Children s Geographies

The New Labour Respect Agenda fuses anti-social behaviour policies, Third Way active citizenship, and a theory of community-based support and regulation. The Respect Agenda itself has a specific focus on, and direct implications for, children and young people, as well as for children living in vulnerable families. This paper argues that the theoretical basis for New Labour's 'Respect' is limited and ultimately flawed. Whilst New Labour policy demands respect from young people, young people's lived citizenship is too often experienced in terms of disrespect and even shame of the self. Young people respond to these feelings of disrespect by seeking out other ways through which respect can be acted out and negotiated. Respect, as conceptualised through the New Labour lens will criminalise vulnerable young people, thereby further stripping them of self-respect, inter-personal respect and societal respect. The paper concludes that respect should be an outcome of policy and a philosophy of a social justice led politics, rather than a conditionally led policy.

The aim of this article is to discuss the close interplay between global discourses on children as citizens, notions of (a good) childhood at the national and local levels, and discourses on nationality and democracy. This dynamic relationship highlights on the one hand the significance of children as central social actors, and on the other hand how social constructions of children and childhood are closely intertwined with economic, cultural and political transformations in society. The discussion is empirically grounded in the analysis of participatory projects in two Nordic countries, initiated in the early 1990s, 'Try Yourself' in Norway, and 'Children as Fellow Citizens' in Denmark, in both of which the constitution of children as autonomous, authentic social actors is central. The main argument I present is that, to an increasing degree, childhood is constructed as a symbolic space reproducing symbolic values related to democracy, national identity, autonomy and authenticity. In this way, children are constituted as social participants, actively contributing to reproducing culture and national identities in new ways.

The article examines children's and parents' perspectives on risks and safety in the neighbourhood in the context of Serbian society undergoing turbulent transformation. The evidence for the analysis comes from a small-scale survey with parents and 13-14-year-old schoolchildren and eight group interviews with the children in three Belgrade urban settings. The data show that the main difference between children's and parents' perspective is situated along the axis general risks in broader society vs. particular knowledge of risks and coping strategies embedded in the neighbourhoods. Such difference is related to different social positions of adults and children but is also significantly marked by specific social context. Bearing in mind recent brutalisation of Serbian society, risk anxiety in general is lower than might be expected. Due to weak institutions parents still rely considerably on social safety nets within the neighbourhoods. Their practices are generally more instructive than restrictive, thus implicitly supporting the practices through which children exercise significant agency in using places. Different spatial characteristics of the studied neighbourhoods emerged as an important contextual variable in both children's and parents' perspective on risks. The under-urbanised suburban locations are perceived as more risky, contrary to experience in the West.

Photography has been commonly used as a research tool in studies of childhood/children. However images of school children in official documentation are rarely taken or chosen by children and may not reflect their real experiences. This research considered the photographs taken by year six primary school children of their school and the images they chose to represent themselves. Subsequent interviews with children revealed attitudes to school, the importance of playground relationships in the construction of gender, leading to the concept of â-˜borderlandsâ-™ inhabited by some boys who adopt non-hegemonic masculinities.

This paper reports some of the findings of research which has investigated the inclusion of disabled children in six primary school playgrounds in Yorkshire, in England. Initially the paper sets the policy context before moving on to discuss the importance of play for children, especially in a primary school setting and particularly for disabled children in such a setting. The inclusion of disabled children is discussed with respect to a series of social and organisational issues and the good practice identified relating to these issues. The social issues include the relationships the disabled children have with their peers and with the staff. The organisational issues relate to the individual routines, moving to a new school, the benefit of staff experience and training, encouraging activity in physical education lessons which can be translated in to the playground and the benefits of extra time outside for some disabled children. All these aspects can influence whether all the children can go outside togetherâ-”an important underlying factor for the inclusion of disabled children in primary school playgrounds.

The power imbalance between adults and young people in research relations has been well documented, including the necessity of adopting appropriate methods when working with young participants. However, the actual spaces and places in which research occurs remains relatively neglected within children's geographies, despite its methodological significance and the important ethical and spatial issues it raises. The purpose of this short article is to offer an intervention into the ways in which the spaces/places of research, even the very small, almost insignificant sites, have to be considered as integral to research planning and implementation. Drawing on recent school-based research with young teenagers, the paper will demonstrate how a storecupboard became constructed as an important research space/place within the school. As an alternative, liminal or 'thirdspace' the storecupboard allowed for a more nuanced understanding of teenage practices and performances than previous classroom-based research encounters.

