The Construction of “At-Risk” Populations: The Binary of Victimization and Deviance

The concepts and meanings surrounding victimization and social deviance are socially constructed and fluid, they are dynamic, they happen in a certain time, are influenced by a time in history, by membership in a certain culture, sub-culture and one’s own personal beliefs. They also delineate who is included and who is excluded, they shape whether one is a victim or a victimizer, who is "at-risk" and describe who is socially deviant and who is not. These constructs tend to define themselves in relation to an Other and may serve many purposes in terms of maintaining order, justice, and morality. One of the contentions of this study is that

concepts of risk are mediated through constructions of victimization and deviance, which form the binary of what constitutes “at-risk” populations.

According to Bessant (2001),

The discovery and the promotion of the ‘at risk’ category especially in relation to young people has largely supplanted older categories such as ‘delinquency’ and ‘maladjustment’ that were foundational to the sociology of deviance. Yet the methodologies, epistemological assumptions and politics of governance inherent in the older projects remain the same. While the older sociology of deviance presumed the existence of a stable social order as its point of departure, the risk categories point to the prevalence of assumptions that are equally normalising about the predominance of restructuring, change and threat. Change and threat have now been tamed as Beck (1992) suggests, by the presumption that a globalising, restructuring social formation needs to manage the multiplicity of risks it now confronts. As part of that process, ‘sociology of risk’ has become a new way to frame old problems and preserve old projects (32).

Bessant (2001: 32) goes one step further, arguing that the sociology of risk has one distinctive feature from the sociology of deviance that involves “dividing practices that distinguish between those who are at risk from certain ‘problems’ and those who are not,” embracing Foucaultian ideals of forecasting for the purpose of justifying interventions in an effort to normalize behaviours. Bessant (2001: 32) argues that moving from a sociology of deviance to one of risk has meant a growth in who it encompasses. This is evidenced by a generalized anxiety towards youth based on categorizations of: youth unemployment, youth homelessness, youth suicides, delinquency, and drug addiction (Bessant, 2001: 32).

According to Furedi (2006), fear has become a free-floating phenomenon that has pervaded the cultural fabric of western society. Fear of risks seems to attach itself to every action and thought

in everyday life, creating categories of safe and unsafe behaviours, and defining categories of “at-risk” populations.

Anxieties about being ‘at risk’ or feeling ‘stressed’ or ‘traumatized’ or ‘vulnerable’ indicate that we have internalized an individualized psychological vocabulary that influences our sensibility of fear. One of the distinguishing features of fear today is that it appears to have an independent existence (Furedi, 2006: 1).

Further, Furedi (2006) adds that that every conceivable threat has been transformed into a risk to be managed.

The anticipation of victimization is refracted through one of the most distinctive idioms of contemporary culture, which is that of being at risk. Anyone labelled as at risk is by definition a potential victim. The emergence of the ‘at risk’ concept ruptures the traditional relationships between individual action and the probability of some hazard. To be at risk is no longer only about what you do, or the probability of some hazard impacting on your life – it is also about who you are. It becomes a fixed attribute of the individual…(Furedi, 2006: 5).

This culture of fear where avoidance of risks is paramount not only creates victims but describes deviants too. Social deviance is the violation of cultural norms. It describes behaviours that are considered bad, dangerous, and/or unacceptable by the larger society.

One of the theoretical standpoints of this research is that concepts of risk are mediated through and by constructs of victimization and deviancy, which are constituted in populations defined as “at-risk.” By defining populations as “at-risk” and describing behaviours and places that are assumed to put them in danger of either becoming victims or deviants, they frame behaviours and places as dangerous and immoral, by virtue of their blatant disregard for safety and security, such as eking out an existence on the streets.

One way of rooting out any form of deviance, and defining "at-risk" populations, with the aim of maintaining social order and conformity, has been well developed by the Foucaultian approach. Foucault's concept of governmentality is based on the linkage between the government of others and self-governance. Foucault's early work was focussed on the role of big institutions, such as the prisons, workhouses, asylums and hospitals whose frameworks were based on practices of discipline which acted on individuals through training and repetition to yield what he called "docile bodies" (Foucault, 1977). Foucault uncovered an important historical shift in relation to governing that occurred during the 18th century which he termed "biopolitics", which is

focussed on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision having been effected through the entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population (Foucault, 1978: 139; emphasis in original).

These new practices of governing were less focussed on individuals but more focussed on populations, aggregates of similar characteristics, and the creation of certain types of subjects. Power was not invested in one person, one government, but involved a complex web of power relations and strategies, less focussed on who was governing as opposed to strategies employed to maintain social control and order through the regulation and repetition of practices (mostly of the body) (Foucault, 1978). The body became the subject and access point for regulation: the promotion of hygiene from the eighteenth century onward was the strategy in which interventions were targeted to achieve a healthy, productive population and longevity, and methods of self-regulation became inculcated (Foucault, 1980).

Regulation, according to Foucault (1978), is a strategy of normalization and should be understood within a complex web of power relations that result in processes of domination and subjugation. This has particular relevance for the intertwining of constructs of risk and homeless youth, who are identified as either victims or deviants. The risk factors and characteristics demonstrated in the research (as portrayed in Chapter One) describe these youth in pathological terms with concomitant health implications due to their "reckless" behaviours (e.g. substance use, unprotected sex...) and their assumed disregard for their own health. It provides a rationale for risk calculation, and a political rationale for intervention (e.g. health promotion - condoms, personal hygiene, abstinence) and hoped for normalization, thus providing a vehicle for reintegration into mainstream society. It has the effect of casting blame onto youth for their own victimization through their disregard of self-regulating practices (e.g. not using condoms and contracting STIs or becoming pregnant), thus rendering them culpable for their own health and well-being and completely ignoring any structural causes that may be responsible.

