the turbo kids - Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies

Attitudes to welfare
THE TURBO KIDS
Lynne Wrennall
Sociologist
Social Work Department
Sydney University
This article is based on research conducted fly the author into a group of
13 - 17 year old inner-city unemployed youth. Their name derives from their
major life-style feature: stealing turbo-charged cars. The author discusses
these teenagers in the context of a sociological group, examining their values
and intemction with wider society. Social and economic factors leading to the
alienation of the group from the rest of society are discussed and issues about
responses to such marginalised youth groups are mised.
Who are the Thrbo Kids?
'Thrbo Kids' is the name adopted by a group of
forty street kids for whom the regular theft of
turbo-charged cars is a major life-style feature.
The kids all have backgrounds of extreme
economic disadvantage. They are male and
female, black and white, and range in age from
13 - 17 years.
My time spent as an action researcher with
turbo kids allowed me to observe the multiple
social problems, the nature of the social
institutions with which they came into contact,
and the development of their coping mechanisms.
In this article I will be concentrating on outlining
the development of their culture and life-style.
The turbo kids are a group in the sociological
sense· of the term. That is to say, they interact
closely with one another as well as sharing a
common culture in everyday practice. The group
provides financial and emotional support to its
members; the affectional bonds have built up over
years of common and shared experience.
The kids come from a similar geographical area
in and around Redfern, . an area in Sydney
stereotyped for street kids, violence and crime.
While there is no strong evidence to suggest that
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the residents and habitants of Redfern commit
more crimes than people from other areas, arrests
and convictions are common and probably reflect
the economic disadvantage of the district.
Industry and run-down residential dwellings coexist, giving a certain 'feel' to the place. Only in
the last decade has anyone with any economic
advantage considered living in Redfern. During
the 1970's the problems of urban traffic
congestion and high petrol prices, together with
Redfern's close proximity to the city centre, made
the suburb a desirable location for residence.
Rents were already artificially inflated by
landlords cashing in on a racial prejudice which
prevented the black residents from moving to
other areas. In recent years, rental costs have skyrocketed due to the increased demand from
middle class people for inner city housing and to
increased pressure on the rental market from the
reduction in home ownership associated with the
general economic recession. So the turbo kids, like
other economically disaffected youths, live
together - sometimes as many as 15 to a room.
Refuges are regarded as unacceptable alternatives
because of their similarity to other authoritarian
structures against which the kids are rebelling.
Referral to refuges is rejected outright by the kids.
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All these kids are unemployed and those of
school age do not attend school, nor do they, even
when eligible, necessarily collect welfare benefits.
Sometimes they are unaware of the specific
welfare benefits available. More often, they view
welfare with a fear and suspicion born of past
experience. The mistreatment of Aborigines by
white welfare agencies is not forgotten
(Tomlinson, J., 1978). The answers to the
following questions are representative of the kids'
attitudes to welfare:
Q: Who are 'the welfare'?
A: They knock on the door and we're
frightened.
Q: What do they have to give?
A: Nothing.
Q: What do they have to take?
A: Everything. They take children away.
The kids' experience of welfare is of the hard
edge, of surveillance and attempts to impose
discipline, order and predictability onto their lives.
Their families have been classified as 'disorderly
households' by welfare authorities and, as a
consequence, many of the kids were placed into
state or charity institutions at an early age. Since
then, other members of the families have
frequently disappeared or died. Negative welfare
experience has led to a number of welfare workers
being physically attacked and threatened by turbo
kids. Although some individual welfare officers
are regarded with respect and affection by the
kids, the relationships are generally ruined by the
ambiguity of the welfare role which passes off
social control under the cover of service provision.
Because of the affluence of their owners, these
cars are also more likely to contain larger sums of
money. Many owners, believing that their cars are
secure due to protection by alarms, use the cars as
unofficial safes. And other owners who are
themselves involved in illicit activities tend to use
cars as storage areas because of the decreased
likelihood, in comparison to houses, that they will
be searched by police. Search warrants tend to be
effected on persons and premises, not on cars.
