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UNIVERSITY OF BATH

Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies

RIOTERS AND PROTESTERS, HOODIES AND CHILDREN:

ANALYSING NEWSPAPER REPRESENTATIONS

OF YOUNG PEOPLE DURING THE RIOTS.

Benjamin Bowman

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for

the MA in International Politics degree

Benjamin Bowman 30/09/2011

Contents

Title page...............................................................................................................1

Copyright information...........................................................................................4

Abstract.................................................................................................................5

Acknowledgements................................................................................................6

Introduction...........................................................................................................7

1. Theoretical background...................................................................................10

Research methodology: Critical discourse analysis and grounded theory........10

Critical discourse analysis.............................................................................10

Grounded theory...........................................................................................13

Theoretical context: Young people in British politics......................................15

Engaged and disengaged perspectives on young people in Britain...............15

Citizenship, or antisocial behaviour? Representing young people’s

engagement...................................................................................................17

2. Tribal youth and the urban politics of belonging.............................................20

Constructing tribal youth in discourse.............................................................20

The hooded youth.........................................................................................21

Youth tribal communication and digital nativity..........................................26

Metaphors of urban nativity and power........................................................30

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Us vs. them: a critical assessment of tribal youth, its boundaries and

deviance........................................................................................................32

3. Enforcement discourse: the passive child........................................................37

Role reversal: Powerful police, vulnerable boys............................................38

Police violence, knee-jerk government and the passive child.......................39

4. Young people as an economic underclass........................................................46

Youth underclass: tribal rioters and “posh” students shoulder to shoulder..47

“The riots weren’t political. But they were a protest…”................................49

5. Conclusion.......................................................................................................57

6. References........................................................................................................61

Newspaper articles cited...............................................................................61

Academic references.....................................................................................63

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Copyright information

Attention is drawn to the fact that copyright of this thesis rests with its author.

This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults

it is understood to recognize that its copyright rests with its author and that no

quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published

without the prior written consent of the author.

This thesis may be made available for consultation within the University Library

and may be photocopied or lent to other libraries for the purpose of

consultation.

Signed:

Benjamin Bowman

MA International Politics, University of Bath

email: [email protected]

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Abstract

This dissertation analyses the ways young people are represented by discourse in

one newspaper’s coverage of the riots in the UK, in August 2011. A theoretical

background provides this investigation its location within the broader academic

literature. The investigation also extends the author’s existing research

concerning young people’s identity and belonging in the UK, which will be the

subject of the author’s ESRC-funded PhD research beginning this October, 2011.

A two-part methodology based on grounded theory and critical discourse

analysis is used to investigate the ways young people are represented by writers

in the Guardian – a left-of-centre broadsheet newspaper – selected for the depth

of its coverage and the variety of different representations of young people

encountered therein1. Three dominant representations are identified: young

people as ‘tribal youth’, young people as vulnerable children and young people

as an economic underclass. The investigation analyses each representation with

illustrative examples from the discourse, and considers them with a critical eye

on how they reproduce ideologies related to young people and their engagement

or disengagement in British society.

1 The Guardian does not print a Sunday edition. In order to provide a more comprehensive study this dissertation includes its Sunday sister paper, The Sunday Observer. This dissertation refers to The Guardian as a collective name for both the weekly organ and the Sunday title it owns, unless otherwise indicated.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my appreciation of the support and advice given to me by

my supervisor, Dr. Marion Demossier, whose effort and enthusiasm I couldn’t

have done without. I sincerely hope that we will have the opportunity to work

together again. I also want to thank the administrative staff at the Graduate

School for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, not least Sophie

Martin, Elise Merker and Ann Burge, who are always ready to help far beyond

what is necessary. My gratitude, also, for the Student Money Service who

provided me support and advice that were vital throughout my undergraduate

degree and this MA programme.

I could not have completed this course without the constant care, consideration

and support provided to me by the management and staff at The Raven of Bath,

especially Tim Perry, who accommodated my chaotic schedule, and me and my

bicycle overnight when I was working evening shifts.

My work I dedicate to my mother, Lisa Bowman, who meets my worries and my

happiness with the same endless love.

And my heart entire to Phoebe Wales. Here’s to us, together and adventurously.

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Introduction

This dissertation looks at how the Guardian represented young people during

and after the August riots, with excerpts from the corpus provided for deeper

analysis. The theoretical framework for the investigation is presented by

explaining its research methodology and outlining the academic theory in which

the research is located. By isolating the riots and their coverage in one

newspaper, this dissertation endeavours to produce a snapshot of discourse

concerning young people in the UK within very strict boundaries, examined to

fine detail.

This topic was chosen to complement the author’s continuing research into

young people in the UK and how they construct and reproduce political identities

and belonging, which will be the topic of an MRes/PhD course through the next

four years, with the support and funding of the Economic and Social Research

Council. The context of my continuing research provides this investigation with

a broader thematic context focussing on young people’s identity, and on debates

concerning their activity and engagement with – or passivity and disengagement

from – British politics. With this in mind, the theoretical background for this

investigation

The investigation discovered several ways to represent young people that were

common in the riot coverage discourse. There appeared to be a partially, but not

entirely, chronological progression in the construction and reproduction of these

representations.

At first, during a phase of riot narratives, young people were represented as

powerful tribal youths. Their tribes resembled the tribes of Maffesoli’s neo-tribal

theory (explained in detail below), and their rioting was represented as a

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collective tribal rite enjoyed by the youths, who belonged to this tribal

community and not to the more legitimate category “local residents”. During the

riots tribal youth were represented deriving power from their nativity to the

urban jungle and to cyberspace. Meanwhile, journalists tended to work as

“deviance defining elites” (Ericson, Baranek et al. 1987, 3), denying them certain

roles. For example, they were pointedly not represented as self-determining

young students. From this representation this dissertation concluded that young

people were represented as tribal youth to lend urgency and threat to the riot

coverage, possibly to better depict the fear that local residents appeared to feel

during the riots. The representation, it is concluded, was not accurate, and

examples were given to show that young people were both unrealistically and

romantically empowered – as the folk devil “hooded youth” was demonstrated to

be – and discursively robbed of power – empowered, for example, to speak about

massed rioting but not about their own individual educational goals.

The discourse then changed tack, and in a second phase here called enforcement

discourse, it represented young people as vulnerable children. They were set in

contrast to powerful police officers and judicial elites. In this representation the

investigation discovered that young people were mobilized as a political

metaphor by discourse that was critical of the way the government enforced laws

during and after the riots, particularly police methods that were considered both

violent and gleefully brutal. Effectively, young people were not represented as

actors at all by this discourse, which instead reproduced an ideology calling for

young people to be protected by adults from a dangerous world. This dissertation

concluded that such a discursive representation served a rhetorical purpose,

allowing the paper to more effectively criticize police actions and government

policy. Young people were, therefore, harnessed as a rhetorical tool, not

considered as political or social actors.

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Finally, as the riots ended, the investigation discovered that both earlier

representations disappeared and were replaced by a representation of young

people as an economic underclass that developed gradually. At first this

representation was strongly linked to young people in certain geographical

regions, but it soon became central to the representation that “poor kids” from

these deprived postcodes and “posh kids”, especially students, were being

brought together by shared wrath at culpable elites for their poor economic and

social prospects. The investigation concludes that this youth underclass

representation rested especially on challenging the British class system as an

ideology. Poor kids and posh kids were represented coming together in a

collective underclass, with the poor providing the brawn (the anger, the rioting

and the swearing) and the posh providing the brains (the political awareness, the

protesting and the lucid speech). Before the riot coverage ended, these young

people were set in contrast to elites, who were represented as incompetent

misbehaving plutocrats. This representation of young people gave them the most

legitimacy as citizens, since it constructed young people as politically active and

engaged. It also implied that their political activity resembled youthful

antipolitics, a form of activity best described as ideologically neutral resistance

against everyone else who is holding them down, which might be mistaken for

apolitics because young people, suggests the discourse, do not always express

themselves in standard political terms.

NB. Many news articles are cited, and some of these articles are written by the

same author and/or on the same days. For this reason articles are cited in their

own format using a numeric system. A separate references page is provided with

full referencing information, drawn from the Nexis UK online database, for all

the articles. All other citations and references follow the standard format.

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1. Theoretical background

Research methodology: Critical discourse analysis and grounded theory

Critical discourse analysisThe method selected for this investigation was critical discourse analysis (CDA),

a branch of discourse analysis that aims not just to describe discourse but to

attempt an explanation as to how and why it was produced (Fairclough 1992; van

Dijk 1997; Fairclough 2006; van Dijk 2007). CDA extends from critical linguistics

(as used by Fowler, Hodge et al. 1979) as a way to explore how discourse is

related to social processes and structures, both by simply reflecting them, and by

consolidating and reproducing existing social structures (Fairclough 1992). At its

heart CDA draws from social theory with roots in Marxism, as well as scholars

like Gramsci (1971) and Habermas (1997), for whom today’s societies are

constructed and reproduced by complex, abstract, socio-political ideologies. CDA

considers language to be the primary means by which cornerstone modern

ideologies function (Teo 2000). CDA as applied by scholars like Fairclough

(2006), Van Dijk (1997, 2007) and others, attempt to use the method to explore

what ideologies are encoded within discourse, and by thorough investigation,

better understand these ideologies, their construction and reproduction, and

their effects. In this investigation, CDA allows an in depth analysis of the

language used to represent young people, while exploring how these

representations consolidate and reproduce the existing social structures and

socio-political ideologies that determine the shape of the society young people

inhabit. Discourse analysis is a useful tool for examining young people’s

engagement for the way it considers the truth to be socially constructed: in other

words, the way different social actors construct ‘the truth’ about young people in

different ways. It does not consider there to be an objective truth about young

people’s engagement that can be extracted from the data. Rather, an

understanding can be formed by research of the data about how different actors

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construct and understand young people’s engagement. In methodological terms

this investigation is aware of Erica Burman’s warning (1992) that discourse

analysis has become synonymous with critical research, and this investigation

remains aware that using CDA may afford preferential treatment towards

research that is critical of the government and society, due to bias that may be

inherent in the discourse analysis method itself.

Because this investigation surveys newspaper articles, journalist writing the

discourse is considered to play an important role in selecting which ideologies

are reproduced in his or her writing. These ideologies are most likely to be

derived from “primary definers” (Hall, Critcher et al. 1978), “those in powerful

and privileged positions” like political and institutional elites, to whom the

media have inequitably high access and who are considered both authoritative

and able to represent – i.e. speak on behalf of – less powerful people (Hall,

Critcher et al. 1978, 58). These primary definers are considered by the media to

hold more authority, and systemically have more access to the media, and thus

set the debate. On the other hand, Hall has been criticized by scholars like

Schlesinger (1990), who believe the British press’ relationship with “primary

definers” has changed since Hall’s work was done, especially because the press

can carry out critical scrutiny of political and institutional elites by “[taking] the

initiative in the definitional process by challenging the so called primary definers

(Schlesinger and Tumber 1994, 19). Thus, this investigation considers the role of

elites in constructing and reproducing the core ideologies at hand to be in flux.

