Shaping the ‘At‐Risk Youth’: risk, governmentality and the Finn Report
- 1 January 1995
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
- Vol. 16 (1) , 123-134
- https://doi.org/10.1080/0159630950160108
Abstract
The category of the `at-risk youth' currently underpins a good deal of youth policy, and in particular, education policy. Primarily, the category is centred around a range of programmes associated with the need for state intervention, intervention which largely occurs `at a distance' within domains such as the school and the family. While it is argued that in some ways, the `at-risk youth' simply replaces older characterisations used in the policing of the young, it will also be argued that the preventative policies associated with `risk' are constituted in terms of factors rather than individuals; that prevention is no longer primarily based upon personal expertise, but rather upon the gathering and collation of statistical knowledge which identifies `risks' within given populations; and that `risk' permits a greater number of young people to be brought into the field of regulatory strategies. Importantly, the category of the `at-risk youth' underpins crucial sections of policy documents such as the Finn Report (into credentialling/ education and vocational competency). In this case, youth is deemed to be `at-risk' of not making the transition to adulthood successfully. It will be argued that not only is the Finn Report significant in the administrative and cultural shaping of the category of `youth', but also by employing the notion of `risk', the Report puts in place yet another element of an effective network of governmental intelligibility covering the young. Finally, it will be argued that young women, as a specific example of a `risk' group (vis-a-vis obtaining certain types of employment), require particular forms of intervention, primarily through changing the vocational aspirations of their parents.uKeywords
This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit:
- An At-Risk Assessment: Teachers Rate Their Students on Academic Skills and BehaviorThe Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 1991
- The Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Early Nineteenth-Century EnglandLabour History, 1978