NARRATIVES OF DECLINE - YOUTH, DIS ORDER AND COMMUNITY IN AN ENGLISH MIDDLETOWN/

The paper is concerned with how adult residents of one medium-sized, m oderately affluent English town which is generally regarded as having a relatively low crime rate interpret and respond to teenage 'incivili ties'. We begin by locating the conflicts over teenage mis/behaviour t hat occur across many of the town's diverse areas and assessing how th e intensity of adult response varies according to people's relationshi p to place. We then. examine the kinds of discourse that such mis/beha viour prompts, discourse that frequently slips away from the locality as such and speaks to the condition (and decline) of the 'national com munity'. Finally, we consider some of the responses people make to tee nage mis/behaviour in their own immediate neighbourhood. By connecting people's 'crime-talk' to their sense of place, we tease out a contrad iction between the obligations that people acknowledge to troublesome 'local' youth and their more punitive, exclusionary utterances about ' youth in general'.