Critical discourse analysis is used to investigate not just what the journalist has

to say, but also from which primary definers this might have been drawn,

particularly questioning whether discourse works to criticize elites as primary

definers, as Schlesinger suggests they do. The journalist is also considered active

in the construction and reproduction of ideology. Particular attention is drawn to

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research by Ericson et al., who theorized that journalists are “deviance defining

elites” (Ericson, Baranek et al. 1987, 3) operating as political actors who are able

to draw and maintain boundaries around different categories with discourse, a

process related to the politics of belonging which is dealt with in more detail

below. While the main focus of this dissertation is young people and how they

are represented, it is important to also consider why, by analysing the ways

journalists appear to construct their own political actorness relative to young

people. During the first phase of “tribal youth” discourse journalists were

considered to have taken a narrative function, explaining riots as newsworthy

events, which suggests that criticizing elites may have taken a back seat and

following Hall (Hall, Critcher et al. 1978) we might expect authoritative elites to

have functioned as primary definers. During the second and third phases,

“enforcement discourse” and “youth underclass discourse”, journalists were

extremely critical of government elites and authorities like the police, which

suggests they would challenge the erstwhile primary definers as they set their

own terms for debate, after the theories of Schlesinger (1990).

Given the huge amount of data it surveyed relative to the limits of the

dissertation, it was important to select a methodology that enabled the

investigation to focus on specific examples. At the same time, the investigation

treads new ground and so cannot rely on others’ general conclusions about the

surveyed material. CDA allowed for the investigation to consider both focussed,

small samples of discourse and their broader habitat including intertexual

context, headlines and photographs. When dealing with newspaper articles,

critical discourse analysis considers the text part of a larger social event

(Fairclough 2006, 21) between social agents. The term text can be broadly

applied, and in this investigation’s case includes other strictly non-textual

features that are important to the “social event” at hand, like headlines and

photographs from which the article itself may draw much explicit or implicit

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semiotic meaning. Furthermore, each article is considered to have “external

relations” (Fairclough 2006, 39) with other texts as well as with additional

headlines, photographs and captions. This investigation considers each

individual article or excerpt part of a broader intertextual discourse in the

newspaper. CDA allows the investigation not only to examine the discourse

within each article but also to locate each article in the broader picture, the

external context created by many other articles.

Since this investigation breaks new ground, it was judged important to

investigate the entire month’s-worth of articles for their richness, varied

content, and to better understand the riot discourse as a whole; a context that

could not be provided by literature review. The CDA methodology proposed for

individual articles was judged insufficient to deal with the corpus as a whole.

Proponents of the CDA method agree with Teun van Dijk that deeper analysis on

a smaller selection of data yields much more insight (MacMillan 2005).

Meanwhile, Fowler and Cress warned researchers that any tool or method that

“creates distance” between the researcher and the discourse by lifting it out of

context and isolating it “would be the very antithesis” of the CDA approach

(MacMillan 2005). This investigation selected grounded theory, outlined below,

executed using computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS),

specifically QSR’s NVivo 9, to aid intensive coding of the corpus. It was hoped

that this two-part methodology would allow intimate analysis of small selections

of data using CDA, while maintaining closeness between these small selections

of data and the broader context provided by grounded theory.

Grounded theoryGrounded theory was chosen as a methodology that can provide the researcher

closeness to the data on a large, contextual scale. Grounded theory aims to allow

theory to “emerge” from out of the data (Glaser and Strauss 1968), and

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“discovers” theory systematically through “progressive focussing” (Holloway and

Todres 2003, 348) and constant comparison with the data, as opposed to

generating theory in the abstract (Glaser and Holton 2004, 14). It was considered

that grounded theory would allow the discourse to speak for itself, maintaining

closeness between the researcher and the discourse that might otherwise be

obfuscated. Grounded theory can be considered a social constructivist theory at

its heart (Mills, Bonner et al. 2006), and this investigation was carried out within

a social constructivist framework that hopes to discover “how people make sense

of the world, not what the world is” (Fiske 1990, 115). The researcher is

considered an actor within the social context of research, and not an objective

observer (Denzin and Lincoln 1994, 10-11). The author’s continuing MRes/PhD

research concerning young people’s identity and belonging is noted in order to

provide context for the investigation at hand. A discussion of young people’s

identity and belonging is provided to better indicate how the researcher himself

will construct discourse to represent the criticism and conclusions that this

dissertation makes. Grounded theory was considered a suitable methodology for

its coherence with this social constructivist framework. In its execution

grounded theory is based on systematic and orderly coding which helped both

tackle the corpus and make selections from the discourse for closer critical

analysis using CDA. The corpus was coded constantly as theories arose from the

data concerning uniformities and agreements between the articles and their

discourse therein; through subsequent recoding, axial coding and gradually

deeper analysis these theories were compared to the data and accepted and

clarified, or rejected, until theoretical saturation was judged to be reached (after

Glaser and Holton 2004). In a nutshell, grounded theory allowed systematic

study of every article to provide context and discover theory while minimizing

the “distance” Fowler and Cress discouraged (in MacMillan 2005); after this, CDA

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was focussed on specific examples of the discourse, located within the context

and theory that study of the broader corpus provided.

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Theoretical context: Young people in British politics

This investigation critically analyses modes of representation that are uncovered

in the discourse, as both products of social processes in the UK and contributions

towards the reproduction of these processes (Fairclough 1992). Attention is

drawn to some unhelpful modes of representing young people that were

encountered during the investigation – for example, as a potentially threatening

tribal ‘other’, linked as a social processes to the discursive construction of

imagined communities (Anderson 1991, 6) of young people and what is here

called the politics of belonging (after Crowley 1999; Yuval-Davis 2006), terms

that are defined in greater detail below – that may, from the analysis’ critical

perspective, point towards ways that socio-political ideologies reproduced in the

discourse have a detrimental effect on young people as members of our society.

The grounded theory approach turned up three dominant ways that young

people were represented in the discourse. These three representations were

accepted as a theoretical standpoint from which CDA tackled selections of the

discourse in order to better understand how the representation of young people

was constructed, reproduced, and to suggest what fundamental ideologies were

reproduced in regards to young people as members of society. In this

dissertation, the results of the investigation are illustrated: each representation

is explained, and then selections from the discourse are provided as examples of

each representation at work, following the CDA methodology to explain the

investigation’s interpretations.

Engaged and disengaged perspectives on young people in BritainTo ask if young people are active and engaged members of society – or, more

often, to decry their disengagement from society due either to some problem

attributable to members of that age group, or to a failing of society and its

political institutions – is so common that “it is almost unthinkable” not to at the

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beginning of any paper on the topic (Banaji 2008, 543). We are often told that

young people are apathetic or disengaged and, therefore, don’t vote: an

argument supported in part by young people’s relatively poor turnout to

elections. Opposite contentions – to give two examples, that young people are

active in other, even novel ways; or that they prefer more direct action with more

obvious results than voting – will be familiar to most. To paraphrase W. Lance

Bennett (2008), discourse is dominated today by two contending ‘paradigms’ that

represent young people either as a) passive and disengaged relative to older age

groups, or b) reasonably active and engaged. Both arguments can be defended,

but can they both be true? In its theoretical background this dissertation is

critical of scholars who contend young people to be passive and disengaged.

Frequently, scholars like Banaji (2008) have pointed out how young people do

construct politically aware and engaged identities, and how young people do

become active in the things that matter to them including political issues like,

for example, the war in Iraq or student fees. It is common for these active young

people to be condemned by elites, the media, the public and even by academics.

Powerful adults like these are able to interpret young people’s political

engagement as deviant misbehaviour in order to reproduce their own

fundamental ideologies. This investigation identified such processes at work.

Inversely, it also identified examples of discourse that interpreted young

people’s misbehaviour as political activity and engagement: these are also

considered with respect to the ideologies at work.

Opinion is split between those who consider young people unacceptably passive

and disengaged members of society, possibly even “harbingers of an incipient

crisis for democracy... [or] radically unpolitical” either by choice or due to

deficient interest or understanding; and, on the other hand, those who represent

young people as reasonably active citizens, engaged to an acceptable extent with

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the rest of society, and commonly showing signs of “sophisticated new forms of

politics, most notably in electronic realms” (Farthing 2010, 182). Analysing

young people’s engagement is a complicated business. The relationship between

young people and the rest of society, and not least their relationship with

political institutions and elites, is intricate and, to use Fairclough’s terminology,

is represented in various ways by different discourses (Fairclough 2003, 26).

Though they gain full voting rights at 18, young people in the are “apprentice or

incomplete citizens” (Matthews 2001, 299) who are denied the right to fully

participate in politics. This has been shown to be especially true in the opinion of

young people themselves: Henn, Weinstein & Forrest’s research into young

people’s attitudes towards politics (Henn, Weinstein et al. 2005) suggests that

young people consider Britain’s political institutions distant and aloof even after

they reach voting age and participate in elections. The young have become the

most disengaged of all electoral segments in the UK, increasingly choose not to

vote when they become eligible, and continue not to vote throughout their lives

(Dermody, Hanmer-Lloyd et al. 2010, 422). 44% of 18-24 year olds voted in the

2010 general election, a smaller proportion than any other age group (Ipsos-Mori

2010). This corresponds with the European trend towards low voting turnout

among 18-25s in local, national and European elections (Sierp 2008). How can

this apparent electoral disengagement be reconciled with contrary evidence of

young people’s political engagement? The next section presents some examples

of young people represented in ways that raise the engagement vs.

disengagement conundrum.

Citizenship or antisocial behaviour? Representing young people’s engagementThe two most important paradigms, according to Bennett, contend that young

people are either “reasonably active and engaged” or “relatively passive and

disengaged”(Bennett 2008, 2). Each paradigm represents a complete framework

for constructing an understanding of young people and their civic behaviour, and

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since each holds sharply different values, assumptions, and even definitions of

terminology, each produces its own characteristic opinions and evidence. What

appears to be logical, even unequivocal fact, to one paradigm’s adherents may

have the other side pulling out their hair with frustration. Public reaction to the

war in Iraq, which engaged young people as well as older Britons in record

numbers (Cushion 2004; Cushion 2007), provides a recent and familiar

illustration. Many British young people dismayed by their government’s growing

commitment to war took an active role in protesting the coming invasion. For

example, numerous young people – ten thousand in London alone (Banaji 2008,

551)– walked out of school lessons and university/college classes in protest. For

Banaji (2008), Cushion (Cushion 2004; Cushion 2007), and others who adhere to

the ‘engaged’ paradigm, such actions represent an interest in the international

situation resulting in civic action, evidence in other words that the young people

involved were active in political thought and deed, and following normal and

reasonable democratic channels – civic actions, civil disobedience, contributing

to the political situation with protests, strikes, petitions, etc. – to play an active

role as responsible citizens. It can be suggested from within this master frame

that young people’s anti-war activity, though it was unsuccessful in changing

government policy, had positive outcomes for young people and their sense of

agency in the public sphere (Mead 2004). On the other hand, adherents to the

opposite ‘disengaged’ paradigm constructed young people as troublemakers.

