The dangerousness of youth-at-risk: the possibilities of surveillance and intervention in uncertain times PETER KELLY This paper will explore the dangerous possibilities provoked by the popular and promiscuous construction of the category of ``youth-at-risk''. In an age of large-scale and profound social changes, narratives of uncertainty and risk dominate popular, political and theoretical discourses about youth. Under these social conditions, the discourse of youth-at-risk is mobilized from a variety of intellectual and political positions in various attempts to regulate the behaviors and dispositions of youth. The paper will argue that these discourses provoke dangerous possibilities for the increased surveillance of, and intervention into, young people's lives by regulatory authorities (schools, police, health services, and juvenile justice systems) and the forms of expertise recruited by these agencies. # 2000 The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescents Introduction If it is true that young people are the nation's most precious resource, then the nation needs better means of measuring the overall effectiveness of the socialization process. Systematic efforts are needed to assess the adolescent population over time. Such efforts will require multifaceted measures that examine a range of adolescent attributes, including perceptions, behaviors and accomplishments... The need to adequately monitor adolescents from low-income families is especially urgent. Relatively little is known about the exposure of the adolescent population to high-risk settings on a national and regional basis. In addition, studies do not adequately sample by race or ethnicity, and hence little is known about some of the most vulnerable populations (Panel on High-Risk Youth, 1993, pp. 255±256). The question of youth, of what to do with them, of how to school them, or police them, or regulate them, or house them, or employ them, or prevent them from becoming involved in any number of risky (sexual, eating, drug (ab)using or peer cultural) practices are questions which have a substantial historical aspect.* In the liberal democracies at the start of the millennium, the crisis of youth-at-risk is a key marker in debates about youth among intellectuals, social commentators, politicians, bureaucrats and experts in various domains of expertise. Swadener and Lubeck (1995) have argued that the truth of youth-at-risk rehearses, in part, the historical truths of youth as delinquent, deviant and disadvantaged. However, a historically novel aspect of the truth of youth-at-risk is that, potentially, every behavior, every practice, every group of young people can be constructed in terms of risk (Tait, 1995). At a quite fundamental level this paper is not about the risky practices, behaviors and dispositions of young people. Nor is it my concern to identify or argue for appropriate Reprint requests and correspondence should be addressd to: Peter Kelly, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Queensland, Ipswich, Qld 4305, Australia (E-mail: peter.kelly@mailbox.up.edu.au) *For an Australian perspective on these histories, and the ways in which class, gender and race have been significant in conceiving youth as deviant, delinquent and/or disadvantaged, see Beasley (1991), Bessant (1991), Carrington (1991), Collard and Palmer (1991), Irving (1991), Maunders (1991), Sherington (1991) and Wyn (1991). 0140-1971/00/040463+14 $3500/0 # 2000 The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescents Journal of Adolescence 2000, 23, 463±476 doi:10.1006/jado.2000.0331, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on