Last modified: 2011-02-11
Abstract
What kind of risks do young women and men face in urban environments today and how should young women and men handle these risks? How do young women and men perceive these risks, how do parents perceive these risks and what kind of strategies do young people and parents have for handling these risks? Young people spend a lot of time in urban environments during both day time and night time. As a consequence, young people also are at high risk for becoming victims of urban violence. This is something not only young people themselves, but also their parents have to handle. Young girls and boys experience and handle urban risks in different ways, partly because they use urban environments in different ways but also depending on information, warnings and safekeeping advice transmitted through the media, friends and parents. In my paper, I discuss how parents and young people construct fear of violence, risk, safekeeping and gender, and how this is connected to the use of public space and to representations of public space. Something I discuss is that parents give different safekeeping advice to sons and daughters; both in content and amount, and that this is connected to how they link gender and public space. Parents, and particularly mothers, talk more about the way girls should behave in urban public space than they talk about how boys should behave, despite the fact that parents seem to worry more about sons than daughters when it comes to become a victim of violence.