This was the official line from British institutions, including the government:

civil disobedience such as school walkouts was considered unacceptable forms of

political engagement. Young people were “refused the label of ‘civic’” (Banaji

2008, 553), and defined as deviants. They were met with serious punitive action

(Cushion 2004; Banaji 2008) such as, in the case of striking students, suspension

and expulsion from school (Cunningham and Lavalette 2004). The invasion

spurred a distinct shift in the dominant media frame, from lauding young

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protestors as active, engaged citizens before the invasion to portraying them as

“opportunistic truants” (Cunningham and Lavalette 2004; Cushion 2007). In

other words, initially the media adhered to the “engaged youth” paradigm, and

represented young protestors as political actors. Later, they shifted in preference

towards the ‘disengaged youth’ framework to deny young people the power of

political activity, calling instead for a personally responsible citizenship – don’t

do drugs, go to school, give blood, work a job, clean up the local park, etc.

(Westheimer and Kahne 2004, 7) – that does not consider the more or less

spontaneous, i.e. not organized in advance by schools and parents, general

strikes an acceptable form of civic engagement. This shift recalls Matthews’

definition of young British people as “apprentice or incomplete citizens”

(Matthews 2001, 299): the British perspective on personally responsible youth

citizenship being that young people are nascent, incomplete citizens who, until

they grow up, are unable to undertake politically engaged activities like anti-war

protests unless these are manifest as citizenship lessons given by schools and

parents. To sum up: given the data that young people were protesting against the

invasion, British adults constructed two opposite representations of young

people. On the one hand they were represented as politically engaged citizens.

On the other, they were represented as opportunistic truants overstepping the

boundaries of their incomplete citizenship. This example illustrates how young

people in a given circumstance can be represented in utterly contrary ways by

observers depending on their adherence to one or other of Bennett’s paradigms.

This clash between paradigms, interpretations and contrary representations,

provides the context in which this investigation is carried out.

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2. Tribal youth and the urban politics of belonging

“A number of the youths put their hoods up and disappeared into the darkness. Others

waited for their friend to be put into the ambulance and then fled, shouting at police

who had asked for information about how their friend was stabbed…

Another young woman remonstrated more angrily with police. ‘Why do you think

everything’s going on? Because we fucking hate you’” (1)

This excerpt displays two fundamental features that characterise the Guardian’s

most common representation of young people during its narrative riot coverage,

that of the “tribal youth”. Firstly, the young people involved are classified using

the category “youths”. Secondly, the youths are depicted standing shoulder to

shoulder and acting collectively: in this excerpt, a number of the youths, all

wearing hoods, disappear into the darkness; the young woman refers to “we”,

discursively implied to be an imagined community of young people, and their

collective hatred towards the authorities. Such discursive strategies are shown to

combine in an overall representation of young people as a tribe. This tribe

resembles the togetherness-seeking tribes present in Michel Maffesoli’s neo-

tribal theory (Maffesoli 1996). The Guardian’s ‘tribal youth’ representation is

critically analysed by this investigation, which concludes that the ‘tribal youth’

representation, though widely used in the corpus, depicts young people holding

unrealistic levels of power as social actors, and builds boundaries between young

people, other local residents and the police. A discursive system is thus produced

in which powerful adults, such as the journalist, control the “deviance” of these

powerful, threatening youths.

Constructing tribal youth in discourse

This investigation uncovered a trend in the Guardian’s discourse, in which the

terms “youth” and “youths” classify (terminology used by Fairclough 2003, 146),

a category of social actors that represents young people as abstract characters

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rather than a concrete individuals (Fairclough 2003, 161). More precisely, this

discourse classifies young people as a nation, a distinctive “pattern of values,

symbols, memories, myths and traditions” that is continuously reproduced and

reinterpreted (Smith 2001, 18). Furthermore, this national representation of

youth hearkens to Michel Maffesoli's contemporary tribal theory. Maffesoli’s

tribe is a grouping “without the rigidity of the forms of organization with which

we are familiar; it refers more to a certain ambience, a state of mind, and is

preferably to be expressed through lifestyles that favour appearance and ‘form’”,

experiencing a “warm” togetherness through a collective unconscious or non-

conscious that is manifest in mass tribal rites bearing the “impression of

participating in a common species”, which he predicts will include “aimless

wanderings” around our vast modern cities as well as “the consumer frenzy of

department stores, supermarkets and shopping centres” (Maffesoli 1996, 98).

The Guardian’s tribal youths share many of these characteristics. For example,

they are depicted engaging in tribal mass rites as they roam the city in their

hundreds: this precise language, “roaming” in hundreds, is an extremely

common construction in the corpus. To give a representative example, “Several

hundred youths, some as young as 10, roamed High Park Street attacking

buildings and cars at random…” (2). This section introduces the tribal youth who

roam through the city, sharing in collective experiences from massed battles

with the police and mob looting, to displays of collective identification and

camaraderie (after Maffesoli 1996, 98).

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The hooded youth

Figure 1: Caption provided by article reads, “Youths throw bricks at police during the unrest in Enfield on Sunday when, despite a large police presence, there was widespread looting”. (1)

In its representation within the Guardian’s discourse, the first characteristic of

the “youth” is the hood or mask, depicted using terms like “masked youths”,

“hooded youths”, or “hooded and masked youths”. The wearing of masks and

hoods is discursively constructed as a distinct trait, and not a clothing choice,

characteristic to youths as a nation, particularly considering the nominalization

of the “hooded youth” – hooded being a characteristic of the youth himself – a

opposed to a person depicted in the process of wearing a mask which occurs more

often for other categories of people such as looters: for example, “most looters

attempted to conceal their faces with scarves” (9). Thus nominalized, the hooded

youth is coherent with the hoodie, an established negative stereotype referring

to a threatening young person in a hooded top. The hoodie is an “assumed

indicator of moral decline among youth in contemporary Britain” (Hier, Lett et

al. 2011, 260), which the Guardian admits is an established “folk devil” in British

culture (3). The homogenization of looters under the “youth” category arguably

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mirrors the way other categories, such as racial ones, have characterized

stereotyping and cognitive prejudice in the past (van Dijk, Ting-Toomey et al.

1997). Furthermore, critical analysis uncovers discourse that links the youth

cultural marker “hooded” to more challenging categories than “youth”; for

example:

“As youths began to run amok along Lavender Hill, south London, there was not a

police officer in sight. Local residents watched the chaos unfold. By 10:50pm witnesses

said the first officers began to arrive, but the police line was very thin and nothing was

being done to stop the violence. The windows of Ladbrokes, Headmasters, Currys,

Carphone Warehouse and Debenhams caved in, and hooded gangs were seen running

into the stores to steal televisions, trainers, and anything they could get their hands

on” (4)

The text represents “youths” as the active party in this “chaos”. “Local

residents”, a group from which the youths are semantically excluded, are

helpless and passive bystanders. A few police arrive late and do not alter the

power relationship between the legitimate local residents and the youths, who

wield unchallenged power over Lavender Hill and the firms who run businesses

there. It also implies that the youths, as the active participants in the chaos, are

organized into gangs. The established marker for these youths’ social identity,

being hooded, is affixed to the gangs so that we are left in no doubt the youths in

question are precisely the “folk devils” we have read about in earlier articles. The

discourse constructs an intertextual macro-structure, a general understanding

within each and between different articles concerning the riots, in which the

youth, their characteristic hooded-ness, and malfeasance go together. This

macro-structure includes visual representations of youths – such as the

photograph in Figure 1, showing two people identified by the caption as “youths”

– hooded and behaving badly. The hood controls how the reader processes and

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comprehends the report by activating relevant background information from the

reader’s long-term memory – such as remembered text and photos depicting the

threatening hooded youth stereotype – and integrating it with the reader’s

mental representation of the text at hand (Kintsch 1992). Thus, the reader is

biased towards concluding that these threatening gangs are youth gangs without

the journalist having to make the allegation explicit. In some ways, this

discourse is strongly reminiscent of the way people with black skin were

implicitly linked to violence by British newspapers in the 1980s, who avoided

choosing specific words while employing powerful syntactic structures to make

sure “‘everybody knows’ that black youths are meant” (van Dijk, Ting-Toomey et

al. 1997, 172). The macro-structure is similar. The journalist needs not explicitly

state that looters and rioters are youths, but can strongly imply this using

established stereotypes and the nominalized “hooded youth”.

The hood in the investigated discourse does not only denote the category

“hooded youth”. It is the most striking of several cultural markers that define the

“tribal youth”, the dominant representation of young people used in the

Guardian’s narrative reporting. The tribal youth are typically depicted engaging

in en masse activity, such as in these excerpts:

“Seconds later there was a smash as the minicab office around the corner was broken

into. Teenagers swarmed in, shouting: ‘Bwap, bwap, bwap.’ …

… But there was no rush; the group knew from experience that police would hold back

for the time being. ‘Keep an eye on the Feds, man’ said one youth. (Aug 10, 6)

There is a Maffesolian tribal quality to these experiences. In the first excerpt,

teenagers are depicted in a collective mass – a swarm, like bees from the hive –

sharing the experience by chanting “bwap”, a word they can all revel in. Whether

gunshot onomatopoeia or dance club cheer, we are to understand that the whole

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youth tribe shares this experience shoulder-to-shoulder, chanting and swarming

as one. In this discourse the tribe’s ability to function as a collective, as a swarm,

empowers them. We are led to believe that “the group” knew by collective

experience how the police would behave. Again, the newspaper reports on a

linguistic marker belonging to the tribe. Having already shown us what the group

fears – the police – this discourse demonstrates how they refer in their own

slang to the police as “the Feds”. There is an ethnographic quality to the way the

corpus investigated discursively represents young people’s slang as cultural

markers of the tribal youth.

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Youth tribal communication and digital nativity

Figure 2: A person carrying a mobile telephone during riots in Hackney. (5)

“When asked about the police, however, there were not enough words to express their

contempt. ‘Come on, who likes the Feds? They’re annoying, nagging,’ said one.

Scrunching up his sweatshirt to hide his neck tattoo, his friend added: ‘You know hot

food? You know when you eat it and then it hurts when you go to the toilet? That’s the

Feds.’” (6)

“I was shown the BBM – Blackberry Messenger – broadcast circulated hours earlier,

announcing Enfield as a target. It called on everyone in nearby boroughs to ‘start

leaving ur yards’ and bring ‘bags trollys, cars vans, hammers the lott!!!’. It warned

against passing the message to ‘snitch boys’ (police informants) and said the aim was

to ‘just rob everything’. There was one line – ‘dead the fires though’ – that seemed to

discourage arson” (7)

These excerpts are typical in the way they depict journalists encountering tribal

youths in situ, engaging in complex social events between multiple actors. In

both examples above, the journalist has an active presence in the discourse,

playing the role of a facilitator who asks questions of the youths and interpreting

their responses, and behaviour, for the reader. In the first excerpt, she asks a

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question, and before her respondents have answered gives the interpretation

that they will express limitless contempt. Later, “Scrunching up his sweatshirt to

hide his neck tattoo” demonstrates an extended lexical characterization of the

friend (he wears a sweatshirt, he has a tattoo) as well as an added evaluation (he

scrunches up his sweatshirt to mask his tattoo), evaluations that are somewhat

more significant considering the article’s background information and

intertexual context: that he is potentially a youth rioter and youth rioters tend to

mask themselves with clothing.

