Moral Economies of Young Women's Sexual Health

Extract from 'Neo-Liberalism and Austerity: The Moral Economies of Young People’s Health and Well-being'. Edited by Peter Kelly (Editor), Jo Pike (Editor)

Shame, Disgust and the Moral Economies of Young Women's Sexual Health in the North of England

Louise Laverty

Introduction

The range of austerity measures implemented in the UK following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 has been accompanied by, and justified through, emotive and stigmatising discourses that recast blame on those suffering the greatest inequalities (Clayton et al. 2015; Tyler 2013). As a number of authors have noted, heightened stigmatisation in recent UK public and political discourse has created a division between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor in society (Hancock and Mooney 2012; Tyler 2013; Wacquant 2009; Wacquant 2008). Most notably, as part of this shift in attitudes, poverty has been recast as the moral failure of the individual rather than the result of structural inequalities (Slater 2014; Valentine and Harris 2014; Wacquant 2008). This discourse is particularly evident in the UK's Child Poverty Strategy (2011, p.4) where behavioural rather than structural causes are outlined. The cause of child poverty, according to this strategy, is a lack of opportunity, aspiration and stability' among children and their families, a lack that can be tackled by reducing criminality, teenage pregnancies and risky behaviour. To experience poverty, therefore, is to occupy a stigmatised social position (Ridge 2011; Ridge 2009; Sutton 2009) that people seek to distance and differentiate themselves from (Shildrick and MacDonald 2013).

Stigma, according to Goffman (1963), is often experienced through feelings of guilt and shame that arise from certain activities or discreditable social positions. It is important, then, to examine the role of emotions in the process of stigma (Lupton 2014; Sayer 2005). In exploring the use of emotions in policy, Lupton (2014, p.11) reports that certain campaigns are 'directed at arousing fear, shame, disgust as a means to promote the self-disciplined citizen'. In other words, emotions are used to create stigma with the aim of encouraging self-regulation and changing social norms (Bayer 2008). In this paper, I illustrate how stigma, enforced through shame and disgust, operates as a form of social control through the marking of moral boundaries around sexuality. Focusing on the experience of a young girl attending a youth club in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in the North of England, I explore how the social role of emotions affects who does, or does not, belong. Most importantly, I illustrate the very real consequences for young people experiencing shame and stigmatisation.

The Politics of Emotion

Sociological theories of emotion take a cultural approach that sees emotions both as embodied and social (Ahmed 2004; Hochschild 1979; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990). As such, emotions can be understood as involved in conveying socio-cultural messages (Geertz 1973) and signalling moral worth and value (Lutz 1990). In other words, emotions act as moral evaluations that 'come to articulate what are often unspoken sentiments in contemporary society about class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity' (Nayak and Kehily 2014, p.1331). Emotions, therefore, do something; they are not simply the product of external disapproval (Sayer 2005). They create and reinforce boundaries that distinguish between those who are morally worthy and unworthy. Therefore, emotions are both relational and social, and in what follows, I briefly summarise the literature related to shame and disgust demonstrating how these emotions act as a form of social control.

Shame is defined as a bodily manifestation and social expression, a congruence of feeling, emotion and affects (Probyn 2004). It has been described as

a painful, sudden awareness of the self as less good than hoped for and expected, precipitated by the identification by others (imaginary or real) or simply by the ashamed self. (Manion 2003, p.21)

It differs from guilt in that shame involves the negative appraisal of self, while guilt results from a specific behaviour or action (Lewis 1992; Manion 2003). Shame is an emotion that is aroused by a crisis, drawing attention to a moral breach, which results in anticipated or felt stigma (Scambler 2004, 2009). This suggests that shame can act as a normalising gaze that makes it possible to classify and consequently punish those who transgress moral norms.

In a similar way to shame, disgust is embodied and is an emotion produced by social norms (Lupton 2014). Often viewed as a reflex because of the physical nature of the emotion, Kolnai (2004) argues that it is not only material objects that elicit disgust, but moral worth and character that also cause a reaction. Disgust acts by linking our senses and bodily experiences and often adheres to the object or person that is its cause (Kolnai et al. 2004). Importantly, like shame, it creates and maintains boundaries. It does so when there is shared revulsion at behaviours and people that betray social norms (Deigh 2006). In sum, shame and disgust demonstrate the link between the embodied physical experience and the social role of emotion that allows moral judgements and values to be felt, and therefore to become real.

