The Construction of British ‘Asian’ Criminality COLIN WEBSTER School of Social Sciences, University of Teesside, U.K. Introduction This paper extrapolates from a 6-year study of delinquency and victim- ization among Pakistani, Bangladeshi and white young people in the North of England. The study involved a three-stage research strategy. First, a 4-year quasi-longitudinal study of 70 victims and perpetrators of racial violence and offending. Second, a self-report crime survey of 412 13–19 year-old Asian and white young people, 7% of the age group living in the area. Third, an in-depth follow-up study of 65 young people. The essential argument is that over the period studied, from 1988 to 1995, we can observe the construction of a popular and public discourse about young ‘Asian’ masculine criminality said to reside in certain British localities. An important source of this build-up of a public discourse about Asian criminality can be found in national and local press and television reports and representations which have focused on areas having significant Asian minority populations [1]. The characteristic feature of this discourse was the way in which ‘Asian’ young men were reassigned a ‘subject position’ (Keith 1995a), from being categorized as primarily law-abiding and/ or victims of crime, especially racial violence, to being associated with criminality, drugs, violence and disorder, and that the roots of this alleged criminality lay in generational tensions brought by the breakdown of Asian family controls on young people. Further, that the sources of these racializing and criminalizing [2] discourses are found not only in the control culture — by which I mean the media, the police and the criminal justice system — but also among white and Asian young people on the street and among certain sections of the Asian parent culture. Within the discourse itself, we need to disentangle the various represen tation s of ‘Asian’ criminality and their sources, from local and national media to police and parent cultures [3]. Although this theme runs throughout the paper, some connected supplementary arguments will be used, the most important of International Journal of the Sociology of Law 1997, 25, 65–86 0194–6595/ 97/ 010065 + 22 $25.00/ 0/ sl960034 © 1997 Academic Press Limited