Targeted harassment, subcultural identity and the embrace of difference: a case study

Introduction

Having gone rather unnoticed for many years, public harassment and violence against alternative subcultural participants has been thrust into UK public debate following the murder of twenty year old Sophie Lancaster in 2007 – a crime widely believed to have been motivated by hostility towards the goth appearance of Lancaster and her boyfriend. The case prompted extensive media coverage, as did an announcement by a prominent UK regional police force, in 2013, that, following campaigning led by Lancaster's mother, it would henceforth be recording attacks on members of alternative subcultures as hate crimes. While the severity of the Lancaster incident was unusual, the coverage and debate that ensued have drawn attention to the broader and more routine forms of harassment and violence that goths, punks, skaters, metallers and others are subjected to.

It is hardly surprising that significant media coverage and public awareness of such harassment would ensue only in the event of so high profile a case. More remarkable is the sparse attention afforded to its nature and significance among the numerous sociological studies of youth music and style subcultures. For it will be our contention in this paper that, whilst the frequency and severity of incidents may vary, targeted public harassment can form an integral part of what it is to be involved in a spectacular subculture. We also show how such harassment is often understood by participants as part of a broader societal hostility to which they are subject and how, as such, it plays a role in defining and strengthening group identification and in contributing to a collective embrace of otherness.

Importantly, our concern in this piece, centred on qualitative interviews with twenty-one individuals connected to the goth scene, is not with on-going debates about whether harassment against subcultural participants should be included under the category of hate crime, though we have discussed this elsewhere (see Garland and Hodkinson 2014a, 2014b). Neither does this article centre on the Lancaster case itself or the campaign that followed. Our emphasis here is on the sociological significance of everyday public harassment for the development and playing out of subcultural lives and identities. We begin with an examination of existing literature on subcultures, violence and societal hostility, placing emphasis on the connections that might be drawn between research on direct experiences of harassment and broader understandings of the role of societal hostility in the development of subcultural identities. Having outlined our case study and methodological approach, we go on to show how our data indicate that, in spite of diversity with respect to respondents’ direct experiences, the collective experience of vulnerability to harassment formed an ongoing accompaniment to subcultural life and contributed to the strengthening of a subcultural identity vested in otherness.

Harassment, violence and subcultures

The involvement of youth subcultural participants in hostility or conflict is a familiar feature of subcultural studies. Some of the best known work of the Chicago tradition centres upon subcultural violence, whether in the form of Frederic Thrasher's exposition of the hostilities and territoriality of Chicago's gangs (1927) or William Whyte's ethnography of Italian ‘corner boys’ in Boston slums (1943). Violence among ‘spectacular’ (Hebdige 1979) subcultures, centred upon strikingly distinctive style and music, is well-documented too, not least in Rock and Stan Cohen's (1970) discussion of teddy boy culture, Cohen's (1972) interrogation of the societal reaction to hostilities involving UK mods and rockers and, at various points in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, even if the core of the Centre's analysis of the UK's postwar style subcultures concerned itself more with symbolic forms of class conflict. Phil Cohen (1972), for example, regards hostilities between subcultures (greasers versus skinheads, mods versus rockers) as a displacement of generational tensions, while Jon Clarke (1976a) refers to the specific importance of ‘trouble’ – including ‘paki-’ and ‘queer-’ bashing – to skinhead culture's embrace of lumpen white masculinity, and Dick Hebdige alludes to the importance of conflict as part of mod night-life (1976).

Yet references to targeted harassment or violence against largely or wholly non-violent subcultural participants are less common. Tony Jefferson's emphasis on the sensitivity, or ‘touchiness’ of teddy boys to insulting comments from passers-by comes the closest within the CCCS’ work to thinking about being abused as an integral part of subcultural experience (1976). Jefferson usefully suggests that such sensitivity reflects the fragile structural identities and backgrounds represented by Teddy boy style and its status as ‘the only reality or space on which they had any hold’, while describing how outside hostility prompted responses in defence of subcultural resolve and ‘group-mindedness’ (1976: 82). Nevertheless, Jefferson is clear that teddy boys were probably as likely to perpetrate violence or abuse as to be on the receiving end.