The Governance of Respectable Sexuality

There is an abundance of literature examining the moral panics around women and girls' sexualities and how they are constructed as intrinsically problematic (Renold and Ringrose 2008, 2011, Ringrose and Barajas 2011; Ringrose and Renold 2012; Skeggs 2005; Walkerdine 2011). These moral panics are constructed and shaped by a complex range of intersecting social identities and positions including, but not limited to, gender, hetero-normativity, class, age and race (Karaian 2014; Mattis et al. 2008; McCall 2005; Skeggs 2005). Skeggs (1997) and Lawler (2005), for example, have described how white working-class women are constantly challenged to perform respectable forms of femininity in order to avoid shame. On the other hand, disadvantaged black women and girls are often hyper-sexualised (Mattis et al. 2008) in ways that can leave them more vulnerable to stigma when they fail to achieve acceptable femininity. This suggests that although there may be common outcomes of moral panics around sexuality, the designation of shame and disgust, for exam- ple, may be experienced differently. As Mattis et al. (2008, p.419) note, 'one is neither a singularly gendered, racialized nor classed being'.

The 'respectable femininity' that women are judged by, however, is likely to be based on a similar stereotype of whiteness, pureness and middle-class heterosexual femininity. Karaian (2014) suggests that this 'respectable femininity' is a neo-Liberal strategy of responsibilisation to govern women through shame. Within a neo-Liberal context, individuals are encouraged to be moderate, rational, decision makers in control of their bodies. Those who are constructed as responsible can be man- aged through self-governance while those who fail are subject to intervention (Adam 2005; Rose 1996). Young women, in particular, are said to be increasingly the focus of neo-Liberal regulation (Harris 2004) that encourages 'responsibility to choose good choices, second to take responsibility for the consequences of those choices, and third, being responsible for making those choices' (Graham 2007, p.205).

The Common: An Ethnography of an English Youth Club

This chapter draws on an ethnographic study of a youth club in the North of England conducted between June 2012 and September 2013. The study explored the conditions that enabled or constrained young people's ability to participate in their neighbourhood, focusing particularly on the role of welfare and wider cuts, and the practices that young people use to establish and maintain value and inclusion among their peers. This included, for example, moral economies of care in which food circulated among young people in the context of food poverty. The ethnography consisted of 14 months of participant-observation generated through more than 400 hours of data collection, alongside 15 photo elicitation and visual mapping interviews, 3 focus groups and numerous informal interviews with attendees.

The advantage of using ethnography with young people, as noted by other prominent authors in the field (Christensen 1993; Hammersley and Atkinson 1983; James et al. 1998; James and Prout 1997), is that it allows members' interests and priorities to emerge and direct the research, and 'emphasises working with people rather than treating them as objects' (Wolcott 1999, p.66). I consulted with the young people about what methods, if any, would be acceptable to them and I tried to remain adapt- able in my approach.

The majority of my fieldwork occurred in the enclosed space of the youth centre, the Common. The Common is a youth and community centre situated in the neighbourhood of Sandyhill on the outskirts of a midsize town. The neighbourhood is one of the most deprived wards nationally in the Indices of Multiple Deprivation, which were used as a proxy to support the self-identification of the area as working class (Department for Communities and Local Government 2015). Furthermore, local statistics showed that the area reported lower-than-average life expectancies (compared with regional and national figures), worse rates of unemployment, and lower educational attainment than the UK average.

The Common was established four decades ago, as a boys' club. The commemorative sign from its opening as a boys' club is still displayed at the entrance to the building, and despite a few extensions over the years, the main hub of the centre is the original design. However, over the decades, the building has fallen into a state of disrepair due to a lack of funding. While the centre is independent of the council youth services that have been subject to intense cuts over the past few years, they are dependent on charitable donations which have become increasingly difficult to secure in a financial climate dominated by austerity and cuts to statutory funding. The youth centre is open six days a week all year round and is open for younger children (5-10 years, the 'juniors') during the afternoons and for teenagers (11-25 years, the 'seniors') later in the evenings. The senior session runs from 6.30 to 9.30 pm, and until 11 pm during school holidays. It is free for young people to attend and the majority of the attendees live in the local area, often within a few minutes' walk. On a typical night, the centre can expect anywhere in the region of 30-80 young people, depending on the night of the week and the weather. The majority of the attendees are boys, who tend to arrive at the start of each session and stay until the end, joining in one of the activities in the main room, pool tables and table tennis, or go to play football or basketball in the gym. In contrast, the few girls that attend are likely to drop in periodically over the course of the evening. The girls never come into the centre unaccompanied and organise to meet with friends beforehand.

