Moral Markets for Troubling Youths

Abstract

Public policy discourses with narrow views of morality and character are at the center of contemporary definitions and marketing of services for violent and troubled youths and children, especially in urban, low-income and black schools and communities in the US. This must be disrupted, this article argues, by exposing the role `moral entrepreneurs' play in such practices. Using descriptive and ethnographic data on violence and related troubles in urban and black schools and communities, the author argues that, left undisturbed, moral entrepreneurs pose as much a risk as those children and youths who are causing so much trouble.