Subsequently, the targeted harassment of subcultural participants has continued to be largely absent from literature in the area. Studies by Hodkinson (2002) and Dunja Brill (2008) do indicate that goths tend to be subject to abuse from passers-by, hinting at the role of such experiences in helping to construct subcultural identity, but neither investigate in detail. Greater depth is provided, however, in Lauraine Leblanc's study of female punks in the USA and Canada (2008), which includes a chapter focused on the kinds of abuse and violence suffered by her respondents at the hands of members of the public. Leblanc shows that targeted harassment, from intrusive stares to physical attack, was an everyday occurrence, to the extent that her respondents had developed a range of differing coping strategies, including ignoring or walking away, humorous retorts and, occasionally, responding with their own insults. Leblanc also demonstrates how female punks were subject to gendered abuse related either to their perceived adoption of a masculine style or, conversely, their wearing of clothing perceived as sexually explicit (also see Blackman 1997).

Leblanc's study provides valuable insight into the kinds of abuse faced by punks and makes a compelling argument that such harassment should be taken more seriously by police and law makers. What is less detailed in the account, and what we hope to develop in the current article, is an analysis of the ways experiences of harassment feed into and inform subcultural identities. Leblanc offers some useful starting points, through indicating that we might think about public harassment as forming part of the general relationship between subcultural groupings and the broader society of which they are a part – a relationship often characterized, she argues, by the stigmatization of the former by the latter. Though she does not really develop this in relation to the accounts of her respondents, Leblanc suggests that, through thinking of harassment in this way, we might explore its significance for subcultural identities through asking with reference to social reaction subculture theories whether harassment might play a role in ‘consolidating a subculture, establishing its boundaries and compelling its members’ commitment’ (2008: 169).

Subcultures and negative social reactions

Sure enough, while research on the person-to-person harassment faced by subculture participants is rare, discussion of the role played by broader societal hostility in the development of subcultural identities is commonplace. While much of his attention is on explaining the initial formation of subcultures as a reaction to participants’ lack of status in dominant society, Albert Cohen's (1955) seminal introduction to Delinquent Boys goes on to detail the way that hostile social reactions elicited by subcultures prompt such groups to become more committed, bounded, oppositional and mutually dependent. Becker's (1963) transactional theory of deviance, meanwhile, places more detailed emphasis on the broader labelling of deviance by dominant society, and the role of this as part of a sequential process through which subcultural identities, values and meanings become shaped. As part of this, subcultures develop self-justifying rationales that legitimate subcultural practices and repudiate external society. Such ideas are taken further, in the UK, by Jock Young (1971) in relation to the ways the deviant behaviour of marijuana users was ‘amplified’ as a result of their stigmatization by dominant institutions, and by Stanley Cohen (1972) with respect to the development of public moral panics, driven by the press, that demonized mods and rockers. Much of Stan Cohen's focus is on interrogating the content and processes of the social reaction itself but he also outlines its role in helping to shape, reinforce and amplify the subcultures involved. Although personal harassment is not specifically their focus, then, these classic understandings indicate that societal hostility plays an important role in defining the subcultural experience, strengthening identity and eliciting defiance (Fine and Kleinman 1979).

Traces of this transactional approach to subculture also can be found in the work of the CCCS, even though the primary concerns of their neo-Marxist, class-centred approach lie elsewhere. As Shane Blackman (2005, 2014) shows, Clarke, Hall, Jefferson and Roberts (1976) are critical of Albert Cohen's understanding of the origins of subcultures, distrusting the psychological/functionalist roots of an account that centred on the notion of ‘reaction-formation’ - psychological compensation for an inability to succeed on dominant terms. Yet this does not prevent references within CCCS work to the implications of the societal hostility subcultures receive once they have emerged. With an apparent nod towards social reaction theories, Jon Clarke ponders whether or not negative societal reaction ‘intensifies their commitment towards greater group solidarity or develops that to a new level’ (1976b: 184), going on to indicate that skinhead identities were strengthened as a result of their stigmatization by facets of dominant culture (dancehall proprietors, police) regarded as ‘people on our backs’ (1976b). We have already noted, meanwhile, Jefferson's attention to the strengthening of teddy boy identities as a result of hostility to their dress (1976).

