The Social Organization of Access to Justice for Youth in ‘Unsafe’ Urban Neighbourhoods

Abstract

Drawing on the feminist sociological approach, institutional ethnography, this article reveals how young people in a designated neighbourhood improvement area in Toronto, Canada, experience reduced access to justice. Young people’s stories about their interactions with the police in their neighbourhood ground an analysis of the dispersal of justice in large urban centres as shaped by and constitutive of the social relations of race, gender and class. While the research proceeds from young people’s knowledge of their work and lives, the foci of analysis are the objectified forms of thought and action that produce the individual accounts young people share. The research finds that young people’s experiences of diminished relational fairness in their encounters with the police reduce the degree to which they expect full and equal access to other juridical and administrative public institutions and processes. Ultimately, the state’s efforts to produce and manage public safety, as a bureaucratic phenomenon, undermines embodied experiences of safety and access to justice for young people who live in economically disadvantaged and racialized urban neighbourhoods.