Several Foucaultian writers point to changes in the health and epidemiological fields which are responsible for promoting self-regulation which is reinforced by the normalization of the majority, to root out any deviance and achieve ‘sameness’ or conformity. In health care and epidemiological settings, risk calculations are becoming more and more relied upon to detect and eliminate any pathologies, and to provide early surveillance and treatment (Dean, 1999; Castel, 1991). Castel contends that early ‘screening’ of populations promotes a ‘new mode of surveillance’, termed ‘systematic pre-detection’. “This is a form of surveillance, in the sense that the intended objective is that of anticipating and preventing the emergence of some undesirable event: illness, abnormality, deviant behaviour, etc...” (Dean, 1999: 288). In this light,

“epidemiological risk therefore has a preventive, rather than restitutive ethos” (Dean, 1999: 143), referring to efforts to “colonize the future” (Giddens, 1990) in the quest for minimizing harm as defined by social norms.

Further, Castel (1991) argues that there has been a shift in psychiatry (what he terms ‘mental medicine’) over the last hundred years from an emphasis on ‘dangerousness’ of the individual to a focus on ‘risk’. ‘Risk’ offers more room for intervention as it only points to the potential for violence and unpredictable action and is based on the calculation of a combination of abstract factors that make the occurrence of undesirable modes of behaviour more probable, whereas dangerousness required a certain burden of proof that could only be provided after the action occurred. This allowed for a widening of the spectre of intervention and surveillance. Moreover, this practice has tended to focus on ‘at risk’ populations, which were located, not coincidentally, at the bottom of the social ladder (Castel, 1990: 284).

Lastly, Castel (1991: 294) proposes that these differential modes of treatment of populations, “which aim to maximize the returns on doing what is profitable and to marginalize the unprofitable”, engenders a ‘dual’ society.

Instead of segregating and eliminating undesirable elements from the social body, or reintegrating them more or less forcibly through corrective or therapeutic interventions, the emerging tendency is to assign different social destinies to individuals in line with their varying capacity to live up to the requirements of competitiveness and profitability (Castel, 1991: 294).

What is created from this differential treatment is a ‘dual’ society in which “the coexistence of hyper-competitive sectors obedient to the harshest requirements of economic rationality, and marginal activities that provide a refuge (or a dump) for those unable to take part in the circuits of intensive exchange” (Castel, 1991: 294). Those who do not fit into this economic rationale of competition and profitability due to their socially-deviant characteristics (e.g. those who are: mentally/physically ill, unemployed, have addictions problems, homeless, etc…) are continually kept at the margins, with no hope for reintegration, thus maintaining the borders of Self and Other. According to Ewald, once the notion of risk appears it has a tendency to proliferate and take on catastrophic proportions. Once a population is designated “at-risk”, it tends to permeate every niche. Assumed to be everywhere it “founds a politics of prevention…The assumption that if prevention is necessary it is because danger exists” (Ewald, 1993: 221-2). To be designated as “at-risk”, therefore, is “to be positioned within a network of factors drawn from the observations of others. The implication of this rationalized discourse again is that risk is ultimately controllable, as long as expert knowledge can be properly brought to bear upon it” (Lupton, 1999b: 5). Being “at-risk” is thus not defined by the population it describes but by more powerful others who construct strategies for prevention or surveillance, which is founded on the presumption of labels and stereotypes that dichotomize experiences either as victimizing or deviant and requiring intervention.

Threats of victimization (i.e. bad risks) can never be completely knowable and are constructed differently by different actors. Even what constitutes being “victimized” is laden with strong cultural and moral undertones. It is subjectively constructed and defined by the powerful Self (i.e. mainstream society, institutions) that judge what experiences are considered victimizing.

“Objective” concepts of risk and victimization do not take into account cultural and political frameworks, the symbolic meanings that these constructs represent. Historically, the constructs of victim and victimization have been categorized as absolutes (Viano, 1992; Holstein & Miller, 1990), but since the notions of victim and deviant depends upon where one is standing in the social structure, and even varies within sub-structures and individual beliefs, these assumptions must be examined critically. As risks, victimization and deviancy are matters of perception, an “expert’s” analysis is likely to contrast greatly with a lay person’s experience. Research to date has assumed that victimization and deviance are static concepts, couched in a normative framework, defined by “experts” who are not living the experiences they are studying. What may be considered victimizing or deviant for a person in a certain social location may be deemed empowering (i.e. pan-handling, squeegee-ing) for another.

Ewald argues that “nothing is a risk in itself; there is no risk in reality. But on the other hand, anything can be a risk; it all depends on how one analyzes the danger, considers the event” (1991: 199). Perceptions of risk, parallel with perceptions of victimization and deviancy, these risks or threats can never be completely knowable or calculable, there is only a perception of risk which is socially, politically, culturally and morally constructed. Similarly, Douglas argues that risk in and of itself is hypothetical: “risk is not a thing, it is away of thinking, and a highly artificial contrivance at that” (1992: 46).

This study aimed to examine youth’s understanding of risk by intentionally abstaining from superimposing preconceptions of risk, victimization, and deviancy to the population under study.

However, it is important to acknowledge the ontology of risk that is pervasive in modern society and the impact expert knowledges have in sustaining heightened anxiety around risk and creating “at-risk” populations, and the political rationales behind them. Moreover, this study sought to examine the impact expert knowledges have in defining risk for a marginalized group such as homeless youth.