The managers of the youth club, recognising that girls were often reluctant to come into the Common and join in activities, decided to open up a girls' room. As a result, the girls were constantly encouraged out of the main room by staff and into the assigned girls' room to get 'peace from the boys'. In creating the girls' room, therefore, the staff unwittingly signalled that the rest of the youth club was the boys' space. As well as how space was assigned, what space was assigned is also important. No 'male space' was given up in order to make room for the girls. Instead, a disused room on the periphery of the building was opened. This disused room had no heating and faulty lighting. In other words, nothing valuable was given up.

Girls at the Common

During my time at the Common, the neighbourhood Sandyhill was the subject of public scrutiny that frequently labelled the area as a problematic 'ghetto'. In what Wacquant (2007, 2008) describes as 'place stigma', Sandyhill was characterised as a troubled, and thus undesirable, place internationally, nationally and locally. In particular, a spokesperson from the United Nations caused controversy by describing several areas in the North of England, similar to Sandyhill, as 'no-go areas' through drug and gang warfare, comparing them to Brazilian Favelas (Brown 2012). In response to the 2011 riots, the UK Prime Minister David Cameron lamented the 'slow-motion moral collapse' (Cabinet Office 2011) in such communities, seen as the fault of broken families, in order to justify interventions such as the Troubled Families Programme1 (Fletcher et al. 2012). Closer to home, the young people at the Common were described as 'yobs' and 'gangs' in the local press.

While Sandyhill has a history of disadvantage and a lack of investment, the introduction of austerity measures has further exacerbated insecurity in the area. The range of cuts implemented after the election of the UK Coalition Government in 2010, such as abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance2 (Chowdry and Emmerson 2010) and the Welfare Reform Act (The UK Government 2012)3, has affected young people living in Sandyhill. The ways in which these measures are experienced often varies by age, gender and ethnicity. For example, for boys and particularly non-white boys, increased surveillance and the use of Antisocial Behaviour Orders have meant displacement and exclusion in public spaces and often the neighbourhood. For girls, the introduction of the bedroom tax disrupted kinship care arrangements that had previously mitigated the experience of disadvantage. Kinship care refers to being under the care of an extended family member that helps avoid the involvement of the state and allows the young person to remain in a familiar place with familiar people (Leinaweaver 2013, 2014).

The role of kinship care was an essential and normal practice around the Common, and mainly affected the girls. There was fluidity in the girls' home lives, moving between kinship,care, more commonly with female caregivers, homes and foster care. The availability of a spare room with an aunt or grandmother was a general resource that helped the girls mitigate potential conflicts with parents and was essential following the illness or death of a parent. Almost all of the young people I engaged withat the Common had experienced at least one significant loss prior to the of 14: parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings and friends. In addition to, and perhaps because of, unstable and precarious home lives, the girls' attendance at the Common was sporadic at best. The boys dominated the main space; they controlled the activities in that space and were the recipients of the majority of funding. For example, funding for sporting equipment disproportionately benefited the boys, and they were given priority to take part in any funded activities. The girls frequently commented on the lack of resources and interest from the youth centre that had only allocated a girls' room on the outskirts of the building. Furthermore, the girls were subject to hostility from the boys, particularly those girls perceived to be sexually active. The boys were rarely punished for this behaviour, instead the girls were told to move away into their periphery space. As a result, many of the girls, after being on the receiving end of this antagonism, chose to leave the Common.

The regional youth services manager, Carrie, described the girls at the Common as 'the most troubled'. In particular, she suggests that a number of the girls 'use sex as a way of getting attention and affection'. During my time at the Common, five girls were publicly vilified as 'sluts' or 'slags'. All of the girls were in the care system, moving between formal placements and informal kinship care. Two girls, Jade (14, White British) and Kayla (14, mixed-race) were not from Sandyhill and so were already marked as outsiders. Hailey (14, mixed-race), Kima (15, Black British) and Jordan (15, Black British) grew up in the area. The five girls, in different ways, were seen as responsible not only for their actions, but also for the consequences of their sexual reputation and activity. In what follows, I focus my discussion on one of the girls, Jade, to explore how shame manifests itself in the everyday experiences of young women.

Jade: An Abject Figure?

