TELLING STORIES OF VIOLENCE: A qualitative study of how storytelling leads to the normalization of violent behavior and identity work among street-oriented male youth

Abstract

This is a master’s thesis on the normalization of violent behavior and identity work among street-oriented male youth in Oslo, Norway. It is motivated by the fact that levels of violence and violent crime among young people are on the rise in the northern countries where evidence of lawlessness is seen to increase particularly within street cultures in urban areas. For this reason, it is important to understand the social forces that makes violence attractive among young people associated with street cultures. While most research in this landscape leaves people’s stories out of the equation, this thesis centres its analysis on the idea that stories and storytelling have important functions that guide people to live according to their plotlines. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews, this study attempts to flesh out how storytelling transmits street cultural values that normalize violent identity work among male youths. In the course of four months, fifteen interviews were conducted with male members of a violent street culture in the inner-eastern regions of Oslo. By taking a narrative criminology approach to investigate what role stories play in the process of normalization, the author is primarily attentive to the participants’ stories, and not to the events purportedly behind their stories. The analysis discusses five identity narratives about violence by asking what stories do for their tellers and their listeners. It argues that these identity narratives are collectively shared and that the social exchange and reproduction of them play an important role in their continued normalization of violence. This study contributes to existing knowledge on the normalization of violence in street cultures on two main grounds. On the one hand, it contributes to larger theories by offering a new approach to study normalization that illustrates narrative criminology as a fruitful framework for this inquiry. The thesis is thus original in the way that it shows how shared identity narratives that create symbolic boundaries may lead to normalization of violent behavior and identity work in street cultures. On the other hand, it contributes to our knowledge about the narrative world of young male members of violent street cultures, showing that storytelling is a fundamental strategy for how they evaluate personal challenges, navigate difficult barriers, create their sense of self and define what types of actions they accept or not. It shows how collectively shared stories are projected into the future identity work of street youth, and how certain stories may complicate their transition to successfully desisting adulthood.