Stigma and Penalty in the Everyday Lives of Black British Young Women : The Case of Child Q.

Miller, Esmorie (2026) Stigma and Penalty in the Everyday Lives of Black British Young Women : The Case of Child Q. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Racial Injustice and Resistance :. Palgrave Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Indigeneity and Criminal Justice (PSREICJ) . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 293-320. ISBN 9783032022417

Abstract

British scholars of race, in a call for change, exhort critical expansion of analyses exploring contemporary race matters. This challenges orthodoxies like the criminological tendency to focus on statistics of offenders and their purportedly exceptional criminality. Indeed, scholars denounce such thinking for essentialising racialised peoples as risky and dangerous. Underpinned by approaches reproducing statistics of racialised peoples’ increasing numbers in the penal system, such analytical models foreground criminality and, as some scholars note, the effect has seen the correlation of racialised peoples’ identities with deviance (Phillips, et al., 2019). The othering of racialised peoples has global significance, with those like de Silva (2007) remarking on the historic embeddedness of this phenomenon, despite the typical delinking of discussions from their rootedness in colonial domination and the consequential reproduction of normalised violence in racialised peoples’ lives. This chapter responds to calls for critical expansion, prioritising a youth justice perspective, using the Child Q case—a Black, British, female secondary student stripped searched without cause, by Metropolitan Police Officers, while at school. Grounded in an intersectional analysis, the chapter takes the approach that for racialised youth, their everyday navigation of institutions, beyond the penal estate, is an unexplored field and a missed opportunity to discuss this more expanded conception of penalty, as crucial for critical criminological. That this is focused on structural, racial intransigence instead of individual blame, is especially relevant to this collection’s goals, centering racist institutions, procedures and practices, and their impacts, beyond the penal estate. Observed through the intersectional lens, the chapter foregrounds that overlapping race/gender/youth experience, arguing that Child Q enables an analysis on the workings of penalty, in the everyday, as an effect of racial stigma. While observing the Child Q case study through an intersectional lens the chapter also draws on archival data, historicising (as scholars exhort) the rootedness of punitiveness, particularly for Black youth, within the British Education system. Indeed, in an arrangement where policing surveillance is rationalised in schools, penalty supersedes lenience and concern for youth like Child Q, and this is proposed to have the amplified effect of retribution, intersecting with the a priori punitive force of racial stigmata. The Child Q case study takes the analysis beyond the penal estate and customary concerns essentialising race as transgressive and enables a crucial exploration of racialised young women’s entrenched, disproportionately unequal positioning, within their everyday cross institutional navigation. Notably, this is differentiated from concerns with their purportedly offender identities and disproportionate criminality. The chapter concludes by offering a conceptual framework for understanding this notion of everyday penalty as an outcome of a system marked by intersecting fault lines, drawing necessary attention to the particularised pains shaped by the race, gender, youth intersection.