More recent work, too, has shown how, in spite of question marks against some versions of social reaction theory (see Blackman 2014), the thrust of such theories with respect to interplay between negative social reactions and the subcultural experience has retained purchase. Bruce Friesen's (1990) examination of the media stigmatization of heavy metal fans in the 1980s, for example, notes that, while metallers simultaneously revelled in and resented different aspects of their stigmatization, the social reaction appeared to encourage self-identification as deviant – a salient point for the current study. Similarly, Donna Gaines’ (1990) study of metal-oriented teenagers in a New Jersey suburban town attends, amongst other things, to the way subculturally-inflected youth were encouraged to play out the role of outcasts assigned to them through their stigmatization by a conservative community.

Sarah Thornton's seminal analysis of 1990s club culture, meanwhile, draws heavily upon Becker and Stan Cohen in the attention it devotes to the role of press hostility in the defining and affirming of rave cultural identities (1995). Crucially, though, Thornton develops a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between social reaction and subculture. In her account, mass media hostility interacts with organized forms of subcultural communication via a range of niche and micro media outlets purporting to speak to and for subcultural participants. Such outlets form intermediaries in the strengthening of subcultural identities in response to mainstream negativity, a point we shall turn to later in relation to our own research (also see McRobbie and Thornton 1995). Similarly, Andy Brown's recent examination of moral panics against heavy metal in the 1980s and emo culture in the 2000s shows how, in the latter case, the subculture utilized specialist media channels to organize opposition to negative media coverage and reaffirm subcultural identities in the face of stigmatization (Brown 2011).

Williams (2011), meanwhile, draws upon a range of studies to show how young people exhibiting alternative styles continue to be branded as folk devils by media, politicians, law enforcement and public health officials. Citing a case study by Rosenbaum and Prinsky (1991), he refers to a local government campaign against punk and heavy metal subcultures in Orange County that specified a range of ‘warning signs’ – primarily related to style and clothing – for parents to look out for. Drawing on Thornton's developments of the work of Becker and Stan Cohen, Williams underlines the way that complex interactions between mainstream stigmatization and subcultural forms of media discourse can give rise to ‘objective’ impacts on the conditions in which subcultures find themselves and ‘subjective’ implications for the lived experiences and identities of participants.

As we have noted, the societal hostility referred to in these studies tends not to concern direct harassment but, rather, the workings of institutional manifestations of ‘dominant culture’ such as media, the police or politicians. Following the lead of Leblanc (2008), we seek in what follows to explore the harassment and abuse of subcultural participants in public places as a particular example of societal hostility and attend to its significance for the subcultural experience. More specifically, we examine the connections often drawn by respondents between specific incidents of harassment and a broader sense of being stigmatized and marginalized. In so doing, we connect our data on harassment with inferences from classic and recent literature focused on negative societal reactions to subcultures. We establish that experiences and expectations of hostility formed an integral feature of the subcultural experience that fed into the strengthening of identity and contributed to a defiant collective embrace of otherness.

Goth culture

Having emerged in the 1980s as a dark-themed subculture based around sombre, macabre forms of music and an androgynous style centred upon black clothes and hair, pale made-up faces and particular style of jewellery and body adornment, the goth scene has now endured for over three decades (see Hodkinson 2002; Baddeley 2002; Spooner 2006; Brill 2008; Haenfler 2010). Along the way, it has developed and drawn upon a range of related styles as well as encompassing a number of different variations and sub-styles, from electronic-oriented so-called ‘cybergoths’ to newer generations of ‘emos’, adorned with goth-themed styles and identities but embracing music with its roots mostly in hardcore punk. More generally, as well as being a distinct subcultural community in its own right with a strong, defiant and often enduring sense of identity and a distinct set of tastes and values (Hodkinson 2002), goth has also tended to form one part of a broader umbrella of ‘alternative culture’ that also includes punks, metallers and some variants of indie music amongst others. Over the years, goths often have shared pubs and clubs with these other alternative scenes, as well as some elements of style such as piercings, tattoos and, often, social connections of one kind or another (Hodkinson 2002). Importantly, while the current study centres on goths, our sample reflects these connections, including individuals differently situated within or connected to the scene and some who associated with goths but who had come to identify more strongly with related forms of music or style within the alternative umbrella, including emo and metal cultures.

