Author: Tessa Cunningham
Cunningham, Tessa, 2025 Criminalised young people and the worlds we create for them: An exploration of discourse, power and subjectivity, Flinders University, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
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Since the Enlightenment era, the phenomenon of youth crime has received significant research attention and there exists an extensive body of literature relating to ‘youth crime’, ‘criminals’, and ‘crime control’. However, as argued within this thesis, dominant approaches seek to understand crime through positivist, quantitative and individualising frameworks and often produce and reify the discourses, logics and practices of the carceral society. Despite the scale of research on youth crime, there remains only a relatively small body of research that meaningfully privileges the voices, perspectives and stories of criminalised young people. A similarly small body of research seeks to turn the gaze away from the ‘criminal’, and what is deficient or deviant within them, and onto the world that society has created for these young people. As such, while criminalised young people are, arguably, over-researched, they remain under-represented and their voices and perspectives continue to be silenced in studies that focus on them.
Drawing from 40 narrative-based interviews with 16 criminalised young people, facilitated through a novel interviewing tool designed to amplify participant agency, this thesis explores the research question: ‘What can we learn from the lived experiences, narratives and everyday lives of criminalised children and young people?’. In adopting a broad research question, a post-structural, narrative methodology, and infusing aspects of co-design throughout, this project offers an original contribution to knowledge by identifying and challenging the dominant, individualising and silencing discourses that construct youth crime and criminalised young people. In its focus on the subjectifying effects of these discourses, this thesis enables a more nuanced, rich and textured picture of the often silenced subject to emerge.
Applying a Foucauldian lens, participant narratives are analysed with a particular focus on dominant discourses and the ways in which these shaped both the subjectivities and lived realities of research participants. Foucault’s notion of the carceral society, highlighting the pervasive culture of control that exists beyond prisons, is also central to this thesis. Thus, analysis of participant narratives highlights the carceral practices diffused throughout society including institutions — such as schools and health services — not normally considered ‘carceral’. As shown in this thesis, the carceral logic plays out most acutely across gendered, classed and raced lines, leaving certain young people particularly exposed to criminalisation and social, systemic, structural, and discursive violences.
The analysis of participant narratives is also influenced by Hearn et al.’s (2022a) notion of ‘violence regimes’, emphasising the violence that is woven into the fabric of the colonial, carceral society. This thesis argues that, in the lives of criminalised young people, violence is not simply physical or interpersonal but encompasses the material-discursive violences produced by dominant discourses of race, class, gender and deviance. This broader understanding of violence illuminates the practices of power that are embedded within the social, economic and political systems of the carceral, colonial society, and fundamentally shape the lives and subjectivities of criminalised young people. Thus, this thesis argues that in order to meaningfully address harm and create a safer, more equitable, society for all, we must begin naming, interrogating, challenging and transforming the material-discursive violences inherent within the colonial, carceral society.
This thesis, and the research translation project that accompanied it, strove to provide a safe space for criminalised young people, who have been so routinely silenced, pathologised and framed in the deficient, to exercise agency in the telling of their stories. Engaging with these stories edges us closer to an understanding of the complexity of their lives and the ways in which dominant discourses both constrain and silence criminalised young people and reinforce carceral practices as necessary and justified. Further, providing participants with opportunities to narrate their lives and experience themselves differently — often in ways they’d never been given permission to before — offers the potential for subtle, but profound, changes in the subjectivities and landscapes of self-understanding available to criminalised young people.
In its challenging of dominant discourses, knowledges and practices of power, I argue that this research constitutes an act of resistance. Such practices of resistance are important as dominant discourses inform how issues like crime, and those constructed as ‘criminal’, are understood and intervened against. When individualising discourses are allowed to dominate, carceral practices emerge as the logical solution. By harnessing the subjugated knowledges of young people, this thesis provides a critical foundation for alternate constructions — or counter discourses — of violence, crime and criminals. It is these counter-discourses that provide the potential for radically different interventions to emerge.
Keywords: criminalised young people, youth crime, co-design, critical, narrative, post-structural, abolition, delinquents, youth offenders, young offenders, foucault, carceral society, lived experience, violence regimes
Subject: Criminal Justice thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2025
School: College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
Supervisor: Kate Seymour