| This study examines current concerns about hangjongeren, or hang-around youth, in Amsterdam, and demonstrates that such concerns are inflected by other anxieties about ethnic difference, authority, social cohesion, parenting, and safety. Hang-around youth, aged 12-25, spend time together in neighborhood public spaces, often after school or work. Some adults complain about noise, litter, vandalism, or feeling unsafe; to address these concerns, policy makers, social workers, citizen activists, and police officers design new municipal projects and hold community meetings. Through their efforts, the hangjongeren problematic becomes intertwined with wider issues: an emphasis on "prevention" in youth policy and policing, a discourse about integration and Dutch "norms and values," and local projects to regulate public behavior through conduct rules.; In addition to contextualizing present-day anxieties within a long history of adult worries about youth, this study examines the policies, discourses and interactions between residents and officials that together construct this social problem. Ethnographic research shows that adults' interpretations of "the hangjongeren problem" are varied, complex, and contradictory. Rather than demonstrating a broad moral panic, neighborhood-based interviews with parents, other adult residents, social workers, policy makers and police officers evidence competing responses to youth. The noticeable anger- and fear-based reactions to the presence of youth in public space, this study argues, arise out of three ideological developments since 1960: a highly individualized notion of personal freedom, a desire for the social welfare state to solve social problems, and the spread of an idealized suburban aesthetic into other residential environments.; Pulling together these layers of context helps clarify seemingly contradictory manifestations of a discourse that blames today's social problems on "too much tolerance." Using this discourse, parents condemn the over-individualization of complaining adults; authorities indicate the difficulty they face in regulating an unruly populace; and complaining adults express their desire to have others set limits on youth, and restore their freedom to live without disturbance. Social scientists studying (in)tolerance today must recognize the multiplicity of meanings underlying the seeming rejection of tolerance: the frustration with freedom and its limits is an outcome of, rather than a backlash against, the social changes of the 1960s. |