As indicated in the section above, goths have not always been regarded positively within public debate. Following the Columbine School shootings in 1999 and a handful of other isolated incidents of violence or self-harm involving individuals portrayed as goths, headlines have sometimes focused on the possibility that the subculture might either attract or cultivate individuals who are violent or dangerous – either to others or themselves (see Hodkinson 2002; Williams 2011; Brown 2011). For Ross Haenfler (2010), goth culture is particularly notable for the way it has been stigmatized by media and politicians and management of this stigma forms an important feature of subcultural life for goths, who – he argues – typically become used to feeling like outsiders. Some qualitative academic studies, meanwhile, have made brief reference to experiences of public harassment (Hodkinson 2002; Brill 2008) among goths while recent quantitative work has indicated a high propensity to be the victim of bullying (Minton 2012) or assault (Young 2013) among participants, something consistent with more anecdotal accounts of such harassment in recent media coverage (see Garland 2010). In the pages that follow, we explore experiences and understandings of harassment in greater depth and draw connections between such experiences and a broader sense of societal stigmatization felt by many participants.

Methodology

The research consisted of 21 in-depth interviews carried out between January and August 2013. Participants were recruited through three different means: snowballing from existing contacts of Hodkinson, contacting the organizers of two goth/alternative university societies and posting calls for respondents on social networking site pages and forums, including a forum for the Sophie Lancaster Foundation – a campaign group set up following the murder of Lancaster which is subscribed to by over 70,000 people, most of whom are participants of the goth scene and related alternative subcultures. These social networking site posts resulted in approximately 50 volunteers but, through recruiting respondents via the variety of techniques and sources outlined, rather than selecting only from the responses to this particular call for respondents, we were able to develop a sample that was diverse and not exclusively reliant upon those willing to respond to an advertizement or indeed those with an unusual level of interest in questions of harassment (see Ritchie et al. 2014).

The approach taken to establishing contact with respondents, then, centred on a desire to include a broad a range of people and experiences. Similarly participants were selected from the range of volunteers generated with a view to maximizing the diversity of the sample – notably with respect to gender, age, location and background, although practical factors, including availability and proximity to locations reachable by the researchers, also played a role. In total, eight men and thirteen women were interviewed and, while most were in their twenties, participant age ranged from 19 to 53. Consistent with the broader profile of the goth scene all participants were white and most (though not all) had middle-class backgrounds. The sample included individuals from a variety of locations in England, including the Northwest, Northeast, Midlands and Southeast of the country, and who lived in a range of different types of conurbation, from large cities to small towns or villages. Participants were told – through initial communication and a more detailed information sheet – that the aim of the project was to understand experiences of targeted harassment and violence among individuals connected to the goth scene through interviews with a small but diverse sample of people. At all stages of recruitment, the researchers were explicit that we were as interested in those who had not suffered serious harassment as in those who had. As a consequence of this and the range of recruitment techniques used, we do not believe the sample to be especially biased towards those who had experienced unusually serious levels of abuse or violence.

All but three of the interviews took place face-to-face, either in the houses of participants, quiet public spaces such as coffee shops or university offices. The others were conducted via Skype. Interview conversations were guided by a detailed topic list but were semi-structured and conducted in an informal manner, with participants encouraged to go beyond the specific topics raised in questions as much as they wished. This approach – and the decision to use qualitative interviews in the first place – were informed by our desire to focus on the detail of participants’ experiences and understandings of harassment, and of its significance to their identities, rather than to attempt to precisely quantify the phenomenon (Fielding and Thomas 2008). Both face-to-face and online interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed verbatim and then analysed thematically. The research was approved by the University of Surrey Ethics Committee. To ensure participant confidentiality, all names in the account below are pseudonyms.

