The Void Between Childhood and Marriage

            As a boy grows up from being a child to manhood, often times it is thought of as a process of stages. First we are children, then we are youth and eventually we become men, get married and have children. The most troublesome stage for parents and even society as a whole seems to be this liminal stage where we are no longer children, but are not fully matured yet.  This time period in the life of a human being, but especially boys, is often characterized as a time of uncertainty, dumb decisions and violence where the youth are gang affiliated and out of control. These representations of youth in the 1920s, led the psychologist, Frederic Thrasher, to study the lives of less fortunate boys living in cities and try to find the reason for the existence of gangs.

            In many cultures, there is a clear distinction between a man and a boy, and when a boy reaches a certain age, and goes through certain rituals he becomes a man. In America, those rituals are not institutionalized and this leaves a lot of grey area between childhood and manhood. “The gang is largely an adolescent phenomenon”, after childhood and before marriage “where he is usually reincorporated into a family and other orderly relations of work, religion and pleasure”. Childhood is our stage of learning when we are just introduced into the world, and manhood is supposed to be us as a complete person, ready for marriage, but what about all that time in between? As a boy begins this metamorphosis, there is this “desire to escape family supervisions” and carve out a social space for youth. The gang becomes the manifestation of that social space when there don’t seem to be any favorable adult sanctioned alternatives.

            Gangs are generally viewed in a negative light and are seen as a collective of violent kids that are up to no good. Thrasher paints us a different picture and he describes future gang members as children who “know each other as well as brothers or sisters, and as they grow older, continue to play together”. He describes how gangs are similar to social club and that the only real difference is that they are not sanctioned by adults. As more wealthy youth are taking part in social clubs, sports teams and getting ready to go to college, the poorer kids create their own social space and that happens to take shape in the form of a gang.

The demonization of the gang is part of this idea that youth are objects of saving and study and that they are dangerous and uncontrollable. One could say that gangs are really the only true youth run organization, since adults have no hand in them at all, and that must be truly frightening when looking from the adult centered perspective. The gangsters Thrasher describes in the 1920’s are not the ilk of Al Capone, and are more characteristic of a group of friends.