This paper investigates girls' friendships (aged 14-15) at Hilltop school in England. Through the use of multi-locational participant observation this paper identifies the significance of schoolgirl friendship in the production and contestation of femininity and compulsory heterosexuality. This paper focuses on one friendship group known as the 'alternative' girls. This paper illustrates how these young women invoke a discourse of 'distinctive individuality' (Muggleton, 2000) in order to produce inclusionary and exclusionary boundaries of friendship. Central to an understanding of these friendships are the complex spatialities of young women's processes of (dis)identification (Skeggs, 1997).

This paper presents research into intergenerational notions of fashion and identity. It uses examples drawn from the case study interviews with motherâ-“daughter family groups and the participatory method of draw and write with the daughters to illustrate the influences on young girls' fashion choices in the key spaces of childhood: the home, school and community. The findings reveal that young girls both identify and disidentify with fashions and identities available to them. Their mothers play a key role in allowing and restricting certain outfits in certain spaces, with particular distinction being drawn between public and private space. This paper contributes to children's geographies by focusing on intergenerational relationships between mothers and their daughters in relation to theories of identity formation. In doing so this paper highlights how both intergenerational relationships and the girls' identities are mediated through fashion, consumption, peers and the home, school and community spaces.

Previous geographical research with street children has principally focused on their micro-geographies in the city. This paper draws on nomadic and episodic processes of homeless mobility, to explore street children's geographies from a wider social, spatial and temporal perspective. By examining street life in Kampala, Uganda as a continued negotiation of public/private and street/non-street locations, the fluid nature of street children's identity is illustrated. Over time, movement between spaces, such as divergent city niches, institutions, homes and other towns, is often subject to power relations operating in street/non-street spaces with each requiring conformity to a different set of values and behaviours. The paper demonstrates how this results in children's street identity changing as they move through the street life path.

That young people today reside within social worlds of unprecedented 'risk' is a persuasive position. While such discourses have become increasingly pervasive, there has been little interest in exploring contemporary shifts within specific socio-geographic contexts: place has been largely invisible. This paper considers Ulrich Beck's 'risk society' theses as a framework for exploring the experiences of 85 young residents of a regional Australian centre. These young people's stories revealed complex and often contradictory, tensions in relation to identity, uncertainty and responsibility. Socio-geographic location was found to be a significant feature in the negotiation and repercussion of these young people's lives.

We examine here the discourses surrounding the lunchbox taken to school by children: aspects both of the contents and of how children consume and understand these.1 Examples within and beyond the UK suggest that the lunchbox is a container for various aspects of the private and public. What traces can be found inside of wider social relations, including processes of care and surveillance? We argue that the lunchbox consists of intersecting spatialities, within which children constitute a public face, and create identities, relationships and subjectivities; this perspective frames opportunities for priorities in future empirical research with children.

This paper describes two youth participatory action research initiatives undertaken in East Palo Alto, CA, USA, as part of university–community partnerships. We discuss the process of engaging youth researchers to build youth skills, facilitate relationships with community-based organizations, and enhance study integrity. We report interview and artifact data that address: (1) how the youths' involvement in the research process affected their sense of place and self-efficacy for creating community change; (2) how the youths' interactions with adult community leaders shifted adult perceptions of youths' abilities and roles in the community; and (3) how the initiatives affected youth and adult participants' perspectives of the university.

This paper explores intersections of ethnicity, gender and age in Rwanda during and following the 1994 genocide. It firstly considers how these intersections affected the specific dynamics and nature of the violence during the genocide. It then examines how these intersections have shifted following the genocide in the context of a nation-building project, which has rejected ethnicity, yet embraced the pursuit of gender equality. Drawing on ethnographic research with young Rwandans in Kigali from 2004 to 2011, it identifies three disquieting continuities in the intersections of ethnicity, gender and age in contemporary Rwanda: (i) the ongoing ethnicisation of sexual politics among young Rwandans; (ii) the reproduction of ‘ethno-gendered’ stereotypes of Tutsi women that were central to the genocide propaganda; and (iii) the continued marginalisation of large numbers of Hutu young men, a factor which contributed to the participation of some young men in the 1994 genocide.