Public harassment as integral to subcultural life

Direct experiences of targeted abuse and harassment were varied among the sample. In the worst cases, individuals had been physically attacked in a manner that had left them with significant short-term injuries. In contrast, others explained that even minor forms of verbal abuse had been relatively unusual for them. For most participants, however, the receipt of public harassment1, in the form of verbal and/or minor forms of physical abuse was sufficiently regular that it had come to feel like a fairly normal part of their everyday experience. As in the case of Leblanc's study of punks (2008), a notable proportion of the direct interactions that took place between goths and strangers they passed in public spaces seemed to have consisted of harassment of the former by the latter. Eleanor's description of the kinds of attention she would fairly regularly receive was not unusual among the sample:

Eleanor (24): Most commonly it was just people yelling like ‘goth’ or ‘mosher’ or something at you… And I think most of the time it was just people yelling at me but I did get quite a few times where people spat on me…. Generally being in town really I think… there was just more chance of people deciding that they didn't like the way you looked for some reason. And buses seemed to be quite a common one as well.

Others described different forms of verbal abuse from people on buses or trains, shouting out of passing cars or walking past. Comments would range from hostile references to subcultural membership, to general stigmatization of difference (‘freak’, ‘weirdo’), mocking references to assumed interests, state of mind or behaviour (jokes about graveyards, depression, self-harming) or threats of violence. Respondents also referred to overtly sexist or homophobic comments connected to the perceived feminine appearance of many goth men or, consistent with Leblanc's (2008) findings on punk women, to the misinterpretation of some variants of female goth style as an indication of sexual availability. We have explored the gendered aspects of such abuse a little more detail elsewhere (Garland and Hodkinson 2014a). Meanwhile, common examples of ‘low level’ physical harassment described by respondents included being spat at, having objects thrown in their direction or being pushed.

Though they were more unusual, serious incidents of violence included being punched, kicked or beaten up. Describing himself as an ‘ideal target’ for ‘people who lacked the self-confidence to pick a fight with someone their own size’, Jamie (33), for example, detailed to us a series of incidents in which he had been attacked as a result of his appearance, attributing the frequency of such incidents to the regularity with which he walked on his own at night and his unthreatening demeanour.

Harassment and broader societal hostility

Earlier in this article we suggested, following Leblanc (2008) that, although studies of the harassment of subcultural participants are unusual, theories about the broader social reaction subcultures can elicit and the role of such reactions with respect to the identities of participants, may prove useful in understanding such harassment. Sure enough, rather than being seen as a discrete phenomenon, targeted harassment tended to be understood by our respondents as part of a broader tendency to be marginalized, stigmatized and, sometimes, discriminated against by various aspects of wider society. Even though we asked no specific questions about broader stigmatization, most respondents keenly raised it themselves. A range of examples were provided, including being stereotyped by mass media, wrongly accused of misdemeanours, moved on or not taken seriously by police, refused entry to nightclubs, disowned by family or friends and discriminated against at work. In many participants’ understanding, such experiences were inseparable from harassment at the hands of passers-by. In the following example Eleanor refers to situations concerning excessive security guard attention and those relating to hostility from members of the public:

Eleanor: Going into any shops, if they had a security guard, you knew the security guard was going to follow you round the whole store very subtly. So yes, I got used to that one. Generally being in town really I think, where there's more people, there was just more chance of people deciding that they didn't like the way you looked for some reason.

Sometimes, the connections between these different sorts of hostility were particularly explicit. More than one participant noted, for example, that, in their response to incidents of harassment or violence against goths, police, parents or others had a tendency to focus on the subcultural appearance of the victim as a causal factor and the adoption of a more normal appearance as the suggested solution. While keenly aware of the role of their cultural trajectories and choices in placing themselves in a potentially vulnerable position, participants were hostile to such perspectives, regarding them as a form of victim-blaming and as evidence that hostility on the street connected to a much broader lack of acceptance of their lifestyle. Harriet, for example, lamented the way negative media representations of goths had contributed to an attitude that prompted her parents to respond to the murder of Sophie Lancaster by encouraging their daughter to tone down her appearance:

Harriet (20):I just have this feeling that so many like goths and metal-heads and alternative people are just generally misrepresented so badly. And I sometimes, particularly with my parents, they just seem to have this very old fashioned view, that if something happens to you because you look different or unusual, then that's your problem… I remember being really stunned and horrified by the way my mum reacted when I told her about Sophie Lancaster… She just said, ‘Well that's why you have to be careful about what you wear’, and I just found that really upsetting.