Alarms in cars are easily overcome by the
shared knowledge of the group. It takes about 10
seconds to steal a car, a little longer if the alarm
is of a more sophisticated type. Cars are rarely
kept for more than a day or so. There is little
reason to hold onto them. Skills in car theft
provide immediate access to new cars at any time.
There are other reasons for the theft of cars.
Having come from backgrounds which were
economically deprived in the extreme, the turbo
.kids have little experience of controlling their
environment. Rarely have they been provided with
opportunities in the past to feel the pleasure of
directing anything external to themselves.
Poverty is associated with feelings of
powerlessness, vulnerability and impotence. The
stealing of cars is a result of kids' attempts to
overcome economic exclusion. They break into a
world which becomes theirs. Inside the car, their
own social relations prevail. It's their world, for
once, and it is populated by friends.
The kids have found their own ways of
surpassing poverty and its associated miseries.
They band together for human warmth and
mutual support. Dependence on welfare is kept to
a minimum, the kids rely instead on theft. Car
theft is their most common form of law breaking,
partly because of the mobility it provides for
committing other forms of theft across the
expanse of the urban area.
Fairly democratic relations prevail in the car.
The driver has been elected by the group, who
take into account the candidate's skill in highspeed driving, ability to maintain presence of mind
under the pressure of possible or actual police
detection, willingness to operate in a consensual
manner as well as other more intangible factors
such as amicability. Although the turbo kids have
no leaders as such, drivers enjoy a particular
importance in the group, the position of driver is
open to anyone who has an established reputation
in car theft and applies for an apprenticeship in
driving. A great deal of leniency is shown towards
drivers in training but consistently bad drivers
find themselves without passengers.
The cars stolen are the highly charged, upmarket turbo powered Porsches, EXA's, Starions
and 300ZX's, favoured for the opportunity they
provide to outrun the police in high-speed chases.
The escapades generally occur late at night or
in the early hours of the morning when the streets
are free for high-speed racing. This is also the
time when the shops are closed and breaking and
Reliance on car theft
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entering into shops is common. Most of the kids'
consumption needs are supplied by theft from
shops. The most commonly stolen items are
clothing, food, 'bongs' for smoking 'grass', alcohol
and electronic goods such as sound systems and
video recorders. Some of the items are for the
group's own consumption while others are sold
through 'fences' in order to obtain money for rent,
drugs and leisure activities.
Breaking and entering into houses is not
practiced by the turbo kids. Houses are an
unknown quantity. There is no guarantee that they
will satisfy economic needs. Moreover, items in
houses are seen as more personally belonging to
someone. Personal homes are regarded with a
high degree of awe and reverence by kids who
have always been homeless in one sense or
another. They do not violate homes. Housebreaking is regarded as a more desperate,
vengeful and less glamorous act than
shop-breaking.
Shop-breaking is also more in line with the high
action, 'mission impossible' image the group likes
to have about itself and which comes from skilful
theft, the overcoming of sophisticated alarm
systems and spectacular escapes from detention
centres. Turbo kids have escaped from custody at
all levels, from minimum to maximum security
and they are frequently in the forefront of riots
and other disturbances in detention centres.
Games turbo kids play
It is this high-spirited adventurousness which
focuses public attention on the turbo kids as they
move across the social field. To the kids, society is
a playground and the games are rotated.
Sometimes the game is 'hide and seek': concealing
themselves in cupboards and the like when
premises are visited by police; sending welfare
officers around a trail of false addresses and
misleading clues; hiding in trees from police
helicopter lights after abandoning a spotted stolen
car. At other times the game is 'chase': chasing
each other in cars, or revving the turbo-powered
engines outside police stations until the police
agree to come out and play.
Two archetypes predominate in the games. The
first of these is the trickster. Practical jokes are
common. Thles of disaster generally turn out to be
false. By this means, reassurance is given that the
world is not always as bad as it seems. The
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pleasurable sensation of relief is felt by all and the
storyteller is accredited with guile and
imagination. The storytelling also provides
practice of acting skills in preparation for
encounters with police and other authorities.