Jade was a girl that I had repeated contact with and that other young people at the Common talked to me about. I had heard about Jade, before I ever met her. Jade, I am told, is 14 and is named as a 'slag'. She is first mentioned by Asia (14, Black British), her boyfriend Reuben (13, mixed-race) and Raymond (11, Black British) sitting talking in the girls' room. They are questioning why Jade comes to the Common, and Reuben replies 'you know why?'. They quickly start talking about the boys (and men) that Jade has reportedly slept with. Asia mentions that Jade always talks about sleeping with Black men, but says that Jade is a racist. Reuben calls her disgusting. Raymond comments that he had heard Jade had been raped in the past. Asia and Reuben scoff and Asia replies, 'It's not rape if you enjoy it'. In this initial exchange, the stories about Jade that circulate at the Common are first exposed. Jade is regarded as wholly responsible for her behaviour. Even when there are reports that Jade has been raped, the blame is projected back on to her. This is evoked through the idea of pleasure. Jade is ultimately deemed responsible to maintain and manage the boundaries of her body and thus is responsible for her 'failures'. I first meet Jade a few weeks later when she comes into the Centre with Carolyn (16, mixed-race), who she lives with in foster care, and Shannon (14, White British). Jade wears a red baseball cap that she keeps pulling over her short cropped hair, but other than this detail her clothing resembles the uniform' of the other girls. Jade immediately draws attention, the gaze of others fixing on her as she walks though the centre, and later that night we are told she is pregnant.

A few weeks later, however, I hear a different story from Shannon and Carolyn. Shannon's phone keeps going off, and Carolyn seems agitated. I ask what is going on and they explain that they are having a fight online on Blackberry Messenger (BBM) with Jade. I ask why and they tell me that they are not friends with her any more as she is a liar and has been saying things about Carolyn's family. Shannon tells me 'Jade isn't pregnant' 'Well...' says Carolyn, 'I heard she got jumped and she lost it? Shannon says she also heard that Jade had an abortion; 'so who knows', she says going back to her phone. She shows me the last message they sent each other, which is filled with expletives and ends with 'you stupid slag. Shannon and Carolyn cut all ties with Jade explaining that the only reason they were friends with Jade in the first place was because they felt sorry for her, referring to the death of her mother. The girls are very vocal about their disapproval of Jade, and work to publicly distance themselves from her. It was as if any association with Jade would taint or contaminate them. The concept of contamination was a big issue with regards to Jade. Jade only had two consistent friendships at the Common, with Jess (16, mixed-race) and Ruthie (14, Black British). Jade tried to initiate a number of other friendships but they quickly dissolved once they got to know of Jade's reputation. Ruthie explains that she gets a hard time for being friends with Jade, with other people at school asking why she is friends with a 'slut'. She has become tainted with the same label and derision as Jade. Ruthie has to explain to them that just because Jade is 'a slut does not mean I am'. She also tells me that she has started to understand that it is Jade's body, and if that is what she want to do with it then 'that's fine'; it does not affect her [Ruthie's] body.

In a later discussion, Ruthie tells me she does not agree with how Jade is treated, but also confides that she thinks 'Jade likes the attention, even if it is bad'. As evidence of this, Ruthie gets out her phone, showing me Jade's BBM profile. Jade's profile picture is a selfie; she is wearing false eyelashes and red lipstick and is pouting towards the camera with her arms pushed against her chest. Ruthie says 'it's bad isn't it, wait you should see the older one, it is worse. The style of Jade's older picture is the same except she is only wearing a bra. 'See?' Ruthie tells me, 'she likes the attention'. In showing me these pictures, Ruthie is suggesting that Jade is actively pursuing attention, refuting norms of girls as passive, through a specific unacceptable form of visibility. Ruthie sees the pictures as attention seeking, which transfers from online to offline behaviour. In the following months, there are a number of reports that there are explicit images of Jade circulating at the centre and although there are disputes about who circulated the pictures, Jade is ultimately blamed for them. The consensus at the Common is that by pursuing and enjoying attention, Jade is deserving of the consequences.

Indeed, there are consequences to Jade's behaviour. She is subject to abuse on a regular basis. From the girls this sometimes takes the form of refusing to acknowledge Jade's presence, or more explicitly by loudly shouting across the room 'eough, what is she doing here, no one wants her here'. The boys, in contrast, are more likely to publicly shame Jade, shouting and sneering about her behaviour as she walks past, calling her 'fucking foul'. One evening, Tyler (15, Black British) repeatedly attempts to shame Jade. Throughout the evening he follows her around the Common taunting her: looking, sneering and calling her disgusting in front of an audience, behaviour that is designed to elicit a shame response. She chooses to ignore this, pretending she has not heard him. After receiving no response, Tyler tries again, in front of a different audience, escalating the volume and explicit content that Jade could not fail to miss. He is publicly displaying his disapproval for her behaviour. Jade is expected to respond to this shaming, perhaps to show remorse, but instead chooses to feign ignorance, which is misunderstood as bravado. However, it was not only verbal assaults and threats that faced Jade. On a number of occasions, while I was at the Common, Jade was physically assaulted. Her status as a 'slag' was explicitly linked to the assaults.

