English

by  Klein, Malcolm M., Lien, Inger-Lise, Peterson, Dana, van Gemert, Frank

Street Gangs,
Migration and Ethnicity
EDITED BY
Frank van Gemert,
Dana Peterson and
WILLAN
Inger-Lise Lien
PUBLISHING
Street Gangs, Migration and Ethnicity
Street Gangs, Migration
and Ethnicity
Edited by
Frank van Gemert, Dana Peterson
and Inger-Lise Lien
WILLAN
PUBLISHING
Published by
VVillan Publishing
Culmcott House
Mill Street, Uffculme
Cullompton, Devon
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© The editor and contributors 2008
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publishers or a licence
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First published 2008
ISBN 978-1-84392-396-1 paperback
978-1-84392-397-8 hardback
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Project managed by Deer Park Productions, Tavistock, Devon
Typeset by GCS, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire
Printed and bound by T.J. International, Padstow, Cornwall
Contents
Acknowledgements IX
Foreword by Malcolm W. Klein XI
About the editors xvii
Part I Introduction and methods 1
1 Introduction 3
Frank van Gemert, Inger-Lise Lien and Dana Peterson
2 Migrant groups and gang activity: a contrast
between Europe and the USA 15
Frank van Gemert and Scott Decker
3 Dangers and problems of doing 'gang' research
in the UK 31
Judith Aldridge, Juanjo Medina and Robert Ralphs
Part II Migration ands treet gangs 47
4 Mexican migrants in gangs: a second-generation
history 49
James Diego Vigil
Street Gangs, Migration and Ethnicity
5 Latin Kings in Barcelona 63
Carles Feixa, Noemi Canelles, Laura Porzio, Carolina Recio and
Luca Giliberti
6 Gangs, migration and conflict: Thrasher's theme in
The Netherlands 79
Frank van Gemert and Jantien Stuifbergen
7 Origins and development of racist skinheads
in Moscow 97
Alexander Shashkin
Part III Ethnicity and street gangs 115
8 The role of race and ethnicity in gang membership 117
Finn-Aage Esbensen, Bradley T. Brick, Chris Melde,
Karin Tusinski and Terrance J. Taylor
9 Weapons are for wimps: the social dynamics of
ethnicity and violence in Australian gangs 140
Rob White
10 Ethnicity and juvenile street gangs in France 156
Coralie Fiori-Khayat
11 Migration background, group affiliation, and 173
delinquency among endangered youths in a
south-west German city
Hans-Jürgen Kerner, Kerstin Reich, Marc Coester
and Elmar G.M. Weitekamp
12 Respect, friendship, and racial injustice: justifying 192
gang membership in a Canadian city
Scot Wortley and Julian Tanner
Part IV Issues and challenges of migration and
ethnicity in dealing with street gangs 209
13 An interactive construction of gangs and ethnicity: 211
the role of school segregation in France
Eric Debarbieux and Catherine Blaya
Contents
14 'Nemesis' and the Achilles heel of Pakistani gangs 227
in Norway
Inger-Lise Lien
15 Wolves and sheepdogs: on migration, ethnic relations 241
and gang-police interaction in Sweden
Micael Björk
16 Concluding remarks: the roles of migration and
ethnicity in street gang formation, involvement
and response 255
Dana Peterson, Inger-Lise Lien and Frank van Gemert
Index 273
Acknowledgements
A number of thanks are due, not just to the contributors for sharing
their research and for their timeliness and patience, but also to others
who furthered this project. We are appreciative to Juanjo Medina who
organized the May 2005 Eurogang meeting at which many of these
papers were first presented and to the Eurogang network of researchers
who remain committed to our goal of cross-national comparative
research. Thanks are due as well to Scott Decker and Frank Weerman,
who graciously donated a portion of the proceeds from the second
Eurogang book for this manuscript's preparation. We thank our two
anonymous peer reviewers for their time, expertise, and insight which
have certainly improved this work. The editors wish to express much
appreciation to University at Albany doctoral students Nicole Schmidt,
who read and edited most of the chapters, and Vanessa Panfil, for
historical research; and to Wasja Rijs from VU university in Amsterdam,
for bibliographic editing of all of the chapters. We also appreciate all
the support we received from Brian Willan and his excellent staff and
affiliates at Willan Publishing. Finally, we wish to thank all of those
who take a chance to discuss and research sensitive issues such as
gangs, migration, and ethnicity; we hope our work adds positively to
the discussion.
ix
Foreword
Malcolm W. Klein
This third book emanating from the Eurogang Programme presents
a significant line of progress over the first two (Decker and
Weerman 2005; Klein et al. 2001). It moves the programme from its
initial phase of technical development over some seven years to an
expanded concern for the contextual underpinnings of comparative,
international street gang research. My excitement over the publishing
of this new volume stems only partially from my proprietary interest
as a founder of the programme. It also reflects my appreciation for a
number of insights offered by the various authors in the volume. My
comments will, rather briefly, cover three topics: programme rationale,
programme history, and the nexus between street gangs and marginal
populations as highlighted in some of the ensuing chapters.
Programme rationale
Most street gang research has been carried out in the USA over a
period of about 80 years. Although there has been a publication
crescendo, what progress has been achieved in understanding gangs
has been more by post hoc synthesis than by planning. American
gang studies have been largely uncoordinated exercises in different
locations, using different research methods, and driven by different
perspectives among researchers and their funders. Our first hope
for the Eurogang Programme was therefore that it could develop
coordination of methods and perspectives across sites.
Street Gangs, Migration and Ethnicity
A second problem with the American experience has been the well-
documented failure to settle upon a common definition, or at least
common components of a definition, that would permit replicable
data collection. If there is such a thing as a street gang, we should
be able to define it both conceptually and operationally. Our second
hope for the Eurogang Programme, then, was a resolution of the
definitional problem.
A third problem in the USA has been that most street gang
programmes and policies have been unrelated to available data,
especially as truly relevant, policy-related data have become readily
available over the past 50 or so years (see the recent data and
programme summaries in Klein and Maxson 2006). Our third hope
for the Eurogang Programme - not yet realised at all - has been that
data-based gang policy can indeed be developed.
The European setting with its rapidly emerging gang problems
has been, for the American participants in the programme, a way
to start over, to get in before the door is again closed. For the
European participants, it has been a way for mostly unconnected
gang researchers to come together across national lines to share a set
of relatively new experiences - a search for synergy.
History
The Eurogang Programme started at an informal gathering in Leuven,
Belgium, in 1997, where a few American and European researchers
traded notes on what seemed to be an accelerated emergence of
street gangs in Europe. The impressions were mostly anecdotal but
consistent. Further discussions led to a series of increasingly focused
workshops in Belgium, The Netherlands, Norway, and Germany, in
which gang research papers were delivered and discussed. At the
same time, a working group was established to obtain agreement upon
both conceptual and operational approaches to defining street gangs.
Five additional working groups undertook the task of developing,
pretesting, revising and settling upon five research instruments that
could be used (with translations) across many nations to yield common
and comparable data on street gangs. By 2005, seven workshops had
led to the culmination of these processes, as well as the identification
of 50 gang-involved cities in Europe and over 100 American and
European researchers interested in participating in what became
known as the Eurogang Programme. This period between 1997 and
2005 constituted the first phase of that programme.