In the second excerpt, the journalist is again the facilitator. He translates two

pieces of tribal youth jargon into English: ‘snitch boys’ and ‘dead the fires’. Slang

fragments like these, taken from BBM and SMS messages sent by tribal youths

are not uncommon in narrative reports. In dialogue between the journalist and

the tribal youth, slang terms are translated by the journalist as an active

facilitator who, furthermore, often adds his own interpretations such as modality

(such as above, “seemed to discourage arson”). In contrast, similar messages

coming from those who are not tribal youths – such as local residents,

celebrities, or the police – are almost always summarized, without

interpretation, and with no active facilitator:

“Leicestershire police said on their Twitter account that their officers were dealing with

a group of youths in Leicester city centre.” (2)

“Co-ordinated online on Facebook and Twitter, volunteers mobilised in the worst-hit

parts of the capital to sweep streets, help local shopkeepers, and show solidarity with

communities…” (8)

Thus, anything that young people classified as tribal youth say is represented as

a significant example of tribal youth discourse that must be interpreted by a

facilitator in order that we might learn something about the tribe; discourse from

anyone else is simply mundane transmission of relevant information. This

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appears particularly true of electronic messages, which in this investigation

appeared to be especially linked to representations of tribal youth. The excerpts

of discourse above, which mention BBM and Twitter messages, are exemplary.

The tribal youth’s BBM message (“start leaving ur yards” etc., at the top of this

section) is quoted and interpreted with a keen eye for slang terms, implied

purposes, and modality. The police Twitter message, on the other hand, is not

quoted but summarized, as facilitation is not judged necessary.

The discourse investigated appears to attribute to the tribal youth a

characteristic nativity to the digital world. This nativity is emphasized by the

extra attention the discourse pays to the tribe’s en masse activities, and their

unrivalled power, online. Tribal youth are represented forming mass collective

movements online and over mobile networks, especially BlackBerry Messenger.

The youth are represented as a web-savvy tribe roaming cyberspace with

characteristic ease, in manifestations of mass rites that resemble Maffesoli’s

fragile, yet emotionally important “instantaneous condensations” (Maffesoli

1996, 76). For example,

“With no focal point of protest, the crowds were more fluid, directed by a combination

of word of mouth, quiet gestures and BlackBerry text messages… the groups simply

melted into back streets at the first sign of police, only to regroup minutes later” (1)

Rhetorical devices like metaphors depict the tribal youth engaging in a “more

fluid”, unfocused manifestation, able to “melt away” at will. Individuals are

absent, while groups are present and active (“the groups simply melted into back

streets” – this metaphorical nativity to the urban jungle is discussed in a later

section). The tribe’s methods of real life communication exclude the police and

include only those youths standing close to others (word of mouth, quiet

gestures, the BlackBerry message community) emphasizing their togetherness

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and tightly-knit community. Interestingly, the fluid “crowds” are discursively

passive, “directed” by these methods of communication. The tribe itself is

somewhat ambient, constantly and collectively aware of quiet gesturing among

its members. It is constantly online and receiving BlackBerry messages, and

using these subtle youth communication strategies, it is able to disperse and

regroup in a fluid-like way with the swarm of individuals passively responding to

collective communication.

As well as enabling subtle tribal communication, mobile phones and other

windows on the digital world are frequently depicted as methods for tribal

youths to engage in warm togetherness.

“‘Shall I be honest? Fuck the police,’ said Reeko Young, 24, who had gathered with

friends on a nearby side street to share images of the riots on mobile phones.” (9)

The friends here represented “gathered” to share photos, videos, and messages

on a side street. The discourse typically represents groups simultaneously

holding an identical message on all members’ mobile phones, or engaging

collectively in the same activity with mobile phones (photographing a burning

car, for example). The capturing and sharing of digital images, as with other

digital activities like receiving text and BBM messages, is typically represented as

a mass tribal “gathering”. Again, the reference to a side street, like the back

streets into which groups were earlier quoted to melt away, activates the

background information that the tribal youth is a creature of the urban jungle,

moving fluidly around city infrastructure that is less open to others, especially

the rigidly structured police (more references to urban nativity follow in the

section below). This undirected being together is a represented as a kind of

young persons’ neo-tribal communion, in which all participants join in with the

festival of shared emotions, experiences, and forms of expression.

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While public figures and local residents often identified widespread looting as a

sick game of Supermarket Sweep, criminality showing up the youth’s moral

decline in a consumerist and acquisitive culture, taking the opportunity “go on

the rob” (5) and nab some nice trainers, the Guardian itself most often depicts

young people engaging in looting as a tribal event featuring characteristic tribal

activity. When it encountered what Maffesoli calls “consumer frenzy” (Maffesoli

1996, 98) the discourse investigated placed emphasis on tribalism, not

consumerism; on the “sense of community” that the frenzy reinforces, and the

qualities of the looters that best represent the tribe sharing a neo-tribal

experience, from fluid collective movement to taking and sharing photos on

web-connected mobile telephones.

Metaphors of urban nativity and powerRomantic metaphorical stereotyping of tribal youths abounds in the discourse.

For example, this dissertation has already provided examples of the way young

people belonging to the tribal youth are represented as urban natives, able to

move around the city with somewhat romantic collective fluidity. Examples of

these metaphors include youths “disappearing into the darkness” when

confronted by adults (1); “they roamed the streets seeking shops to target,

melting away at the sign of police…” (10). Many of these metaphors are used to

discursively empower collective groups of the tribal youth and their home

advantage relative to the weaker police, who travel in from outside, e.g. “for

hours they had been chasing groups of youths around Enfield, Ponders End and

Edmonton, in north London, using dogs and batons to disperse anyone seen

looting shops” (11). The “groups of youths” in this quote are never caught as

they roam Enfield despite the time and physical effort put in by the baton-armed

police and their dogs, who can merely chase them around and “disperse” them

when they stop to loot. Powerful tribal youths and the weak police are most often

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represented in this way, with youths slipping away from the police the way a

flock of small birds evade a predator:

“A gang of masked youths [were] looting a branch of Jessops on the corner of Albert

Square, beside Manchester town hall… [they] had posted a lookout and scattered as a

police van swept past with blue lights flashing, then went back to the store a moment

later” (12)

Romantic metaphorical actions like disappearing and melting away imply a

native oneness with the urban landscape, lending the tribal youth the power to

wink out of sight when the police come by, reappearing a moment later to carry

on the spree. Their nebulous quality, as the tribal youth form, disappear, and

reform, recalls Maffesoli’s theory of modern tribalism marked by “fluidity,

occasional gatherings, and dispersal” and “instantaneous condensations which

are fragile but for that very instant the object of significant emotional

investment” (Maffesoli 1996, 76).

Metaphors like these represent young people with unrealistic, threatening

capabilities that obfuscate the true power relationships at work. This chapter has

already shown how the discourse activated the hoodie “folk devil” as the main

rioter: having constructed a tribe in the hoodie’s image and identified the

boundaries of this tribe marking it as a deviant outgroup, the discourse proceeds

to define him as a powerful and potentially threatening urban presence, a tribal

nation so native to the city it may as well be part of it, certainly not to be messed

with. Similarly, the collective rites of the tribal youth, as they swarm and scatter,

roaming in their hundreds, serve to construct a tribal identity that both

generalizes individuals and places them into a stereotypical category, and

empowers these swarming masses with a collective spirit. Spot a hooded

teenager on his mobile telephone, implies the narrative, and you can be sure he

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is in instant contact with hundreds of others, sharing a collective experience,

able to turn up in their hundreds to do whatever makes them feel good together;

be sure, too, that if the police turn up to stop them they can melt away into the

back streets, never to be caught.

Us vs. them: a critical assessment of tribal youth, its boundaries and devianceThis dissertation has so far shown how the discourse investigated represented

young people as tribal youths, and more specifically, as a tribe matching the neo-

tribal theory of Michel Maffesoli. It has identified several ways that the articles in

the corpus construct the tribal youth representation, such as the cultural marker

“hooded”, certain linguistic features like slang, and nativity to cyberspace and

the urban jungle.

It is possible that these constructions are accurate. Neo-tribal representations

are not peculiar to the Guardian, after all. Neither is this dissertation

comfortable accusing the Guardian of anti-young bias. As stated in the

theoretical background of this paper, the goal is considered to be to understand

how journalists construct and reproduce representations of young people to

explain the world as they understand it, not to compare their representations of

young people to an objective truth about what young people are. However, even

if the tribal youth representation is an accurate depiction of how these particular

young people behaved during the riots, it represents young people holding

unrealistic dominance in their power relationships with other groups, such as

local residents, and particularly the police, opposition to whom is represented as

a constituent part of the tribal youth identity; a power, furthermore, that is

withdrawn from young people in other discursive representations that will be

discussed later in the paper.

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Young people classified as tribal youth are semantically excluded from ingroup

categories – ‘us’, including people like local residents – as deviants, a potentially

threatening tribal outgroup. The politics of belonging, a political project to

construct collective belonging (Yuval-Davis 2006, 207-208) is at work here as

boundaries are revised, redrawn and constructed between “us” and “them” to

make them “relevant under a new set of circumstances...”, and “...respond better

to the material, symbolic or affective needs of its members” (Triandafyllidou

1998, 609). The riots were frightening and threatening, and people’s homes and

the communities to which they belonged were no longer safe or happy.

Journalists may have perceived an affective need for members of the “local

resident” community to symbolically protect their ingroup against threatening

deviants. For whatever reason, discourse was used to divide the collective

belonging of tribal youths from the collective belonging of other, non-deviant

ingroups like “local residents”.

One way that this “dirty work of boundary maintenance” (Crowley 1999; Yuval-

Davis 2006, 203) was carried out, was through the use of discursive control over

how tribal youth communicated to define them as a deviant outgroup. As in the

examples below, a journalist typically works as an active facilitator in social

actions representing these young people; the journalist typically defines what

constitutes deviant behaviour and what does not. This statement is not meant to

imply impropriety by individual journalists: it is simply the case that journalists’

discourse works in this fashion. To quote Ericson et al. (1987, 3), “journalists join

with other agents of control as a kind of ‘deviance-defining elite’, using the news

to provide an on-going articulation of the proper bounds of behaviour in all

spheres”. Journalists in the investigated corpus claim hegemony over the bounds

of behaviour tribal youth may engage in and thus define their deviance.

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For example, quotes from adults or well-spoken (i.e. adult-like, not tribal youth-

like) young people are formal in structure, as in the case of

“Jay Kast, 24, a youth worker from East Ham who has witnessed rioting across London

over the last three nights…” (13)

Mr Kast carries a respectful citation giving this young man’s name, his age, his

links to the community and the background experience (he witnessed riots) that

makes him a legitimate interviewee (13). Discourse is profoundly different when

tribal youths are quoted, with the journalist playing an active, facilitating role. In

the following excerpt, the journalist begins by defining these youths’ deviance,

providing background information, and explaining his opinions concerning their

decrepit habitat, manners of speech, dress, and how remarkably civil the tribal

youth can behave:

“In the shabby environs of Sandwell shopping centre, I managed a snatched

conversation with six male teenagers – five black, one white – who admitted, between

smirks, to having been in close proximity to Tuesday’s trouble. Talking to them, I was

reminded of scores of kids I can recall from school: the kind who would take no

encouragement to go shoplifting, or render a classroom uncontrollable.

