Understanding deviance from the perspectives of youth labelled as children in conflict with law in Mumbai, India

Abstract

This article presents voices of youth labelled as ‘children in conflict with law’ on deviance, using the theoretical framework of labelling. Based on a narrative analysis of 24 in‐depth interviews with youth and other stakeholders in Mumbai, three key themes emerged: defining deviance; self and the deviant others – the othering of deviance; and living with a deviant identity. We found that the youth explained deviance as good or bad contextually, continuously interpreting its meanings, different from adult viewpoints. The youth engaged in identity management strategies to move away from the labels and stigma. The youth, labelled as rule‐breakers, balanced the power equations by ‘counter‐labelling’, where they hold the rule‐enforcers accountable for creating labels. The article locates the findings in Southern criminology and argues for the Indian juvenile justice system to acknowledge the local contexts of youth and their communities and address the larger pathways that lead to deviance and crime.

A Scoping Review of Children, Empowerment, and Smartphone Technology Regarding Social Construction Theory with the Aim of Increasing Self-Direction in Democracies

“…Examining the 11 returns from the limited Google Scholar search of "deviant crimes against the middle class using smartphones" (see Table 3), there are three points to note. The first is that, of the 11 returns, five are concerning South Korea (Cho and Glassner 2021;Kim and Lee 2023;Kim and Moon 2023;Son et al 2021), two are regarding India (Korde and Raghavan 2023;Mohan and Mahanta 2022), and one focuses on Malaysia (Yoga Ratnam et al 2022)-all Eastern democracies. There are only three reports concerning Western democracies: one considering Austria (Jovicic 2020), another focused on the United States (Ramirez 2022), and the third concerning Australia (Whitten et al 2024).…”

A Scoping Review of Children, Empowerment and Smartphone Technology Regarding Social Construction Theory with the Aim of Increasing Self-Direction in Democracies

“…The following are the titles of the reports of included studies as seen in Table 3. Impacts of Low Self-control and Opportunity Structure on Cyberbullying Developmental Trajectories: Using a Latent Class Growth Analysis [103], Scrolling and the In-Between Spaces of Boredom: Marginalized Youths on the Periphery of Vienna [104], Cyberbullying Victimization and Perpetration in South Korean Youth: Structural Equation Modeling and Latent Means Analysis [105], Predictors for runaway behavior in adolescents in South Korea: national data from a comprehensive survey of adolescents [106], Associations Between Parental Maltreatment and Online Behavior Among Young Adolescents [107], Understanding deviance from the perspectives of youth labelled as children in conflict with law in Mumbai, India [108], Smartphone Addiction Culminating into Youth Deviance: A Sociological Study [109], The digital divide in the US criminal justice system [110], The Effects of Korean Parents' Smartphone Addiction on Korean Children's Smartphone Addiction: Moderating Effects of Children's Gender and Age [111], Exploring the Role of Self-Control Across Distinct Patterns of Cyber-Deviance in Emerging Adolescence [112], Exploring the Decisional Drivers of Deviance: A Qualitative Study of Institutionalized Adolescents in Malaysia [113]. A reason these publications did not return in the scoping review of "children, empowerment, smartphones" may have been that the focus of the 4 February 2024 limited Google Scholar search was not empowerment.…”

“…Examining the 11 returns from the limited Google Scholar search of "deviant crimes against the middle class using smartphones" (see Table 3), there are three points to note. The first is that, of the 11 returns, five are concerning South Korea [103,[105][106][107]111], two are regarding India [108,109], and one focuses on Malaysia [113]-all Eastern democracies. There are only three reports concerning Western democracies: one considering Austria [104], another focused on the United States [110], and the third concerning Australia [112].…”