The second, and more serious, archetype is
that of the gambler. The experiential world of the
kids is one where events appear to be swayed by
luck and chance. The juvenile court in particular
provides the dangerous fascination of Russian
roulette. Only painfully and slowly are the
subtleties and complexities of its middle-class
code deciphered. After multiple attempts at
learning via the methods of trial and error, some
rudiments of middle-class cultural expectations
are gleaned and some possibilities for influence
developed. Overall though, the gamblers reign is
maintained, and to a certain extent, the kids are
not mistaken in this perception. Out of a
vulnerable population of economically
disadvantaged deviants, the selection of personnel
for processing by the juvenile gaols is partly a
matter of chance and repeat committals are highly
unpredictable in their timing.
Play is also the means by which ordinary life is
made continually interesting. A visit to a
bureaucrat, a hospital or a shop is greeted with
excitement. As former inmates of total institutions
whose interactions have been tightly controlled,
the kids view broader social introductions almost
as privileged liberties. Such visiting is conducted
communally. This is a feature of the close-knit
bonding which has developed from shared past
experience of oppression and its transcendence.
Friends are nearly always cited as 'the most
important thing in life:
Conflicts with social norms
The closeness is both emotional and spatial.
Privacy is not a familiar concept, human warmth
and protection are more highly valued. The
degree of physical proximity selected by
participants in conversations, is usually less, than
45 cm, so conversations generally take place
among participants who are within what has been
described as the 'intimate zone' of one another
(Hall, E.T., 1966). This contrasts strongly with the
behaviour of high status persons. The
commanding of a wider area of physical distance
during interactions is associated with high status
(Henley, N., 1973).
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When the kids attempt to exercise their normal
degree of physical intimacy with persons outside
the group, they are violating a social norm,
particularly where such persons enjoy a higher
status. The right to enter into the intimate zone of
another is accorded to high status persons. The
kids are hurt and shocked when they are rejected
for breaking a social rule, the existence of which
they are unaware and the rejection is interpreted
as being due to a personal failing on their part or
a coldness in the person by whom they have been
rejected. Anger and frustration are the most
common results.
In the breaking of this social rule we have but
one example of the numerous cultural conflicts
experienced by the kids during attempts to
contact persons outside their own sub-culture. Too
often, over time, they begin to dispense with the
attempt. Natural childish gregariousness is
gradually displaced by a sullen withdrawal or
exaggerated bravado in the presence of strangers,
which goes beyond the norm even for adolescents.
There is an alienation which develops between
the group and other social groups who come to be
viewed amorphously as 'the rest of the world'.
Contributing f~ctors are the stereotypical images
presented of juvenile delinquents and the aiding
and abetting or harboring laws which prohibit the
giving of assistance to indictable offenders prior to
their having been charged. It is specifically these
laws which are a continuing source of harassment
to social/youth workers and others who would
attempt to broaden the social experience of
multiple or long-term law breakers. In order to
remain within the law themselves, workers are
placed in a difficult position of either regularly
withdrawing assistance to clients or friends and,
in so doing, destroying the trust and noncompulsive elements which are essential to any
positive relationship. Consequently, the repealing
of all types of aiding and abetting laws will be a
necessary plank of any reform platform which
seeks to build links between long-term law
breakers such as turbo kids and other non-law
breaking social groups.
The alienation of the turbo kids from other
social groups has proceeded through multiple
layers. It began with an economic exclusion which
was exacerbated by the social parish status
attendant to extreme poverty. Widespread public
racial prejudice against the Aboriginal 'brothers
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and sisters' further alienated the group as a whole.
Black and white turbo kids have grown up
together and white members of the group view
racism against Aborigines disfavourably.
Values of turbo kids
The law-breaking response to poverty adopted
by the kids has further contributed to their
isolation, such that the development of their
cultural values has gained a degree of autonomy
from broader social influences. Cultural autonomy
is by no means complete. The attractions to
prestige cars, good clothes and expensive
restaurants express socially broader consumerist
values. But the valuing of adventure above safety,
quality of life over longevity and ' graphic
expressiveness rather than conformity are more
distinctive features of marginalised youth groups.