Others regarded abuse and violence itself as something that had resulted directly from more general misrepresentation and hostility. Claire attributed pressure to adopt a more normal appearance from her family and the abuse she sometimes received from strangers to misunderstandings of the scene derived from media stereotypes:

Claire (32): I've written so many complaints to the TV… I can remember writing to Coronation Street [UK soap opera], I think, when one of their characters was a goth… they'd gone for the negative stereotype, as the moody, I'm staying in my bedroom and I'm interested in murder… And that wouldn't help I don't think, that really doesn't help.

From the point of view of many respondents, then, the everyday experience of negotiating the possibility of abuse in public spaces formed a particularly direct and unpleasant component of a broader marginalization of their subculture by various facets of a narrow-minded society outside it. This sense of being stigmatized was something developed and understood on a collective rather than just an individual level. It had come to comprize an important part of internal subcultural discourse, both through grassroots conversation between individuals and, sometimes, more organized, larger-scale types of internal communication. Experiences of being harassed, for instance, form part of a discourse of being maligned, misunderstood and pressured to be ‘normal’ in the lyrics of some goth and alternative music. For example, lyrics to the album track, ‘Leave Me Alone’ by Florida goth/darkwave band Crüxshadows include the following: ‘everywhere I go they all stare, I don't understand why they care, they stare at me in all black, and when I turn they stare at my back’ (The Crüxshadows 1999).

Affirming identity and embracing otherness

It was clear from the accounts of respondents that, through forming such an important part of collective discourses about societal hostility, experiences of targeted harassment were contributing to the strength of participants’ overall attachment to the goth scene. As such, harassment can be partly understood, we suggest, with reference to elements of the social reaction theories discussed earlier in the article. Leaving aside the controversy surrounding Albert Cohen's functionalist explanation for the emergence of subcultures (Blackman 2014), we found respondent accounts of the significance to their subcultural affiliation of the feelings engendered by experiences of harassment – and the ways these connected to broader feelings of societal marginalization – to be strikingly reminiscent of elements of the post-subcultural-formation transactional processes described by Cohen (1955), Becker (1963), Young (1971), Stan Cohen (1972), Fine and Kleinman (1979) and, more recently, Thornton (1995), Williams (2011), Haenfler (2010) and others. In some cases respondents were emphatic that being harassed because of their subcultural appearance had both strengthened their subcultural identity and emboldened them to display their allegiance, as here:

Lauren (53): No, in a way it made us defiant. We will walk the streets of [town], we will wear velvet and you won't damn well stop us. I think in a way it reinforced our pride in ourselves. We will walk the streets of [town], we will look stylish and glamorous and stuff you know. Ridicule isn't a thing to be scared of, as long as it is ridiculed.

There are some nuances to take account of, here, though. In spite of the boldness of Lauren's statement, it would be far from accurate to infer that, as a whole, goths revelled in the ways they were targeted for harassment. Neither did such harassment represent a ‘fulfilment’ of any oppositional agenda of their own, as was the case, according to Sarah Thornton (1995), with the relationship between 1990s club culture and media moral panics. We have already noted that many goths had become used to taking precautions in public spaces to avoid attracting negative attention. And some reported that, at certain moments, they had been moved to reflect upon the danger that they could be putting themselves in by dressing in a subcultural manner. Such findings suggest that direct harassment, through the physical danger in which it can place people, may be distinct from broader forms of societal rejection such as negative media coverage or adverse comments from politicians, in the sense that it can lead to strong feelings of anxiety and fear with respect to personal safety.

Nevertheless, moments of genuine doubt tended to pass, while precautions in public places, far from reflecting mixed feelings about subcultural identity, usually amounted rather to pragmatic coping strategies or, stigma management, as Haenfler (2010) would have it, designed to render a subcultural lifestyle more feasible in a hostile environment. And the flip-side of the anxiety that harassment could lead to, was that it also rendered such experiences a particularly powerful focus for shared identity. As we have shown, the ongoing experience of feeling targeted constituted crucial common ground between participants. And, as Barbara Perry (2015) demonstrates in relation to established hate crime victim groups, a shared feeling of being under threat of attack can engender a particularly strong sense of cohesion and mutual reliance. Goths may not have been entirely protected, as Albert Cohen (1955) would have it, from ‘mixed feelings’ about their way of life, but the tendency for their identities ultimately to be strengthened in the face of the negative attention to which they were subject coheres with the thrust of social reaction subcultural theories of the past and present.

