Original Articles

Sebastian Kurtenbach, co-author of Springer's The Codes of the Street in Risky Neighborhoods: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Youth Violence in Germany, Pakistan, and South Africa (Open Access)

We all hear stories about street violence among juveniles in the news; sometimes things went badly wrong, sometimes it was just an argument. What we also hear is that those issues happened more often in some specific neighborhoods in urban centers - whether we watch the news in Cape Town, Berlin or Islamabad. But is it the same? Or more specifically: are the norms, attitudes and beliefs beyond street violence the same in such different places? We were not sure about it, and Wilhelm Heitmeyer, as one of the leading researchers in violence studies, picked up this topic to compare this aspect between male juveniles in quite different places. The researchers who worked on the project were Simon Howell (Cape Town), Sebastian Kurtenbach, Steffen Zdun, Abdul Rauf (Bielefeld) and Muhammad Zaman (Islamabad).

So, what we did first in our international research team was to review the literature to figure out which theories were on the table for explaining street violence. It turned out that the theoretical approach of the code of the street, formulated by Elijah Anderson around twenty years ago, is the most established explanation about this issue in social science. Interestingly, Anderson himself claimed that the street code, as he describes it, occurs in specific kind of neighborhoods or communities. However, these constraints were often overlooked in the literature using the street code. For us, the street code was a helpful approach; we were able use it is as a framework to compare such different contexts, as the townships in Cape Town with former working class neighborhoods in Berlin or the slums of Islamabad or Rawalpindi.

Anderson’s theoretical approach was incredibly useful for us. Through intensive reading, in the team and also in an M.A. level course in sociology at Bielefeld University, we worked out the core elements of the code of the street:  respect, masculinity, neighborhood perception, and street wisdom. We translated these elements into interview guidelines, and did our fieldwork in risky neighborhoods in Germany, Pakistan and South Africa. In every country, 30 interviews with male juveniles in different risky neighborhoods were conducted. The interviews were transcribed afterwards and analyzed with open coding in a comparative manner. By doing this, we had a theoretical framework on hand, which guided us through the data and we were able to “prove” if this approach fits also at contexts where it had not been developed in.

Now, after four years of intensive research about street violence and the code of the street, with an inspiring team of great colleagues  from three different continents, we are glad to publish “The Codes of the Street in Risky Neighborhoods: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Youth Violence in Germany, Pakistan and South Africa.” We feel that we are able to contribute to a better understanding of street crime, street codes and norms beyond violence.

Read the Open Access book he co-authored for free, continuously