Gangs, Youth Crime and Everyday Violence in Finland: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Finnish Government Policy Documents

Abstract

This thesis examines gang and youth crime related discourses in Finland, focusing on political discourses derived from Finnish government policy documents. The aim was to explore how youth crime and gang related matters are discussed throughout the policy documents and how the discourses frame societal understandings of these phenomena and the young people associated with them. The overarching focus was to explore the varying forms of everyday violence and inequalities reproduced through the discourses. Further, one of the main objectives was to examine more specifically the discourses related to immigration and to discuss how the discourses might affect young immigrants in Finland. In addition, exploring the role of the discourses in the securitization and militarization of the everyday sphere of Finnish society was one of the aims of this thesis. This thesis provides a background and literature review of the topic by considering the complex phenomena related to youth crime and gangs, including gang involvement, gang-related policies and the gendered nature of gangs. Additionally, the gang-related context in Finland is explained to understand the premises of this thesis. The theoretical framework includes notions of everyday peace and violence, critical security and militarism studies, securitization of migration, symbolic boundaries and stigmatization. These concepts and theories are later used to reflect the results of the study. The data analysed in this thesis is composed of two Finnish political policy documents. The first is the current programme of Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s government and the second is a recently published programme of measures related to preventing or combating youth and gang crime, written based on the objectives of the government programme. The data was analysed through the method of critical discourse analysis. The three discourses introduced in the result section of this thesis are named the combat discourse, the prevention discourse and the immigration and integration discourse. The main rhetoric of the combat discourse is that gang and youth crime ought to be combatted with hard, criminalizing measures. The prevention discourse discusses preventing youth and gang crime by addressing vulnerabilities, risks and responsibilities. The immigration and integration discourse examines how immigrants or immigration are depicted in the documents. The discourse frames immigration and integration policy as a strategy to combat or prevent gang and youth crime. Analysing the government’s immigration and integration policy revealed othering, securitizing and controlling discourses towards immigrants and immigration. By reflecting and discussing the results through the theoretical framework, it was concluded that symbolic boundaries, varying forms of inequalities and everyday violence, such as discursive, institutional and structural violence, were reproduced through the discourses. Furthermore, militarist language was detected particularly within the combat discourse, and it is argued that certain aspects of the discourse play a role in the everyday militarization of the Finnish society. Regarding future research, it is noted that the measures related to youth and gang crime should be further examined, especially given the raised questions about the effectiveness of strongly punitive or criminalizing approaches in prior research. Lastly, it would be crucial to incorporate the voices of young people into future research on these phenomena and explore how young immigrants as well as youth more broadly navigate these complex dynamics and forms of violence through acts of everyday peace.