Contrary to stereotype, they were hardly feral: well turned-out, and fairly polite, they

even issued the odd sentence that revealed traces of social conservatism…” (14)

This journalist is an active party in the discourse, who has managed to snatch

this conversation from these kids. He controls and orchestrates the social

interaction at hand. He is also in total control of the terms in which it is

presented, as he imposes his own ideology on the children’s statements before

they speak. He defines what kinds of troublemaking are stereotypical “kid”

behaviour, as well as expressing surprise that they can “turn out” well and

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“fairly” politely. Only after being introduced to the journalist’s opinions is the

reader introduced to his interviewees. The discourse continues,

"‘When Staples was getting trashed,’ said a 16-year-old who called himself Critz, ‘the

police were just standing there. Four riot vans; 20 or 30 police. It was like they wanted

us to do Staples.’

Why did people do it?

‘Free shit,’ said a voice. ‘And fucking the system.’

‘You smash up the shops,’ said a boy who would only identify himself as Corey, ‘and

you get free stuff. Everything's about money these days, innit?’

‘If they're stopping EMA [Education Maintenance Allowance],’ added another, ‘what

do they want us to do?’ Hearing this, I wondered whether this was a line cynically

pinched from some talking head on the TV, and parroted back at me, but all six said

they wanted to go to college – a music course was mentioned, with retakes of GCSEs –

but in the absence of the EMA, they were now wondering whether it was worth it…

“When the photographer requested a picture, up went the hoods, and out came the

black bandanas: we were now facing feral youth, straight out of central casting. They

threw a few cliched shapes, and then dispersed, apparently rattled by the attention of

the police.” (14)

In Corey’s case the construction “who would only identify himself” obliquely

questions Corey’s honesty and veracity. After all, “between smirks”, these youths

have already admitted to being “in close proximity to” the rioting in West

Bromwich. Their criminality, and duplicity, is strongly implied. All the while they

are depicted showing a warm, even joyful, tribal togetherness. They share last

night’s trouble as a collective experience, which matches the tribal youth

stereotype and is printed verbatim in tribal vernacular; another shared

experience, their eagerness as individuals to pursue a music course, and GCSE

retakes, is interpreted into the interviewer’s voice. There is a linguistic boundary

drawn here: free shit, fucking the system, and foundation myths of collective

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disempowerment (i.e. ‘we’ vs. ‘they, who have taken our EMA’) are what tribal

youth talk about. The journalist claims hegemony over discourse outlining hopes

for individual improvement by better GSCE grades and higher education. It is not

up to the tribal youth to control how these things are presented, and again, the

journalist applies his own background judgements, communicating surprise that

the youths are able to fully elucidate opinions about such grown-up topics as

GCSEs rather than simply “parrot” from the TV. The journalist engages in the

politics of belonging – the “dirty work of boundary maintenance” (Crowley 1999;

Yuval-Davis 2006, 203) – in which the reporter draws imaginary boundaries

between respected members of society like the journalist himself, Jay Kast, and

by extension ‘us’; Critz and Corey are classified differently, as members of

‘them’, the tribal youth.

“Tribal youth” is, in some ways, an accurate way to represent Critz and Corey.

They do wear hoods and use them to hide from the police. They do exhibit some

Maffesolian neo-tribal behaviour. But applying this representation so forcefully

is dangerous. It inaccurately empowers young people and entails risks, not least

for public decision making. It is easier to legitimize violence against a powerful,

threatening, faceless category; fire a baton round and hit Corey, however, and he

won’t be able to “melt away”. The following section demonstrates how

journalists dealt with exactly this problem. When baton rounds are considered,

the tribal youth representation is replaced by less powerful representations of

young people.

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3. Enforcement discourse: the passive child

Figure 3: Photograph from an article entitled, “Policing: ‘We’re not namby-pamby,’ Met tells rioters. ‘There is no order to be soft’”. Caption reads: “Riot police in Hackney, east London, during

the street violence this week. A senior police source claims that to control a large crowd baton rounds are preferable to either dogs or baton charges by individual officers.” (15)

As the riots continued a second manner of representing young people appeared.

In this investigation, a dichotomy was uncovered between riot narrative discourse

which almost always represented young people as tribal youth, as discussed

above, and enforcement discourse which laid focus on law enforcement by the

police and courts, and especially on police methods, in which young people are

virtually always represented as children. While employing the tribal youth

representation, discourse generally used terminology like “youth”, “hooded

youths”, and so on. On the other hand, this investigation shows that in

enforcement discourse young people are called “children” and “boys” and

“girls”, and that the discourse often adds to these young people the background

of their youthful position within family structures, further emphasizing their

childhood. From these observations, this dissertation derives several possible

explanations, considering the likeliest one to be that young people, represented

as vulnerable lost children, are harnessed as a “potent political metaphor”

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(Selwyn 2003, 353) in the Guardian’s subtle criticism of the law’s execution by

the police and interpretation by the courts regarding young rioters.

Role reversal: Powerful police, vulnerable boysWithin “tribal youth” discourse, this investigation uncovered a strong tendency

for “youths” to be represented as powerful in comparison to the police, as in the

above-cited excerpt, “for hours they had been chasing groups of youths around

Enfield, Ponders End and Edmonton, in north London, using dogs and batons to

disperse anyone seen looting shops” (11). In contrast, enforcement discourse

juxtaposes discursively weak “children” or “boys”/“girls” with the discursively

powerful police.

“Shortly after 8.30pm, a crowd of about 100 mainly teenage boys broke into a jewellery

store. When police arrived less than a minute later, there were chaotic scenes, with a

number of people struck with batons and attacked by dogs.” (16)

In tribal discourse the police had no long-term effect on the youths. They chased

the youths and “dispersed” them when they were caught looting shops. The dogs

and batons are passive in the first excerpt, simply used as tools by the police to

execute the relatively peaceful action, to “disperse”. The narrative depicts police

who had been chasing youths for a very long time to little avail. In the second

example the discourse presents the police as a powerful strike force. They arrive

“less than a minute later” and their arrival results in “chaotic scenes”. Police

weaponry is emphasized by the second excerpt which renders the batons as

weapons that “struck” people, and the dogs as active participants by whom

people were “attacked”. Characteristically, young people are here represented as

“mainly teenage boys”: their minority, in age terms, is doubly stated. The term

“youths” that is almost ubiquitous in tribal youth discourse is here substituted

for the child term “boys”. By this discourse the reader may be biased to conclude

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three things: firstly, that the looters were children; secondly, that the police

leapt promptly into action; thirdly, that when the police came, chaos resulted,

notably the striking of people with police batons and the attacking of people by

dogs. The reversal of the sentence structure between the first and the second

sentence, coupled with the narrative phrase “chaotic scenes”, further

emphasizes the dramatic power reversal here between the uncertainly termed

“crowd of about 100 mainly teenage boys” in the first sentence who are rendered

instantly passive by the firm, dominant, and concretely termed police, who move

quickly, bringing chaos and armed violence. The manipulation of both groups is

apparent should we rewrite the excerpt in reverse, for example, “close to 100

hooded youths broke in to loot a jewellery store, but were promptly dispersed by

police who were armed with batons and dogs”; which would carry the same

information while discursively legitimizing the police and their methods against

more dangerous, active youths, not representing chaotic armed violence against

discursively more passive children/boys. The switch away from using the term

“youth”, and the disappearance of the tribal youth representation in favour of

vulnerable children – usually in that chronological order though not necessarily,

as these representations sometimes appeared in different articles in the same

newspaper and, albeit rarely, even alongside each other in different sections of a

single article – appeared in this investigation to be pivotal to enforcement

discourse which represents the authorities as powerful, violent, or harsh. For

example, enforcement discourse disposes entirely of the otherwise common term

“youth” in any article that deals with the increased weaponization of the police

response, or the involvement of third parties who have a reputation for using

weapons and increased violence, such as the army (17) and “hard man” police

leaders like Brian Paddick (15).

Police violence, knee-jerk government, and the passive child

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The following excerpt comes from an article narrating the police and their

increasingly powerful weaponry. The headline for this article, which read

“Sandra Laville on how the police came close to firing plastic bullets”, and the

leading photograph with its caption “an officer from the Police Service of

Northern Ireland with a baton gun. Police have never fired plastic bullets on the

mainland” (4), play a key role in providing focus and engaging the reader’s long-

term memory concerning British history and particularly the Troubles, a period

of intense violence between citizens in Northern Ireland and the British police

and army. This discourse clearly deals with law enforcement, violence, and how

close the police came to using weapons on children the same way they used them

in Northern Ireland. The historical connection is impossible to miss given the

headline, which represents a critical moment in the mainland’s history, and the

photograph which recalls a place and time where the British police did fire

plastic bullets on citizens, perhaps implying two questions to the reader: do we

want the police to escalate the situation with young looters to Northern Irish

proportions, and do we want to look back on August 2011 and remember it as the

end of nearly two centuries of unarmed policing on the mainland?:

With some of the looters as young as 11 it was a grim moment for the Met, but it was

an escalation senior officers felt they had no option but to make. In the end what

stopped them was not the concerns about the repercussions of ending 180 years of

policing by consent - but the tactical difficulties of using officers carrying baton rounds

against a fast-moving group of rioters. Instead police sent in their armoured vehicles -

or Jankels - which were driven at speed towards the gangs of young people. (4)

It is made clear from the very beginning of this excerpt that some of the looters

are children “as young as 11”; it is later implied by the term “what stopped them

was not…” concerns about violence but “tactical difficulties” that the police were

perfectly ready to make the “grim” choice to “escalate” violence against children.

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This is a decision, we are told, that senior officers feel they have to make despite

the historic tenure of policing by consent. The excerpt concludes with the

police’s second best tactic, given that they couldn’t employ plastic bullets, which

was driving armoured vehicles called Jankels at speed towards the “gangs of

young people”. Again, the police are active, armed, and powerful. Their

weaponry is described using technical terms that draw specific attention to the

technology used. The term “young people” is preferred to youths, and the typical

behaviour of tribal youths (melting away before the Jankel armoured cars,

perhaps) is absent. The only legitimization this discourse gives for the increased

police violence is the opinion of “senior officers”, who, it is implied, are not

concerned by the historical implications that this article renders highly

important by its headline and photograph from Northern Ireland, but are only

worried about what tactics their officers will use to execute violence against

“looters as young as 11”. The presupposition established in the headline and lead

photo, that police were close to firing plastic bullets despite the negative

historical significance on the mainland, is clarified in the article by representing

the police as willing and even eager to use weapons against young people, for

having been tactically unable to fire plastic bullets they instead charged the

young people at speed with armoured vehicles. The grim decision that “they had

no option but to make” is not clarified – why did they feel they had no option? –

leaving the legitimacy of this historic violence against young people hanging

totally on the opinions of faceless “senior officers”. The comparison to tribal

youth discourse is stark: here, the police employ calculated tactical decisions and

are the most active, most powerful parties in their relationship with young

people, who are discursively passive, on the receiving end of police weapon

technology.