Some of the youth workers colluded in avoiding engaging with Jade, warning me 'don't let her drag you in; she has done it to all of us, getting attention, telling lies, getting sympathy. Don't get involved. Youth worker Robin's words echo the other young people, 'I don't even know why she comes here. I went to her house, when she was in foster care, and she was so rude to me, so rude, and just lies upon lies, I want nothing to do with her. The youth workers, by refusing to work with Jade, reinforce the moral boundaries around the centre and collude in her stigmatisation. Jade is treated as undeserving of their support, a contamination that must be avoided. Jade stops coming in regularly, but she continues to be discussed, almost serving as a cautionary tale. Shortly after I finish fieldwork, Jade is reported as missing.

Conclusion: The Moral Dimensions of Shaming

I have argued that Jade is punished for her alleged sexual activity, regarded as morally deviant, through shame and disgust. This moral condemnation is rationalised through positioning Jade as deserving of punishment. This is evident in the incident in which Jade's rape is dismissed, but also in the way that the boys talk about Jade with one boy telling me 'if she's a lady treat her like a lady, if she's a whore treat her like a whore'. In addition, Jade's unrespectable feminine behaviour is racialised and classed in the way that she is positioned as 'white trash' by other young people. This is particularly important given that within the ethnically diverse neighbourhood of Sandyhill, being white is a marker of being an outsider. The other girls at the Common, who come from different ethnic backgrounds, have different experiences of slut shaming. What they have in common, however, is the use of shame that categorises them as deserving to be treated according to their status and behaviour. Here, 'slut-shaming' is a form of neo-Liberal governance with other young people taking the role of intervening in Jade's behaviour due to her failure to manage and control her own risk and body. Indeed, as the boys are not punished for this behaviour, they could interpret their actions as acceptable and necessary. It is intended to bring Jade back in line. While this finding is not new, the role of emotion provides a new way of examining the disciplinary practices that impact on girls. Shame and disgust is a way of marking moral boundaries that determine acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.

At the Common, Jade's personal life is publicly owned and shared. In contrast, in my year of knowing Jade, I never hear her side of the story. She strictly refused to talk about the subject. Perhaps discussing her experiences would mean that she had to recognise and acknowledge the shame imposed on her, thus, her safety was in her silence. In addition, it is clear from the example above that there are consequences to what has been termed 'slut-shaming' (e.g. Ringrose and Renold 2012). Jade and the other girls at the Common suffer through the shame imposed by others. As well as the withdrawal of friendship from their peers, and withdrawal of care from youth workers, the girls are also physically punished. Jade and Hailey are physically assaulted, while some of the other girls, such as Kima and Jordan, self-harm as a result of their stigmatisation. Furthermore, the girls are 'adultified' as they are treated as responsible for their behaviour. As Mattis et al. (2008) and others have warned, the adultification of girls can result in the withdrawal of protection from abuse as they are seen as complicit. The very real consequences mean that we should regard the role of emotion and stigma as strategies of exclusion.

Although I am drawing on the specific case of the youth club, it is interesting to note that these findings are echoed in other work that demonstrates that girls and women become particularly visible as 'sexualised bodies' (Puwar 2006). The girls at the Common become visible when they are perceived to violate acceptable forms of feminine sexuality, leading to exclusion. It is important to consider that this exclusion draws on existing social norms. Looking at the Common and its gender norms, it is clear that the centre's prioritisation of the boys and marginalisation of the girls have much deeper impacts than simply confining the girls to the periphery. Opotow (1990, p.1) has argued that the 'morally excluded are perceived as non-entities, expendable or undeserving, consequently harming them appears acceptable, appropriate or just'. I would argue that the shaming of Jade does exactly this.

In conclusion, this chapter has explored the social role of emotions in generating and regulating stigma and creating exclusion. This is important to consider as stigma is increasingly utilised as an acceptable and necessary force to change behaviour in public policy (Bayer 2008; Burris 2008; Karaian 2014). 'Slut-shaming' is a tactic that tries to reinforce certain sexual norms and punish deviance through evoking shame, disgust and guilt. Instead, it leads to exclusion and blames the individual for their deviance or failure. In turn, as issues such as poverty are subject to similar moral discourses, such as 'welfare-shaming', we are likely to see similar experiences of exclusion and blame laid at the feet of individuals (Clayton et al. 2015; Tyler 2013). Perhaps we should be more concerned with questioning who is being shamed and stigmatised and by whom.