Seen but Not Heard: The Legal Lives of Young People
![handle is hein.journals/polar23 and id is 233 raw text is: Madelaine Adelman and Christine Yalda
Arizona State University
Seen But Not Heard: The Legal Lives of Young People
Little is known about the legal lives of young people. In this article, we ask why this is, and
we call for further study. Although one conceivably might argue that law and law-like
processes neither affect young people nor shape their everyday lives-and thus conclude that
legal anthropologists have no reason to study youths-relying on this argument to absent youth
from one's research remains problematic. In fact, law strongly constitutes the identities and
lives of young people. Legal and related social distinctions between youths and adults rest
upon laws defining, among other things, young people's rights and/or obligations to adjudi-
cation, work, compulsory education, sex, marriage, alcohol consumption, smoking, and
voting.' Youths live, at varying moments, under the direct gaze or in the shadow of law, and
youth culture takes its shape, in part, from this social location. Young people are not merely
passive recipients of law but also indirect and direct agents of reproduction, as well as change,
in law and legal discourse. Youths participate in school-based law-related education and peer
mediation programs, Teen Court diversion programs, and university-sponsored judicial boards.
Additionally, some youths represent contempt for and/or resistance to law and legal authority
as part of their identities.
This mutually constitutive nature of youth culture and law warrants further inquiry. We suggest
that youths, and the concept of youth culture, present at least three areas of inquiry for legal
anthropologists: first, to advance knowledge about how public perceptions of young people
and youth culture shape law; second, to determine whether and how youths and adults
experience conflict and law in similar and different ways; and third, to consider why youth
conflict and young people's orientations to law and legality may differ from those of adults. To
illustrate these points, we offer examples from our study of youth culture and conflict.
Public perceptions about young people influence the (re)invention of various forms of legal
and social regulation of youths. Increasingly, contemporary television news and print media
portray young people in the United States as out of control. Some adults express and exhibit
fear of youths (Giroux 2000:15), referred to clinically, and sometimes popularly, as ephebi-
phobia (Males 1999:47).2 Worried adults rely on reports of high levels of youth crime,
unemployment, school drop-outs, and teen pregnancy in the urban core (read as: Latino and
African American youth) to confirm their worst fears. Recent high-profile news stories of
school-based mass murders compound this moral panic. Many adults in the U.S. perceive
youth as a social pathology (Giroux 1998) and urge legislative and social reform as a cure.
Politicians and parents simultaneously call for individual responsibility and deride the failure
of social institutions, such as the family and public schools, to prepare young people to be
good citizens. They also criticize American society for failing both to punish guilty youths and
to protect innocent young people. Proposed solutions are driven by the idea of youths as unruly
bodies in need of external containment. In the name of the social good, and in rejection of
some forms of youth resistance (Giroux 1996), adults urge increased regulation of young
people: by strengthening school-based physical and/or moral authority over students (Devine
November 2000]
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Seen but Not Heard: The Legal Lives of Young People
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