This paper reports subjective experiences in nature of 5 children aged 6–10 years collected during a 5-day camp in a botanical garden. Creative expressive visual methods and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data. Inductive analysis produced the follow themes: children being positioned to take care of nature and to be taken care of by nature, as well as nature needing protection from children and children needing protection from nature. The roles of gatekeepers in mediating attraction to and repulsion from nature were also highlighted. We examine these in the context of socio-cultural constraints and invitations that children experience in developing these relationships. These themes are discussed using a theoretical framework that blends Vygotsky's socio-cultural development theory with Gibson's theory of affordances. Findings contribute to a more integrated understanding of how ecological psychology and social psychology can inform our understanding of children's relationships with nature; in particular, how children's experiences with nature are mediated by socio-cultural factors. By adding to our understanding of how children develop relationships with nature, practitioners can more effectively facilitate experiences that encourage pro-environmental and stewardship attitudes and behaviors as well as result in positive health and development outcomes for children. This paper contributes to the children's geographies literature by strengthening the theoretical foundation from which geographers approach child–nature relationships.

In this paper we report on preliminary fieldwork conducted in Ghana and The Gambia on the interrelationships among youth, gender and livelihoods. We examine how policy in developing countries, typically characterised as related to child labour or education, needs to emphasise the linkage across processes that affect young people. We argue that policy will be improved if young people are given voice to express how work, education, social networks, and culturally-bound notions of responsibility are linked and how they perceive the opportunities and constraints on their ‘life chances’.

In this contribution we discuss the process of feedback and dissemination that we adopted following research with children affected by AIDS in southern Africa. We outline our reasons for engaging in detailed feedback and dissemination, distinguishing between active or passive processes and discuss the participatory methods we adopted. Through our reflections we consider feedback as an obligation to participants and dissemination as a potential agent of social change. In addition we evaluate the effectiveness with which we were able to truly incorporate the voices of young people in our dissemination and relinquish control of the outcomes to make them available for action among policy-makers. In conclusion we highlight that active dissemination, although not able to guarantee that research recommendations will be acted upon, at the very least opens dialogue and enhances understanding among those able to implement action.

This paper examines the potential for applying child-centred research methodologies which involve children doing their own research (with adult facilitators) within a transport and mobility context in West Africa. Relatively little attention has been paid to the transport needs of the poor and powerless within African transport policy and planning: the specifics of children and young people's transport and mobility needs are essentially unknown and unconsidered. Using evidence from a small pilot study in Ghana, we reflect on both the opportunities and the challenges of work in this field. Although the paper is focused on the specific issues raised by child-centred research, it raises broader questions regarding the potential for research partnerships with vulnerable groups and, more specifically, the challenges of developing more collaborative research processes within transport studies, where technical priorities still regularly triumph over social concerns.

In this paper, we explore the role of place in drinking practices of young people in the context of rural Estonia. We draw on a participatory research project carried out during seven months with a group of eight young men (15–18 years of age). We focus on three locations identified as the most popular drinking places by the young men in our research – familial homes, a local hamburger kiosk and the outdoors. The findings indicate that youth drinking practices as well as the drunkenness-related risks are spatially contingent. Characteristics of individual drinking locations influence the negotiation of local and national opportunities, restrictions and attitudes toward drinking, and the associated risks. We argue that, when developing public health tools, it is fruitful to pay attention to the local context and specific places in which young people's drinking practices are negotiated.

In rural Bolivia, like many rural areas of the majority world, there are few opportunities for permanent employment and most young people do not have access to their own land. Consequently, many young people in southern Bolivia migrate seasonally to Argentina and their migratory experience provides them with a sense of collective identity during periods spent within their home community. It also enables them to access consumer goods as well as to continue to maintain interdependent family ties by contributing financially to their households. This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Bolivia, considers the positive and negative ways in which the young migrant identity offers young people alternative youth transitions as well as enhances their social and economic autonomy.

