“Adolescents are Terrorizing the North of the City”
Before the development of the scientific field that deals with the institutional status of street gangs in Quebec, the category “street gang” was used in the media in a context of tension, struggle, and profound lability. Our objective was to take a genealogical perspective in analyzing both the struggles and instabilities that led to the emergence of this concept and the discursive mechanisms by which such groups managed to challenge public authorities and create the view that they are stable and necessary. By going beyond the moral panic that was part of the context in which street gangs began to be discussed in the media, looking at the “discursive event” makes it possible to analyze the discourse that led to the concept of the street gang becoming embodied in a concrete social existence. Our empirical work uses discourse analysis to examine articles from the newspapers La Presse and the Journal de Montreal published between 1987 and 1989.