As well as contributing to shared identity through common experience, the resentment that resulted from feeling under attack also contributed to a discourse of defiance – illustrated clearly in Lauren's extract above – and, in turn, to the consequent reinforcement of perceived boundaries of values and identity between the subculture and outsiders. Beth put this succinctly:

Beth (25): …it [experiences of harassment] also reinforces this like sense of the other. It's good because it intensifies your community spirit, but it also solidifies your feeling against the other group.

And, as inferred by Beth, a key part of this process was the construction among subcultural participants of particularly negative understandings of a ‘normal’ or ‘mainstream’ external culture that tended to be associated with both the specific phenomenon of targeted harassment and a broader perceived stigmatization of their subculture. Copes and Williams (2007) identified a similarly vehement rejection of a generalized mainstream culture in relation to references to low level harassment among straight-edge participants. And, although context and details are different, it is hard not to see connections with Albert Cohen's broader observation that ‘the typical solution [to societal hostility] is to devalue those whose good will and respect are forfeit anyway’ and that in the face of societal hostility subcultures develop internal discourses characterized by ‘contemptuous images of those groups whose enmity they have earned…’ (1955). Alternatively, as Stanley Cohen puts it, ‘if one is seen as the enemy… it is not difficult to respond in similar spirit: one “rejects the rejecters” and “condemns the condemners”’ (1972: 179).

Conclusion

It is worth reminding readers that, in spite of routine experience of verbal harassment across our sample, serious violent attacks were relatively unusual and some had experienced even verbal abuse only occasionally. Nevertheless, it is our contention here that experiences, discourses or understandings of targeted harassment formed a somewhat ever-present and internalized feature of subcultural life. As we have outlined elsewhere, this could sometimes lead to considerable anxiety (Garland and Hodkinson 2014a) and, partly as a result of this, it had also come to form a component of shared subcultural experience that tended to strengthen participants’ investment in subcultural identity and their embrace of otherness.

Experiences and discourse about harassment combined, we argue, to generate ongoing awareness and anticipation of possible abuse and the routine deployment of avoidance strategies as a normal part of everyday routes through public space. Whether an individual had been the subject of serious attack or not, the spectre of harassment formed an ongoing accompaniment to subcultural participation. And direct and indirect experience of harassment tended to form part of a broader sense of being marginalized and stigmatized by what participants tended to characterize as ‘normal’ society. As such, even if individual experiences of harassment were attributed to specific hostile groupings, they had a tendency to feed into the strengthening of a collective identity invested in distinctiveness from mainstream society.

In developing these arguments, we have shown, following Lauraine Leblanc and others, how some features of classic and more recent interactive and social reaction theories may still have purchase in making sense of subcultural experiences of harassment. Notably, the tendency to understand harassment as a manifestation of broader external hostility, the role of this in the development of shared negative understandings of external society and the strengthening of investment in collective difference recall some features of social reaction theories. Yet, recognition of the complexity and inconsistency of subcultural constructions of normal society (Hannerz 2015) and the role of organized subcultural communication in responses to hostility (McRobbie and Thornton 1995), can help provide a more nuanced understanding of such processes. Meanwhile, social reaction theories have tended to exclude public harassment from their analyses and it is a greater understanding in this respect that constitutes our primary contribution here.

The anxiety and emotion surrounding direct and indirect experiences of abuse or attack, we suggest, provide substantial common ground among subcultural participants and can prompt the development of particularly powerful forms of shared identity invested in difference. We also move beyond questions of stigmatization, however, in highlighting the practical and symbolic importance of being an ongoing potential target for hostility. Often in the background but sometimes thrust dramatically to the fore, it can form, we argue, an internalized, ever-present and collectively-felt accompaniment to subcultural life.