Recent public debates about Australia's children and young people have begun to acknowledge the direct impact of urban development on their health and well-being. This paper reviews a broad range of transdisciplinary literature addressing child-friendliness in contemporary Australian cities, drawing particular attention to the fact that even some of the most recognised texts on children and young people in Australia still make few references in their analysis to the issue of place and neighbourhood. More specifically, the paper points to two particular research challenges confronting the ongoing study of young people's wellbeing in urban areas, including (a) the need for a more thorough analysis, both conceptual and applied, about how children and young people's well-being is affected by different urban forms and by the social and ecological variations that occur throughout cities; and (b) the focus on younger children needs to be complemented by a focus on adolescents and young adults who in turn need to be actively involved in confronting these challenges. Yes Yes

In Sierra Leone, economic and social marginalisation, and exploitation from chiefs and elders prompted young people to ‘revolt’ against them and the state in search for acceptance, recognition and empowerment. In the post-war period, youths have drawn on certain tenets of the liberal peace including human rights, good governance, development and rule of law to create spaces for exercising ‘resisting power’ as well as negotiating with chiefdom authorities. However, this has not been very effective since in addition to receiving support from state elites, traditional authorities possess material and coercive power which they have used to control the youth. This article argues that it is crucial for critical peace research to move beyond examining power relations between international actors and local actors to also examine power and power relations between various local groups as this also has an influence on the nature of peace being established in a post-war situation.

This paper offers theoretical reflections on how adult researchers access, process and represent the 'worlds' of children and childhood. Recognising previous claims and warnings issued by geographers, it is argued that researchers can and should take advantage of the fact that all adult researchers have once been children, meaning that there are always fragments of connection allowing 'us' at least some intimation of children's geographies as experiencede and imagined from within . Gaston Bachelard's (1969a) 'poetics of reverie' is partially built upon just such a sense of connection, laying out the basis for a phenomenology of childhood wherein adults seek an imaginative revisiting of the reveries--the absent-minded daydreaming--of 'bored' and 'idle' children. This paper provides a critical exegesis of Bachelard's work in this respect, emphasising the importance to his thinking of geography, landscape and environment as both elements within and embodied spurs to childhood reverie. Questions about the admixture of adult imagination and memory in the recovery of childhood reverie are considered, and conclusions are reached about what can usefully be taken from Bachelard's 'poetics of childhood', notably in terms of a methodology of 'not doing too much' as an adult researcher in this field. Claims are also made about needing to take more seriously than hitherto the mundane reveries of childhood, those contained in children's own undirected jottings, drawings and play, as a possible source for future inquiries into children's geographies.

This paper presents material from extended interviews and observations with 25 street youth in Mexico, revealing how their attempts to control and understand their lives relies on a control of and identification with their bodies. Using Goffman's ideas of stigma and performance, and Butler's performativity, the paper illustrates that even if these young peoples' bodies fall short of mainstream ideas for youthful bodies, they have developed some strategies that allow some control over their bodies. These bodily performances differ according to audience. This intention is by no means fully achieved. Their bodily actions sets out a series of identity markers but street life implies all sort of events, from painful childhoods to vicious leisure pursuits, and restricts the ability to affect material conditions. Moreover, care needs to be taken in interpreting these signs as the participants' own understandings and practices are neither easily categorized nor consistent.

This paper explores how participatory research processes aid in our understanding of a 'proper' Muslim girlhood in the bustees (urban slums) of Kolkata. Specifically, young women in this paper use PhotoVoice to analyse what it means to be a 'good Muslim girl' in the conservative Muslim slums. By focusing on clothing and the body, young women use photographs to depict societal expectations of them. This exploration points to various ways young women resist and challenge the normative understanding of the 'good girl' in their everyday lives. The paper shows that participatory inquiry can begin a process of dialogue amongst peers to address and support young women's desires. It ends by mapping the impact of young women's participation in this research project, and calls for new ways to quantify 'genuine children's participation'.

This paper offers a governmentality analysis of the online recruitment materials of the British Army Cadets. Governmentality theory attends to the role of rationalities and techniques of government in producing subjectivity. I apply this theory to an analysis of recruitment materials to show that the cadets can be understood as techniques of government that are framed within rationalities that position young masculinity as risky, particularly in contexts of urban poverty. These techniques of government include the use of stylised practices to discipline the body and the deployment of military artefacts that enable the Cadets to perform ‘tough masculinity’. I argue that the Cadets appeal to the desire to use their bodies, as arguably the only resource that poor working-class youth have unmediated access to, as the site on which reputation and respectability can be inscribed.

