When young people come into contact with the criminal justice system, the public conversation can quickly become dominated by labels: offender, delinquent, troublemaker.
But what happens when we look beyond those labels and try to understand the experiences of the young people behind them?
It is a question Associate Professor Andrew McGrath from Charles Sturt University has explored throughout more than two decades of research into juvenile offending, stigma and the experiences of young people in contact with the criminal justice system.
Now, he has brought that research together with his longstanding interest in cinema in a new book, Crime and Marginalisation: Young People in World Cinema.
Published by Routledge, the book examines how films from different countries portray young people experiencing crime, exclusion and marginalisation, and what these stories reveal about how societies understand and respond to youth crime.
Andrew’s interest in juvenile delinquency began with his Honours research in 2001. Since then, his research has examined juvenile risk assessment, the effects of custodial penalties on reoffending, the sentencing of young Indigenous people, serious and violent offending careers, cyberbullying, and children in out-of-home care who come into contact with the criminal justice system.
A defining point came during his PhD research, when he interviewed approximately 200 young people who had recently been sentenced in the NSW Children’s Court.
His research found that young people who experienced the court process as stigmatising - who felt they were being judged as a bad person rather than for a particular behaviour - were more likely to reoffend.
An article arising from this research later won the Allen Austin Bartholomew Award for the best article published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology in 2009.
The findings deepened Andrew’s interest in labelling theory and the consequences of stigma. Years later, he found a way to combine this long-standing research interest with his love of cinema.
“I dreamt up this project that combined my research and personal interests, and pitched it to Routledge, who subsequently offered me a contract to write the book,” Andrew said.
Much of the published research on juvenile delinquency has historically come from Western countries, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom.
Andrew wanted to take a broader view and explore how youth crime and marginalisation were represented across very diverse cultural, social and political contexts.
Alongside films from the United States and Australia, the book considers cinema from Brazil, Gabon, India, China, Japan, Taiwan and France.
Across these different contexts, Andrew found striking commonalities.
“Despite the wide cultural, political and social differences between these nations, the experience of being an outsider was remarkably similar, even though the reasons for this status varied,” he said.
One of the strongest themes to emerge was the enduring legacy of colonialism. This was explicit in Australian films such as Romper Stomper and Samson and Delilah, but Andrew found its influence, in different forms, running implicitly through many of the films he examined.
The book examines films ranging from the foundational juvenile delinquent movies of the 1950s, including Rebel Without a Cause, to later portrayals of young people living on the margins.
These include the experiences of young African Americans in Boyz n the Hood, street children in Salaam Bombay!, First Nations young people in Samson and Delilah, and excluded outsiders in contemporary China, as depicted in the films of director Jia Zhangke.
For Andrew, one of the most significant insights was the difficulty - and danger - of trying to define a single type of young person who becomes involved in crime.
The young people portrayed in the films varied widely in age, gender, sexuality, race, nationality, family circumstances and experiences of poverty.
Their diversity challenges simplistic explanations of juvenile offending and raises questions about the labels societies place on young people.
“At a time when juvenile offenders are increasingly stigmatised and juvenile justice laws are becoming more punitive, these movies allow the viewer to experience what it is like to be a young person in trouble with the law and to begin to understand the processes behind this,” Andrew said.
Public understanding of youth crime is often shaped by news headlines, political debate and crime statistics. Cinema can offer another perspective by taking audiences into the lives of young people and revealing the relationships, inequalities and social circumstances that shape their experiences.
Andrew also found an unexpected thread of hope running through many otherwise confronting stories.
In hostile adult worlds, young characters often found protection and belonging in one another.
“Love and comradeship were key themes of many of these films, and one consolation in what was a very dark world for many of the characters,” he said.
Although Crime and Marginalisation is an academic book for undergraduate students, Andrew hopes it will also reach a broader audience.
Above all, he hopes readers leave with a more nuanced understanding of youth crime.
“I hope they take away from it an understanding that goes beyond headlines to try and understand the lives and motivations of young people we would otherwise be swift to condemn,” he said.
Andrew hopes the work can contribute to broader conversations about how societies respond to youth crime, including whether greater understanding and empathy can coexist with the legitimate desire for safe communities.
“I would love it if this could contribute to a wider debate about how to deal with youth crime in a more humane and less punitive manner,” he said.
“Most people have an understandable desire to live in a safe community. I don’t think these two aims are necessarily incompatible, and a starting point of empathy and understanding might be key to this.”
Writing the book has also led Andrew to reflect on his own research journey.
Much of his previous research has been quantitative, using data to test theories, evaluate programs, and inform policy. While this work remains important, Andrew says it can reveal less about the individual lives behind the data.
“There is obviously no one ‘best’ research methodology, but work that seeks to understand its participants beyond quantifying their behaviour seems important to me,” he said.
“Cinema seems particularly well placed to achieve this, given its accessibility and visceral impact.”
Andrew also sees opportunities to extend the research. While the book examines a wide range of national cinemas, many countries and film traditions remain outside its scope.
Future work could extend the analysis to explore other cultures and examine where the experiences of marginalised young people converge—and where different histories and social systems produce very different stories.
For a researcher who began studying juvenile offending more than 20 years ago, cinema has offered a new way to ask a longstanding question: how can we better understand young people whose lives are too often defined by the labels placed on them?
Associate Professor Andrew McGrath is a researcher in Psychology at Charles Sturt University. His research interests include juvenile offending, sentencing, stigma and labelling, juvenile risk assessment, reoffending, young people in out-of-home care, and quantitative methods in criminological and psychological research.
Read more: Crime and Marginalisation: Young People in World Cinema, published by Routledge.
Charles Sturt University aligns our research, policies, procedures, and other work with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These are the most relevant SDGs for this initiative.
When young people come into contact with the criminal justice system, the public conversation can quickly become dominated by labels: offender, delinquent, troublemaker. But what happens when we look beyond those labels and try to understand the experiences of the young people behind them?
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