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Later in the corpus, as arrested rioters and looters were brought to trial,

convicted, and punished, enforcement discourse was increasingly employed to

rhetorical ends, representing young people as weak children under threat by a

powerful right-wing government and its increasingly authoritarian police and

judiciary:

“With the support of David Cameron, Conservative Wandsworth council was the first

to evict tenants who had been caught up in the rioting. The authority announced on

Friday that the first eviction notice had been served - to the mother of an 18-year-old

boy accused of violent disorder and attempted theft.” (18)

In this enforcement discourse, previously threatening tribal youths have been

reconstructed as wayward children. This excerpt is drawn from an article entitled

“Coalition row grows over ‘kneejerk’ riot response: Housing charities slam

eviction threat, Lib Dems attack ‘hasty’ measures” (18) that criticizes evicting

convicted rioters’ families from their homes as a Conservative party policy. Here,

the hitherto tribal youth has metamorphosed into an 18-year old “boy” who was,

the discourse implies “caught up in the rioting”. Both these discursive structures

implicitly increase the accused’s vulnerability, representing him as a child and

refusing to link him actively to the riots, implying by the construction “to be

caught up in” that rioters were vulnerable to being seized by the event.

Elsewhere this article contains six very critical statements from sources

presented with both gravitas and emphasis on their credentials and links to

charity and social welfare, each named and titled (for example, “the Lib Dems’

welfare spokeswoman Jenny Willott”, “Chris Goulden, programme manager at

the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Charity”); two statements in support of

evictions are printed, one from Greater Manchester Police alongside a later

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retraction and apology for being perceived “inappropriate and gleeful”, and the

other a defence from “deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg” albeit one urging the

government to be careful. The context, as this balance shows, is overwhelmingly

critical, and the critical tone is carried forward by the representation of this

young person as a vulnerable child under threat of eviction by the Conservative

government in the guise of Wandsworth Council “with the support of David

Cameron”. The “inappropriate and gleeful” police communication activates the

intertextual background representation of the police force ready and willing to

deploy their armoury of weapons technology – like the plastic bullets and Jankel

armoured cars depicted above – in somewhat of a rush, without considering the

historical connotations of using such violence on the mainland.

The representation of young people in enforcement discourse is simpler than the

tribal youth representation was. There are no metaphors or complex descriptive

narratives of the type that empowered young people as tribal natives.

Descriptions, apart from each child’s age and descriptions relating to their child

status within a family group, are rare. In one description a 13-year old young

man is described as “Her son, a skinny, pimply boy who attended court in a red

hooded top and jeans” (19), in the sole example uncovered by the investigation

of a young person depicted in a piece of enforcement discourse with a hood, and

may be a special case since the article was a character profile of the boy and his

mother. Even this outlier matches the trend in enforcement discourse for young

people to be represented as boys or girls, and the discursive process of a boy

attending in a hooded top diverges from the tribal youth nominalization of a

hooded youth. The investigation turned up a remarkable change in the discourse

between tribal youth representations and these representations of vulnerable

individual children.

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Such representation of young people as vulnerable children is common. Though

young people all over the world, including those in the UK, experience violence

and unhappiness every day, this conceptualization of the innocent child

represents young people as passive victims of the world’s ills, a group that

powerful adults should shield and keep in a “whimsical, happy, and carefree time

of life” (Berman 2003, 105). A similar contention turned up, discursively implied,

in this investigation into the Guardian’s enforcement discourse. The skinny,

pimply boy in the excerpt above was represented as a wayward, essentially

innocent rascal most interested in toys, e.g. “‘I’ll take his Xbox off him. That

hurts more than anything else in the world’” (19); criticism of the police and

government is typically emphasized by juxtaposition with weak children and

quotes from well-meaning charitable adults with the kids’ best interests in mind,

as above (18). Representing innocence and vulnerability arguably “empties the

child of its own political agency, so that it may more perfectly fulfil the symbolic

demands we make upon it” (Jenkins, quoted in Berman 2003, 106), allowing the

journalists covered in this investigation to mobilize children as a political

metaphor in order to strengthen their own criticism of government policy and its

execution by the police and the courts.

This investigation only discovered the “passive child” representation of young

people in a very particular context, i.e. enforcement discourse, further

strengthening the argument that the representation was mobilized in order to

gain space for a particular political position. Enforcement discourse criticized

increased police violence and strict punishments that were judged excessive, and

problematized reductions in social welfare provision. At the time it was

uncertain what form government policy towards the riots would take. Various

solutions to the riots had been posited, and it is fair to say that “the nuclear

option – the possibility of calling in the army” (17) had cross-party and public

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support. Hajer wrote in a different context about the role of discourse in claiming

space in a new spatiality of modern politics (Hajer 2003, 179), and a similar

mechanism may have been at work here, as the Guardian’s discourse depicted a

need for someone outside political institutions to participate in policymaking.

David Cameron and his government’s ministers were represented as having been

tugged back from their summer holidays unlikely to make any significant policy

decisions (“MPs showed a worrying lack of interest – or perhaps it was a failure

of courage” (17)) except for making sure rioters and looters would “feel the full

force of the law” (20). This the Guardian considered “unbounded hypocrisy when

all such services have been mocked as part of the silly, bloated public sector”

(21). These excerpts accurately depict the sentiment in the discourse that simply

increasing the force by which the law was kept could not solve underlying

problems, but that British institutions, particularly the Government, were not up

to the task of formulating new policy. The Guardian claimed space within this

policymaking void on the metaphorical backs of children (Jenkins 1998),

switching from an earlier representation of young people as a threatening urban

tribe to one in which young people are represented as children under threat and

in need of protection. This explains, for example, the discursive switch from

young people as active participants in the riots who melt away before the police’s

baton charges, to teenagers and children who are struck by batons, caught up in

riots, attacked by dogs, and so on. The discursive disempowerment of young

people serves to legitimize a critical turn in the Guardian’s overall coverage of

law enforcement during the riots.

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4. Young people as an economic underclass

The discursive representation of young people as an economically deprived

group or even an economic underclass flourishes as the riot coverage continues

until, by the end of the month, the youth underclass representation is the

primary method of constructing young people in discourse. Furthermore, young

people represented as an economic underclass are harnessed in a familiar way as

a “potent political metaphor” (Selwyn 2003, 353) to support statements against

the “feral elite” (26) – particularly government ministers and bankers – echoing

Jenkins’ assertion that “almost every major political battle of the twentieth

century has been fought on the backs of our children” (quoted in Selwyn 2003,

353), the representation of young people being one of the most powerful

rhetorical instruments available to contemporary politics.

While tribal youth representations were hyperbolic, using romantic metaphors to

depict young people as natives to the urban jungle and to cyberspace, the

representation of young people as an economic underclass first appeared in the

discourse as a subtle undercurrent of background knowledge that imbricates the

representation of young people as a deprived economic class within the overall

structure of discourse. It was common until the 9th August for discourse to point

out, deep within each article, that riots were occurring in economically deprived

boroughs and always to mention cuts to youth services, particularly the

provision of youth clubs, as in the following excerpt:

“Haringey, although it contains such prosperous parts as Highgate and Muswell Hill,

remains among the five most deprived boroughs in London. There is every indication,

as unemployment climbs - the latest figures show claims for jobseeker's allowance up

10% up in a year - and as cuts are made in youth clubs and other services, that the

sense of alienation will burgeon.” (22)

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It was typical for early forms of youth underclass discourse to designate

boroughs that witnessed rioting as geographically bounded zones in which the

economy is poor, here in an article titled “Tottenham Riots: a suburb in flames”

(22) by isolating Tottenham in Haringey as an exceptionally deprived area. It was

common, too, for the discourse to juxtapose these boroughs in contrast to nearby

prosperous ones, as Highgate and Muswell Hill are represented here, in a general

discursive strategy that isolated the communities suffering riots from other

communities outside their geographic borders. Economic indicators are given,

typically unemployment figures as in this excerpt. Once the geographic region is

defined and its economic deprivation is quantified, young people are implicitly

represented as noteworthy and deprived residents, as they are here by the phrase

“as cuts are made in youth clubs and other services”. The discourse highlights

the poor provision of youth clubs to continue the general implication that the

rioters are young people. It problematizes young people without explicitly

stating, for example, that it is young people who have a “sense of alienation”. In

the end the discourse represents young people as a problematic and alienated

group within concrete, deprived communities like Tottenham, and posits poor

Government economic policy as the cause. The discursive chain, 1) define the

geographic boundaries around a community, 2) point out its economic

deprivation, 3) highlight the poor provision there for young people, and 4)

criticize poor government policy is virtually ubiquitous in the first few days of

the coverage. This early excerpt illustrates the source from which the

representation of young people as an economic underclass develops.

Youth underclass: tribal rioters and “posh” students shoulder to shoulderFrom the 9th August onwards, the discursive representation of young people

underwent a metamorphosis. Young people became represented as an

economically and socially deprived underclass driven by their real or perceived

disengagement from the rest of society to a radical, antipolitical rejection of the

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system that abandoned them. This representation was constructed to two ways.

Firstly, discourse was used that followed previous structures (like the chain

between defining geographical boundaries to criticizing government policy

outlined above), and to that chain was added the representation of young people

as becoming politically active in response to their deprivation. Secondly, the

discourse represents young people as a hitherto fractured class society made up

of poor rioting youth (lower class) and “posh” kids in higher education (upper

class), whose collective economic woe has drawn them together, shoulder to

shoulder, as one deprived youth underclass. In other words, it equates “poor”

rioters with “posh” student protesters and represents these two restive groups as

the vanguard of a new, radically antipolitical youth underclass.

Concerning this coming together of young people, the investigation recalls from

its theoretical background W. Lance Bennett (2008), who defined two

“paradigms” of youth disengagement and passivity vs. youth engagement and

activity; it identifies a trend in economic underclass discourse in which young

people were gradually represented in a way that bridges these two paradigms.

The Guardian’s discourse appeared to pose the question of “youthful

antipolitics” (Farthing 2010, 182), wondering whether young people’s collective

political activity could be considered radically anti-political. This investigation

discovered an economic underclass discourse in which young people are

represented with an enigmatic duality, showing both disengaged and apolitical

behaviour like anger, criminality and inconsiderate acquisitive looting –

represented characteristic to poorer, inner city young people – as well as

engaged and anti-political behaviour like organization against political

authorities and awareness of their poor economic status – represented

characteristic to students – with the discourse suggesting that young people are

coming together in a “youthful antipolitics”, both the angry urban poor and

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more articulate students, as one deprived economic underclass. While tribal

youth and enforcement discourse declaimed the state of the youth with

boundaries between them and adult groups, this economic discourse represents

“anybody young and unlucky enough to be trapped” (24) in poor locations in

Britain as a single economic group.

The following excerpts recall background knowledge of more politically engaged

actions by young people, particularly students.

“the liberal intelligentsia encouraged posh kids to protest and riot over student fees -

and now poorer kids have joined in and we are all appalled” (23)

“… from the tweets and BlackBerry messages it is clear that … there is a thread linking

last week's destruction to other events … [in Bristol] young squatters occupied a local

store that Tesco wanted to turn into a Tesco Express… And recall the shock at students

running amok in their protests about tuition fees last autumn” (24)

The underclass discourse presents these “dutiful, non-rioting” students, whose

running amok was more articulately legitimized as protests against tuition fees

or globalization, in comparison to less “posh” kids whose rioting appals. The

legitimacy of student protests is obliquely linked to their superior economic

status: they are “posh” kids, for example, compared to their “poorer” urban

compatriots. At the same time, the discourse represents young people

themselves as rejecting such class boundaries. As in the first excerpt, they are

represented asking together, work hard “for what?”, are their “vanishing

prospects deserved or fair?” The “thread linking” riots to other, more obviously

political actions by young people is a collective representation of a young

underclass, under discursive construction.