This paper considers the potential contribution of secondary quantitative analyses of large scale surveys to the investigation of 'other' childhoods. Exploring other childhoods involves investigating the experience of young people who are unequally positioned in relation to multiple, embodied, identity locations, such as (dis)ability, 'class', gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race. Despite some possible advantages of utilising extensive databases, the paper outlines a number of methodological problems with existing surveys which tend to reinforce adultist and broader hierarchical social relations. It is contended that scholars of children's geographies could overcome some of these problematic aspects of secondary data sources by endeavouring to transform the research relations of large scale surveys. Such endeavours would present new theoretical, ethical and methodological complexities, which are briefly considered.

Academic researchers on children should not ignore criteria for children's well-being. Starting from the observation that attempts at protection from harmful work has often damaged children's opportunities, the article argues that protection must be broader than simply protection from particular risks, and take in protection of opportunities. Moreover, researchers need to find ways to look beyond material and cognitive development to neglected areas of well-being sometimes referred to as ‘spiritual’.

In February 2007, UNICEF launched the latest in a series of reports comparing the conditions of young people's lives across the world's more industrialised countries. The report ranked the UK as the lowest of the countries investigated. We give a critical overview of the report, identifying its limitations as well as some of the trends it reveals. We also discuss the poor placing of the UK in relation to current broader political and public debates.

Majority World working children's voices have attained some prominence in debates over their well-being. Many have defended their right to work, challenging Minority World understandings of children's ‘best’ interests. Yet employers' voices remain sidelined, raising questions over the extent to which the discursive and material spaces of children's work have been decolonised. A postcolonial perspective on children's work challenges suggestions that Majority World adults (and societies) need western guidance on how children ought to be raised. It also creates opportunities to look beyond western discourses of economic exploitation, to the potential for more-than-economic relationships between working children and their employers.

Northern Ireland is in the early stages of transition from conflict, but progress is regularly affected by political and public discontent. A divided landscape, segregated and under-resourced communities are enduring legacies of ‘the Conflict’. Yet the political will to tackle social and community division, consult with and support communities has been lacking. Grounded in six communities most affected by poverty and the Conflict this paper illustrates the difficulties, tensions and contradictions experienced during transition and how, in the process of ‘change’, children and young people have been silenced, marginalised and demonised.

This special edition emerged from a day-long conference session held at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Colorado, in March 2005. The special edition, like the conference session, is inspired by collective endeavours to critique dominant conceptualisations of the ubiquitous, normally developing, middle-class, white, child resident in Northern European or English speaking nations of the Global North. Although this process began early in explorations of new geographies of childhood, it is questionable whether this the critique has been as holistic and complete as might be desired. In this editorial we point to some potential ways in which children's geographers can reproduce, rather than transform, dominant representations of childhood before suggesting how such problems might be, at least partially, overcome. We end by illustrating the ways in which the papers in this issue, which individually represent a range of theoretical perspectives and empirical foci, can collectively contribute to this more thorough jettisoning the ubiquitous child and to the retheorising other childhoods in a globalised world.

Unless they focus on epidemiological debates, most thematic issues of social-science journals concentrate on research results, describing methods only as a means to an end. Nevertheless, the burgeoning field of research with children in the context of international rights-based programming has placed a new spotlight on epidemiological questions. What exactly (and what age) is a child when seen as the subject rather than object of research? How does this affect both methodology and method? Does the special social status of childhood imply new approaches and techniques, different ethical considerations, a novel role for researchers? Who should be a child researcher? What, indeed, are the human rights of children?

Recent scholarship on the circulation of children and on the plight of youth trapped in transition in Africa and the Middle East recognizes – from two separate vantage points – how the circulation of children extends from and then reproduces violence. Displacement (forced and voluntary) and stuckness (the inability to transition from childhood to adulthood due to exclusionary economic and political structures) are two related outcomes for young people in contexts of armed conflict and structural violence. Drawing on insights from these two research streams, this paper examines how Israeli and Palestinian youth perceive and represent themselves in relation to the different contested spaces that they occupy. Surface plays of power and territoriality are disrupted as well as reinforced by specific mobilizations of children and youth (as people), and by the circulation of ideas about children and childhood.