The group's highly developed sense of
protectiveness is based in Australian mateship
traditions and is enhanced by the sense of
intimacy which develops from sharing a
clandestine life-style.
There is also a strong valuing of courage and
firmness in the face of attack. An importance is
attached to 'making your own decisions', and
'deciding your own life for yourself'. Allowing
anyone to 'stand in your way' is not countenanced.
Obstacles and limits are for overcoming, power is
mainly bluff and dangers after all are only made
from fears. The development of these latter, highly
existential values is a curious phenomena. The
kids rarely blame other people for their own
behaviour. The explanation: 'I'm a criminal
because I love it' is more usually given.
What place is to be accorded to this explanation
in terms of choice, within analysis? The kids
accord a high value to the phenomena of choice to
explain the development of their own life-styles.
Have they merely internalised bourgeois
individualist ideology? Are their own explanations
to be dismissed?
Not all poverty-stricken persons raise their
spirits to rail against their socially given
conditions. Law-breaking is not the only possible
response to economic disadvantage. Not all
victims of injustice want to argue about it. The
turbo kids have an argument which they have
expressed in their lives. They do not accept the
way things are. Why?
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Why do turbo kids rebel?
There is a danger in answering this question
too closely. Precise information on how social
critique arises and develops in practice can too
easily be incorporated into a technology of social
control which limits the development of local
colour in other areas of the social field. Social
critics have all too frequently pointed out escape
routes from systematic normalisation, all the
better to see them closed.
FAMILY CONFLICT AND LEAVING HOME
I have learned a certain silence from the kids.
Not all questions ought to be answered.
Frank Maas
Senior Research Fellow
Australian Institute of Family Studies
References
Hall, E .T. (1966) The Hidden Dimension,
Doubleday, New York.
Henley, N. (1973) 'The Politics of Thuch' in Brown,
P. (ed.) Radical Psychology, Harper and Row,
New York.
Tomlinson, J. (1978) Is Band-aid Social Work
Enough?, The Wobbly Press, Darwin.
This article examines the changing nature of family conflict, and its causes,
as a reason for young people leaving home. Differences in patterns of leaving
behaviour between the 1970's and the 1980's is discussed. Tndependence' was
the most important reason given by young people in a survey conducted by
AIF5. The impact of youth policies on increasing dependence, and therefore
family conflict, is also examined.
Introduction
The nature of interaction between young
people and their families is an important issue for
policy makers and service providers in such areas
as educati,on, training, housing, recreation and
welfare.
Most under 20 year-olds live with their families.
Census data for 1981 shows that nearly 80 per
cent of 15-19 year-olds live with their parentis,
while less than nine per cent live independently
(ABS, Census of population and housing, 1981).
The nature of relationships within families is of
basic concern to young people. Results of the 1984
survey undertaken by ANOP for the Department
of the Special Minister of State regarding the role
of families in the lives of young people were as
follows:
• 55 per cent ranked family relationship problems
as a specific worry, ahead of the 53 per cent
who cited education as a worry;
* when asked about the worst things in life,
family relationships were listed as second after
education by 15-17 year-olds, and third after
lack of money and unemployment by 18-20 and
21-24 year-olds;
* when asked the best things in life, family
relationships were listed first by all age groups
(ANOP, 1984).
Despite the importance of families in
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determining the basic well-being of young people,
little attention has been paid to those factors
which contribute to the character of family
interaction. A recent example of this policy blind
spot is the publication }Dung Australia. Part A,
background to reform, published last year by the
Commonwealth Office of Youth Affairs. This
document, ' while an excellent overview of the
education and employment environment
experienced by young people, is completely silent
on their family circumstances and experiences.
Policies presume dependence
Yet many government policies presume certain
supportive arrangements within families. For
example, both the under 18 and under 21 rates of
unemployment benefit assume unstated levels of
support from parents. The operation of income
tests for education allowances assume again
unstated levels of transfer from parents to
offspring. Even the parlous state of support for
youth accommodation programs could be an
indication that policy makers assume that families
will automatically provide housing for young
people.
Conflict within families
Most concern in recent times has focused on
perceived high levels of conflict between parents
and their adolescent children. Th be more precise,
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