“The riots weren’t political. But they were a protest…”

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A good example of the youth underclass representation as it develops is provided

by the article titled “'They think the youths go mental. We don't. We just want a

job': Poverty, frustration, class, or the thrill of the mob: youths to academics give

their views on blame and causes of the riots” (26). In this article poor young

people are introduced first using familiar tribal discourse. These tribal youths are

then linked to “posher”, better educated young people by the similarities in their

economic deprivation and alienation from the political system. Finally, a young

graduate named Trisha exemplifies the representation of a member of the

“young underclass”. She is a hybrid of the tribal rioter and the student protester,

a “posh kid” whose politically aware anger has been channelled to radical

antipolitics that joins rich and poor young people together, into one economic

underclass.

Young people are, at first, represented as a brazen tribe in which individuals

“abandon their sense of personal identity” to join the “tribe” for “a sense of

community”. In this return to tribal representations bandanas and hoods are

visible and slang (“‘yo, yo, yo, riot van pulling up’… ‘na, we’re sweet, man”) is

prominent in the discourse (26). In this, there is evidence of an ‘apparent denial’

(van Dijk, Ting-Toomey et al. 1997, 170) as the journalist at first appears to claim

that these typically tribal youths are shockingly and unrepentantly violent,

apparently denying that they have any political motivation or engagement: then

the journalist flouts his denial in following discourse. The initial denial is a

discursive tool following the basic framework “X is not true, but Y proves it to be

true”; in this case, “Tribal youths aren’t politically aware, but here is some proof

that tribal youths are politically aware”. The reader is first shown these tribal

youths “going mental” with apolitical violence. Then this initial denial of

political awareness is disproved:

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“‘At the end of the day, they think we're youths and the youth generation today goes

mental. (But) we don't go mental, we don't want no trouble. We just want a job. I'm

happy to do hard work, decent work.’ ‘Fuck all this life,’ Joe says pointing to the

smashed up windows of the shops. ‘This is a shit game bro’.” (26)

The original claim, that rioting youths are apolitical tribal thugs, is reversed, for

example by quoting these youths who are deeply aware of their political and

economic situation (“We just want a job”, “This is a shit game, bro”). Statistics

and academic sources are then provided to back up statements by young people

like Joe, including the term “discriminated against” to illustrate the difficulty

young people (as a single economic group) have in finding jobs relative to adults.

The journalist has presented an initial denial (there is nothing political about

young people rioting, they just do it for tribal thrills), reversed it (there is

something political about young people rioting and they are aware of their own

economic deprivation) and tarred the initial statement with powerful discursive

tools like authoritative scholarly sources and statistical analyses that even

suggest the initial denial reproduces systemic discrimination against young

people.

Thus, the tribal youth who riots is represented as a slightly incoherent, but not

ignorant, political actor. The Maffesolian tribal characteristics recede as the

initial denial is reversed and the young people involved are shown to care about

their own individual economic prospects. Their community, once interpreted as

the street tribe, becomes the “youth generation today”. This is characteristic of

youth underclass discourse, which identifies the earlier “tribal youth”

representation, shows how it was wrong, and redefines the poor youths within a

broader generational representation in which the poor youth are just learning to

elucidate their own political opinions as they join the youth underclass. Next, a

student is represented joining the underclass. As the tribal youth is represented

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in the process of learning to explain his anger in political terms, the student is

represented learning to imbue her political awareness with the anger of her

poorer generational peers:

“‘I went to university and I still ain't got a job,’ she says. Dressed in jeans and a black

bomber jacket, Trisha read child psychology at Middlesex University and was recently

made redundant. ‘I'm still paying my student loan. That's why I looted all I could,’ she

says without remorse. She turns her wrath at those in power. ‘Cameron’, she says, is

‘doing nothing but talking shit in parliament. They do not know what it is like for us

young British people…” (26)

Discursively, this educated young woman is given the social standing to be

afforded the formal citation, “Trisha read child psychology at Middlesex

University”, not unlike the introduction used for academic sources and young

professionals like Jay Kast, above, but never used for poor youths. Yet, while the

discourse never comments on the clothing choices of professionals like Jay Kast,

it does carefully depict Trisha’s clothing choice as a rioter. She is arguably

represented as a young graduate, worthy of our respect, who has donned a

bomber jacket and jeans, and youth slang, as features of youth uniform and

joined “us young British people” on the streets. Yet unlike the poor youths who

have vague political direction (“This is a shit game”, etc.) Trisha is discursively

represented with specific, coherent political and economic concerns (“I’m still

paying my student loan”, “She turns her wrath at those in power”). Trisha is

represented as an example of the “posh” educated youth forced out from society

by poverty and beginning to join the youth collective “us British young people”.

Finally, the result is a youthful antipolitics best understood as the student’s

brains plus the poor youth’s brawn. This is illustrated in the discourse by the

typical example, “Cameron is doing nothing but talking shit”, showing the anti-

system rhetoric and angry swearing of the poor youth (“Fuck all this life”)

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rendered politically coherent by Trisha, a graduate who has joined them on the

streets, who takes that wrath and forms an anti-political ideology from it: not

“fuck all this life”, but rather “fuck Cameron and Parliament who are culpable”

This representation of young people contends that there were two classes of

young people, posh kids and poor kids. The posh kids took political action

because they realized the system was broken. The poor kids rioted for the same

reason, though their motivations were not so clearly stated and they were

wrongly condemned as tribal youths. Now the two are uniting as an alienated

underclass. The poor kids were inspired by student protests to take apolitical

action, and now wrathful, politically aware posh kids have donned bomber

jackets and joined them on the streets: the result is a young people’s underclass,

in which the vigorous urban poor and the politically aware educated rich stand

together in wrathful antipolitics. As this economic underclass discourse

continues to develop, “those at the top” taking “all that they can” become more

and more fundamental to the way young people are represented. The discourse

shifts to represent young people as deprived by incompetent or malicious

political and economic elites as, following the riots, the discourse gradually

leaves narratives depicting the riots and young people as participants in them

behind. The discourse moves on towards societal interpretations discussing

economic problems that are most often linked to young people’s deprivation and

poor government policy/elite behaviour. This transition marks the end of the riot

coverage.

At the conclusion of the riot coverage, young people are represented in stark

contrast to elites – e.g. leaders, politicians, bankers, David Cameron – in

discourse which creates an economic spectrum. At the top, plutocratic elites,

aloof and separate from British society, are ruining Britain with their

incompetence and/or malfeasance, and pandering to older voters with

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economically unfair policies that keep adults rich and young people deprived. At

the bottom, an underclass of deprived young people are represented gaining

political awareness, disproving those who would call them unengaged, apolitical

yobs. Radical “youthful antipolitics” (Farthing 2010, 182) is suggested but never

discursively stated. For example:

“Michael Gove was right that the rioters were not calling themselves protesters, and

liberals are wary of ascribing motives to those who don’t state them. But can we always

expect young people to express themselves in such terms? It is possible to feel angry

and let down without knowing why…” (14 AUG)

In this typical example of their representation, young people are asserted to be

apolitical (“not calling themselves protesters”); once made, the assertion is

challenged, and their apolitics is obliquely argued to be another example of

politicians “missing subtleties” as they were earlier accused in the article.

Though the denial of apolitics, and the assertion of youthful antipolitics, is never

stated outright, the discourse challenges the reader (particularly the “wary”

liberal reader) to be more revolutionary with her thinking, not to miss the

subtleties that Michael Gove does when he claims young people are apolitical,

and to understand the anger young people are trying to express.

Such apparent denials are common in this final phase of young people’s

representation in the riot discourse. Van Dijk et al. wrote that the apparent

denial allows a journalist to make oblique assertions without stating them

outright (van Dijk, Ting-Toomey et al. 1997, 170). The apparent denial can

provide discursive legitimization for young people represented as rioters, and

most often follows the format, “Young people and their riots are not political.

But for these reasons they are political”. Young people are angry because older,

economically powerful people have stolen their hopes and their futures. More

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accurately, young people are represented as a radically antipolitical economic

class: aware that elites are in the wrong, angry that the system is serving them

poorly, and beginning to mobilize that anger in protest:

But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing.

They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn’t

theirs. And British society, David Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour. This

is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts had never happened, followed

by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G8 and G20 meetings, where

the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of

this… Of course London’s riots weren’t a political protest. But the people committing

night-time robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daylight

robbery… Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes

previously offered – a union job, a good affordable education – being rapidly sealed

off…” (27)

The first logical about-face begins with “British society, David Cameron tells us,

abhors that kind of behaviour”. This denial (kids aren’t political, they’re lawless,

and Cameron’s British society abhors lawlessness”) is flouted in the following

discourse which represents British elites (bankers with record bonuses, and

leaders including David Cameron in cahoots) exactly “[taking] advantage of a

situation to take what isn’t theirs”. Semantically, if Cameron claims he as a

member of British society abhors that kind of behaviour then he is excluding

“lawless kids” from British society: yet Cameron and the bankers he supported

are represented engaging in similarly abhorrent behaviour, and so exclude

themselves from British society by the same token, leading the reader to wonder

how Cameron can speak for “British society” if he neither belongs to it nor

abhors what it abhors. The logical reversal which discredits Cameron and his

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judgement (that England’s riots are “not political”, but abhorrent lawlessness),

supports the journalist’s subtle suggestions that elites cannot be trusted (“…or

so we keep hearing”, “…This is said in all seriousness”).

Having drawn Cameron into a logical bind, an apparent denial is employed to

obliquely make the point this journalist originally wanted to make. “Of course

the riots were not a political protest”, is an apparent denial that the lawless kids

earlier indicated are politically aware or engaged. The denial is quickly reversed:

rioters are sure as hell aware about elites’ misbehaviour and their own economic

deprivation in their hands, since “the few escape routes… being rapidly sealed

off” is later attributed as “Cameron’s response” (27). Cameron is explicitly

named as the powerful actor sealing off “kids” escape routes from poverty.

Though she does not explicitly state that young people are politically engaged,

the journalist does warn politicians “…you should expect resistance – whether

organised protests or spontaneous looting” (27), claiming spontaneous looting

as a form of resistance. The difference from enforcement discourse is noteworthy

given that even though young people are “kids” and the article mentions, for

example, the police’s “pricey new arsenal” of weapons (27), young people are

here represented in an underclass as economic and political actors who are aware

of their plight, have escape routes. It is suggested that they have the power to

resist, and implied that their rioting is indeed an act of resistance.

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5. Conclusion

The Guardian used complex discursive methods to represent young people.

Mostly, these representations were harnessed by journalists to create rhetorical

space for the journalist’s political activity; these representations shift and

change depending on the intentions of the journalist and the development of

events themselves.

