Street Gangs, Migration and Ethnicity PDF
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Street Gangs, Migration and Ethnicity EDITED BY Frank van Gemert, Dana Peterson and WILLAN Inger-Lise Lien PUBLISHING Street Gangs, Migration and Ethnicity Street Gangs, Migration and Ethnicity Edited by Frank van Gemert, Dana Peterson and Inger-Lise Lien WILLAN PUBLISHING Published by VVillan Publishing Culmcott House Mill Street, Uffculme Cullompton, Devon EX15 3AT,UK Tel: +44(0)1884 840337 Fax: +44(0)1884 840251 e-mail: [email protected] website: www.willanpublishing.co.uk Published simultaneously in the USA and Canada by VVillan Publishing c/o ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave, Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA Tel: +001(0)503 287 3093 Fax:+001(0)503 280 8832 e-mail: [email protected] website: www.isbs.com © The editor and contributors 2008 All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publishers or a licence permitting copying in the UK issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. First published 2008 ISBN 978-1-84392-396-1 paperback 978-1-84392-397-8 hardback British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Project managed by Deer Park Productions, Tavistock, Devon Typeset by GCS, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire Printed and bound by T.J. International, Padstow, Cornwall Contents Acknowledgements IX Foreword by Malcolm W. Klein XI About the editors xvii Part I Introduction and methods 1 1 Introduction 3 Frank van Gemert, Inger-Lise Lien and Dana Peterson 2 Migrant groups and gang activity: a contrast between Europe and the USA 15 Frank van Gemert and Scott Decker 3 Dangers and problems of doing 'gang' research in the UK 31 Judith Aldridge, Juanjo Medina and Robert Ralphs Part II Migration ands treet gangs 47 4 Mexican migrants in gangs: a second-generation history 49 James Diego Vigil Street Gangs, Migration and Ethnicity 5 Latin Kings in Barcelona 63 Carles Feixa, Noemi Canelles, Laura Porzio, Carolina Recio and Luca Giliberti 6 Gangs, migration and conflict: Thrasher's theme in The Netherlands 79 Frank van Gemert and Jantien Stuifbergen 7 Origins and development of racist skinheads in Moscow 97 Alexander Shashkin Part III Ethnicity and street gangs 115 8 The role of race and ethnicity in gang membership 117 Finn-Aage Esbensen, Bradley T. Brick, Chris Melde, Karin Tusinski and Terrance J. Taylor 9 Weapons are for wimps: the social dynamics of ethnicity and violence in Australian gangs 140 Rob White 10 Ethnicity and juvenile street gangs in France 156 Coralie Fiori-Khayat 11 Migration background, group affiliation, and 173 delinquency among endangered youths in a south-west German city Hans-Jürgen Kerner, Kerstin Reich, Marc Coester and Elmar G.M. Weitekamp 12 Respect, friendship, and racial injustice: justifying 192 gang membership in a Canadian city Scot Wortley and Julian Tanner Part IV Issues and challenges of migration and ethnicity in dealing with street gangs 209 13 An interactive construction of gangs and ethnicity: 211 the role of school segregation in France Eric Debarbieux and Catherine Blaya Contents 14 'Nemesis' and the Achilles heel of Pakistani gangs 227 in Norway Inger-Lise Lien 15 Wolves and sheepdogs: on migration, ethnic relations 241 and gang-police interaction in Sweden Micael Björk 16 Concluding remarks: the roles of migration and ethnicity in street gang formation, involvement and response 255 Dana Peterson, Inger-Lise Lien and Frank van Gemert Index 273 Acknowledgements A number of thanks are due, not just to the contributors for sharing their research and for their timeliness and patience, but also to others who furthered this project. We are appreciative to Juanjo Medina who organized the May 2005 Eurogang meeting at which many of these papers were first presented and to the Eurogang network of researchers who remain committed to our goal of cross-national comparative research. Thanks are due as well to Scott Decker and Frank Weerman, who graciously donated a portion of the proceeds from the second Eurogang book for this manuscript's preparation. We thank our two anonymous peer reviewers for their time, expertise, and insight which have certainly improved this work. The editors wish to express much appreciation to University at Albany doctoral students Nicole Schmidt, who read and edited most of the chapters, and Vanessa Panfil, for historical research; and to Wasja Rijs from VU university in Amsterdam, for bibliographic editing of all of the chapters. We also appreciate all the support we received from Brian Willan and his excellent staff and affiliates at Willan Publishing. Finally, we wish to thank all of those who take a chance to discuss and research sensitive issues such as gangs, migration, and ethnicity; we hope our work adds positively to the discussion. ix Foreword Malcolm W. Klein This third book emanating from the Eurogang Programme presents a significant line of progress over the first two (Decker and Weerman 2005; Klein et al. 2001). It moves the programme from its initial phase of technical development over some seven years to an expanded concern for the contextual underpinnings of comparative, international street gang research. My excitement over the publishing of this new volume stems only partially from my proprietary interest as a founder of the programme. It also reflects my appreciation for a number of insights offered by the various authors in the volume. My comments will, rather briefly, cover three topics: programme rationale, programme history, and the nexus between street gangs and marginal populations as highlighted in some of the ensuing chapters. Programme rationale Most street gang research has been carried out in the USA over a period of about 80 years. Although there has been a publication crescendo, what progress has been achieved in understanding gangs has been more by post hoc synthesis than by planning. American gang studies have been largely uncoordinated exercises in different locations, using different research methods, and driven by different perspectives among researchers and their funders. Our first hope for the Eurogang Programme was therefore that it could develop coordination of methods and perspectives across sites. Street Gangs, Migration and Ethnicity A second problem with the American experience has been the well- documented failure to settle upon a common definition, or at least common components of a definition, that would permit replicable data collection. If there is such a thing as a street gang, we should be able to define it both conceptually and operationally. Our second hope for the Eurogang Programme, then, was a resolution of the definitional problem. A third problem in the USA has been that most street gang programmes and policies have been unrelated to available data, especially as truly relevant, policy-related data have become readily available over the past 50 or so years (see the recent data and programme summaries in Klein and Maxson 2006). Our third hope for the Eurogang Programme - not yet realised at all - has been that data-based gang policy can indeed be developed. The European setting with its rapidly emerging gang problems has been, for the American participants in the programme, a way to start over, to get in before the door is again closed. For the European participants, it has been a way for mostly unconnected gang researchers to come together across national lines to share a set of relatively new experiences - a search for synergy. History The Eurogang Programme started at an informal gathering in Leuven, Belgium, in 1997, where a few American and European researchers traded notes on what seemed to be an accelerated emergence of street gangs in Europe. The impressions were mostly anecdotal but consistent. Further discussions led to a series of increasingly focused workshops in Belgium, The Netherlands, Norway, and Germany, in which gang research papers were delivered and discussed. At the same time, a working group was established to obtain agreement upon both conceptual and operational approaches to defining street gangs. Five additional working groups undertook the task of developing, pretesting, revising and settling upon five research instruments that could be used (with translations) across many nations to yield common and comparable data on street gangs. By 2005, seven workshops had led to the culmination of these processes, as well as the identification of 50 gang-involved cities in Europe and over 100 American and European researchers interested in participating in what became known as the Eurogang Programme. This period between 1997 and 2005 constituted the first phase of that programme.
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