Indonesia has a proliferation of children living on the streets of its larger cities. To the state and dominant society, they are perceived as committing a social violation. In response to their marginalisation and subordination, street children in Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia, have developed a 'repertoire of strategies' in order to survive. These include the appropriation of urban niches within the city, in which they create collective solutions for the dilemmas they confront in their everyday lives. This paper discusses a street boy community that exists within these marginal spaces: the Tikyan subculture of Yogyakarta. It presents the Tikyan subculture as a technique for street children to resist the negative stereotypes which are given to them by mainstream society. As they get older and become increasingly alienated by society, the Tikyan actively reject their 'deviant' label, and decorate street life so that it becomes agreeable in their eyes. This is achieved by deviating from dominant styles of dress and conventional behaviour, and through the development of a specific symbolic identity. These symbolic challenges to the dominant culture are communicated and dispersed within the social group and conveyed to the world via the subculture's 'specialised semiotic': their style of dress; their acts of bodily subversion or dissent (in the form of tattoos, body piercing and sexual practices); the music they play and listen to; and their use of drugs and alcohol. I describe these practices as the Tikyan 's obligatory performances, and the expected ways of behaving in order to remain accepted by the group.

It is often assumed that ‘play’ is an unproblematic category of children's activity, but consideration should be given to whether it is really an adult construction full of questionable assumptions about enjoyable activities free of stress for the children concerned. This paper offers some empirical materials to begin such a deconstruction of ‘play’ through an inquiry into the social geography of children's play in a Scottish new town. By retrieving what children think about their own play, what it entails and the spaces, places, social encounters and social variations central to it, it is possible to sketch out a social geography of children's play that, if not entirely unexpected, does suggest the ‘nature’ of play to be less certain than might commonly be supposed.

Urban environments form the setting of everyday life for most Western young people. This article explores visual representations of cities made by young people in a range of environments within four countries. The findings inform a larger study on urban geographies within geography education. We analyse students' drawings of cities regarding physical characteristics, activities and issues. There are many commonalities between drawings from the four countries, the majority showing a ‘big, busy city’ representation with skylines, traffic and shopping areas. There are also distinctive characteristics for each set, for example Finnish students tended to emphasise environmental and social issues more than in the other countries. In relation to methodology, we conclude that drawings, supported by contextual information, are a useful source to understand young people's representations of cities. Further, this research supports thinking about how to merge young people's experiences and imaginaries with the teaching of urban geography.

What are the methodological and theoretical issues of doing collective research? While raising questions that speak to the process and point to the high and low lights of a collaborative research approach, my paper addresses issues of representation and shifting power that are central to feminist inquiry, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, and research concerned with social (in)justice and inclusion. Specifically this paper grapples with the possibility of research as a vehicle for social change. journal article

While most collaborative research approaches for working with children and young people draw upon visual methodologies, which are engaging and accessible to all ages and transcend barriers of language and literacy, the methods I discuss in this paper privilege written and verbal expression. These techniques may be especially useful for those researchers who work with teenagers, however the principles of the PAR approach are relevant to all doing research with children and young people. journal article

This paper discusses the reflections and experiences of conducting research with street-frequenting young people on the streets of Suva, Fiji. Much attention is devoted to ethical considerations and their impacts in relation to the issues of access, the researcher's positionality and data collection methods. These are important for two reasons, one this study is the first in-depth research with children and young people on the streets of Suva, Fiji and secondly the methodology adopted is novel to the context. The methodology is influenced by the new sociology of childhood congruent with the notion of rights-based research with children and young people. Participation lies at the centre of this approach dictating a shift in the way children and young people are perceived and influencing the choice of research methods adopted in understanding them. The paper takes the position that there is much to be understood in this area of research with children and young people on the streets of Fiji and perhaps of the Pacific. The experiences are worth sharing especially in societies where an appreciation for research and its outcomes are poorly appreciated and acknowledged.

This article examines how young people living in the Kivu provinces, Democratic Republic of Congo, attempt to engage with existing social support in their efforts to cope with protracted structural and political violence. Through an examination of narrative, visual and written data, this article describes how decades of violence have broken down traditional support structures, leaving young people with few options for effective coping beyond engaging in patronage relationships. This article examines how young people situate themselves in positions of weakness in order to gain material support and protection as they attempt to cope with a lack of material resources and other forms of insecurity.

This paper reports on a study of victimization, offending and fear among homeless young people in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, which employed a participatory methodology. These young people live in marginal and often invisible spaces, yet are subject to a high degree of regulation which structures their experiences of risk. Their accounts demonstrate that an 'either/or' distinction which often structures understanding of offenders and victims, feared and fearful, and safe and dangerous spaces has led to their experiences being poorly represented. Homeless young people are often multiply positioned in relation to crime, an understanding which challenges the current political climate in Britain.