In the descriptive reporting phase, the rhetoric aimed to create an understanding

between the journalist and the reader that young people were rioting, that they

were powerful and threatening to local residents, and that they could not be

controlled. Each journalist had to construct a representation of young people

that could serve as a framing mechanism to accommodate the reader in coming

to these desired conclusions. It would not have done, for example, for the reader

to have understood young people to be vulnerable children on their summer

holidays: the journalist would have had limited space within this framework to

depict young people as powerful and threatening. Instead, the “hooded youth”,

an existing stereotype, was mobilized as a ubiquitous master representation of

the dangerous urban youth, allowing journalists the rhetorical space to depict

young people as violent rioters. To this hooded youth were added Maffesolian

(1996) neo-tribal qualities that strengthened the boundaries delimiting young

people as a category of “other”. Though young people in this representation

were empowered as threatening urban entities, in the discourse they were

fundamentally disempowered. They were defined as deviants (Ericson, Baranek

et al. 1987, 3), and so restricted from certain activities and belonging. They were

allowed, for example, to criticize police brutality against the tribal youth

collective, but not to make statements about their individual educational goals.

Such engagement with non-deviant activity was denied to tribal youths and was

interpreted by the journalist instead. This urban “politics of belonging” (after

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Crowley 1999; Yuval-Davis 2006) disempowered youths, rescinding tribal youths’

individual rights, for example, to choose to belong to more legitimate groups like

“local residents”.

During the enforcement discourse phase, the Guardian’s rhetorical point

changed. It no longer wished to argue that young people were powerful and out

of control, but rather to argue that the authorities were ineptly (or wilfully)

abusing their own power. As the rhetoric changed, so too did the representation

of young people. The master framework provided by the “tribal youth” was

largely abandoned, replaced by the vulnerable boy, girl, or teenager. Again,

young people were harnessed as rhetorical tools for making a political argument,

this time represented as vulnerable children who had to be sheltered from a

dangerous world by adults. Doing so allowed the journalist rhetorical space to

depict the authorities mishandling affairs and exerting excessive force.

Maintaining the tribal youth representation, this dissertation concludes, would

not have made this rhetoric so easy to defend. It is easier to represent force as

excessive when those on the receiving end are weak.

Both the above were superseded by a representation of young people that

depicted them as political actors. This investigation did not discern any way in

which journalists were clearly “making space” for a rhetorical point in doing so.

There were initial representations of young people – for example, the “posh kid”

behaving like a “poor kid” – that arguably laid the groundwork for the broader

underclass representation itself. The strongest noticeable rhetorical point made

outside the discussion of young people itself was to condemn “feral elites”

including David Cameron. Of the three representations, the youth underclass

was the most empowering. Though some narrative touches that were

characteristic to earlier representations remained, broadly speaking young

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people were represented with the power to become political actors if they wanted

to. Though it was not explicitly stated, discursive features including apparent

denials were used to imply that young people were choosing to engage with

British society using radical youthful antipolitics. The journalists’ intention in

constructing this representation was concluded to be twofold. First, allowing

young people the awareness and power to engage with politics by representing

them as actors within an economic class enabled the journalist to suggest this

youthful antipolitics: “tribal youth” represented young people as apolitical,

acting in collective swarms for the warmth of togetherness; “vulnerable

children” were represented as passive beings needing protection from their

elders, not as economic or political actors themselves.

This investigation provides ample opportunities for further research. In terms of

critical discourse analysis, the next step would be to compare this newspaper’s

discourse with that of another. The Daily Mail is suggested as the Guardian’s

opposite, a right-leaning tabloid to the Guardian’s left-leaning broadsheet. The

Guardian itself was discovered in this investigation referring to the Mail as

misleading (28) and to its articles as “apocalyptic jeremiads” (29). Otherwise,

further research might compare printed discourse with online discourse, for

there appeared to be some divergence with regards to the electronic

communication so frequent in tribal youth discourse, such as one BlackBerry

message was summarized in print (7) but presented in entirety online (Halliday

2011). Further research might also investigate representations of young people

not included here that less often occurred in the corpus, such as racial and

gendered representations of young people, and the representation of young

people as members of postcode gangs.

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The investigation’s theoretical background suggests that the “youth underclass”

representation is most accurate, though proving its accuracy is beyond the scope

of this paper. It would be interesting to combine the analysis of newspaper

discourse with an investigation into the young people themselves. Past research

(Henn, Weinstein et al. 2005) has used focus groups to investigate young

people’s political engagement or disengagement, and such a methodology might

be applied to rioters (if they can be found!) to try and discover their opinions on

the tribal qualities they may or may not have displayed, and their potential

“youthful antipolitics”. This question might well fall within the boundaries of

the author’s continuing research into young people’s identity and belonging.

Theoretical arguments pertaining to young people’s political engagement are

not merely academic matters. They are present in daily newspaper discourse,

too. This investigation further proves that Britain’s young people and their

political activity and engagement are not fully understood. There remains a

fundamental divide between those who believe young people to be active and

engaged and those who consider them passive and disengaged. The

disagreements between these two factions are tumultuous, even within such a

specific selection of discourse as this one, so young people tend to be

represented in different ways depending on the ideologies and political

intentions at hand. The findings of this investigation, then, support Banaji

(2008), who contends that young people’s political engagement exists within a

social environment where reality is subjective and in constant flux. Just as the

elites Banaji studied represented young people as legitimate political actors at

one moment, and apathetic truants the next, so too did the representation of

young people in this investigation waver from one kind to another. There is no

single dominant discursive representation of young people. Several

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representations exist, shifting and changing depending on the political

ideologies in play.

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6. References

Newspaper articles cited1) Lewis, P. (2011). Front: London Riots: How protest evolved into something very different: The Guardian witnesses sustained and chaotic looting in Enfield on Sunday night. Guardian, 9 August, p.4

2) Wainwright, M., H. Clifton, J. Beal, and J. Shepherd (2011). Front: The riots: Nottingham, Leicester, Liverpool: Police station fire-bombed by gang of 40 men: At least eight arrested after attack in Nottingham, trouble also reported in Leicester city centre. Guardian, 10 August, p.4

3) Braddock, K. (2011). G2: Trouble in the Hood: How did a comfy, utilitarian item of clothing become the ultimate symbol of exclusion and menace? Guardian, 10 August, p.10

4) Laville, S. (2011). Front: The riots: Turning points: Sandra Laville on how the police came close to firing plastic bullets. Guardian, 12 August, p.11

5) Dodd, V. and C. Davies (2011). Front: The battle for London: Full-scale alert as violent riots spread across capital: Disorder breaks out in Birmingham city centre: Mayor and home secretary return, PM still on holiday. Guardian, 9 August, p.1

6) Davies, L., P. Walker and C. Davies (2011). Front: London riots: ‘There are no opportunities here, so what do you expect when people see one?’: Youths in Tottenham complain of few jobs and disrespect from the police. Guardian, 9 August, p. 6

7) Lewis, P. (2011). Riots, the week that shook Britain: Guardian journalist Paul Lewis spent a week documenting the riots, braving the mayhem and disorder, guided by the public to the violent and often tragic flashpoints via Twitter. Here is his report of an incredible week. Guardian, 13 August, newsprint supplement p.1.

8) Davies, L., A. Topping, J. Ball and I. Sample (2011). Front: The riots: The victims: The aftermath: Armed with brooms, hundreds answer appeal to clean up streets. Guardian, 10 August, p.8

9) Lewis, P. (2011). Tottenham riots: They gathered in peaceful protest. Suddenly, all hell broke loose: Shops looted, vehicles torched and police injured in worst riots since Brixton in 1995. Guardian, 8 August, p.2

10) Lewis, P. (2011). Front: London riots: There was no doubting their aim: they wanted to fight the police: Masked men and women barricade Hackney estate in the largest confrontation yet as the third day of rioting sees violence spread to more boroughs across the capital. Guardian, 9 August, p.2

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11) Lewis, P. and B. Quinn (2011). Front: London riots: Outmanoeuvred: How ‘Muscle of the Met’ lost its grip on the streets: Three days of rioting and looting have exposed alarming flaws in the Metropolitan Police’s readiness and tactics for dealing with public disorder on such a scale. Guardian, 9 August, p.2

12) Clifton, H., M. Wainwright, S. Laville, P. Walker and J. Vasagar (2011). Front: The riots: Manchester, Salford, Birmingham: ‘This has been senseless on a scale I have never witnessed in my career’: Dozens of shops ransacked and Miss Selfridge store set alight as masked gangs wage running battles with police. Guardian, 10 August, p.2

13) Lewis, P. and J. Harkin (2011). The riots: The rioters: Who is doing this? Young people from poor areas, but that’s not the whole story: The crowds on the streets are drawn from a complex mix of social backgrounds. Guardian, 10 August, p. 6

14) Harris, J. (2011). Front: The riots: Aftermath: A tense and weary West Midlands takes stock after looting: John Harris visits the Black Country to talk to rioters, shopkeepers and other locals about the week’s unrest. Guardian, 13 August, p.8

15) Dodd, V. (2011). Front: The riots: Policing: ‘We’re not namby pamby,’ Met tells rioters. ‘There is no order to be soft’: Plastic bullets can be fired if needed, says top officer, contrasting demands of public ‘limit police tactics’. Guardian, 10 August, p.4

16) Lewis, P., M. Taylor and B. Quinn (2011). Front: Second night of violence in the capital. Guardian, 8 August, p.1

17) The Guardian leader pages (2011). Policing the riots: The thin blue line. Guardian, 12 August, p.34

18) Helm, T. and T. McVeigh (2011). Front: Coalition row grows over ‘kneejerk’ riot response: housing charities slam eviction threat, Lib Dems attack ‘hasty’ measures. Observer, 14 August, p.14

19) Vasagar, J. (2011). Front: The riots: Courts: Manchester: ‘It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done’. Guardian, 13 August, p.3

20) Watt, N. (2011). Front: The riots: Politics: Back from his Tuscan holiday, Cameron calls for halt to 'sickening violence': 'You will feel full force of the law,' PM tells rioters Second meeting of Cobra committee due today. Guardian, 10 August, p.5

21) Moore, S. (2011). Saturday: Put the shutters up on the shops, but not in our minds. Don’t lock these kids out. Guardian, 13 August, p.35

22) The Guardian leader pages (2011). Tottenham riots: a suburb in flames. Guardian, 8 August, p.26

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23) Bailey, S. (2011). Comment: Riots without responsibility: We've failed to teach our kids that an entitlement culture is wrong. Now we are paying the price. Guardian, 11 August, p.30

24) Hutton, W. (2011). Comment: Our wounded nation will not be healed by vengeful gestures: A peaceful protest outside one London police station evolved into successive wild nights of looting, violence and lawlessness across the country. Where does England go from here?: Unfairness and inequality are corroding the social and cultural ties that binds us - that is what we need to address. Observer, 14 August, p.32

25) Malik, S. (2011). Front: The riots: Voices: 'They think the youths go mental. We don't. We just want a job': Poverty, frustration, class, or the thrill of the mob: youths to academics give their views on blame and causes of the riots. Guardian, 13 August, p.6

26) Kampfner, J. (2011). Comment: The door has been left open for authoritarian hyperbole: Following the riots the gap between professed civil libertarians and the right has narrowed. But police do need support. Guardian, 15 August, p.24

27) Klein, N. (2011). Comment: If you rob people of the little they have, expect resistance: We keep hearing that the UK riots weren't political - but looters know elites have long been helping themselves at others' cost. Guardian, 18 August, p.35

28) Booth, R. (2011). Front: The riots: Media: Met dismisses newspaper report linking rape of girl, 13, to riots. Guardian, 16 August, p.6

29) Monkey (2011). Media: Media Monkey’s Diary. Guardian, 15 August, p.29

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