When bad is cool: violence and crime as rites of passage to manhood

Modern society has brought greater opportunities for peer groups to play relatively greater and increasingly unsupervised roles in the lives of young men as they grow up. At the same time social and economic circumstances have created pressures for adults, who previously played a central role in guiding and mentoring young people, to become less important in their lives. The increased influence of peer groups has a strong impact upon the codes of masculinity that many boys aspire to and plays a central role in policing which masculinities are considered ―acceptable. A potent combination of obligations for boys to act like ―real men and of pressures to eschew roles that have become discredited as soft, gay or feminine seems to be driving young men towards dangerous, risk-taking hyper-masculinities. The net outcome of these processes is for violence and crime to be increasingly seen as premiere ways of proving one's manhood in front of those who matter most to boys: their peers