Under curfew and under siege? Legal geographies of young people

Against a backdrop of widespread panic about children's safety and the unruliness of teenagers, efforts to remove young people from public space are becoming increasingly pervasive. Public space is being constructed as adult space through legal mechanisms such as curfews, which seek to curtail young people's spatial freedoms and contain them within their homes. Ostensibly motivated by a desire to reduce youth crime and victimisation, curfews reflect a contemporary preoccupation with achieving social control through the control of space. This is certainly the case in the US - the Western nation where juvenile curfews are most prevalent, despite rhetoric about the 'fundamental' nature of individual freedoms. In this paper, critical discussion of the American situation provides a backdrop for considering curfews recently imposed in Paeroa and Te Kuiti, two New Zealand towns. It is contended that these curfews were as much about enforcing a particular notion of 'parental responsibility' as controlling young people themselves. We conclude that a discourse of rights provides a particularly strong foundation for arguing against curfews. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.