The Eurogang Project

Into The Abyss:
A Personal Journey into the World of Street Gangs

by Mike Carlie, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2002 Michael K. Carlie
Continually updated.

The Eurogang Project

Many thanks to Sarah Brown, one of the outstanding students in my "Gang Phenomenon" class, for her helpful summary below.

As in the United States, street gangs are an issue throughout the European community and elsewhere. The Eurogang Project is a collaboration of European and American researchers who have been meeting once a year since 1998 to exchange information on the gang phenomenon. According to Esbensen (page), the Eurogang Project has three primary objectives:

	To build a foundation of knowledge regarding the European socio-economic conditions and institutional processes that foster or curtail the social exclusion and subsequent emergence and persistence/dissolution of youth gangs and problematic groups;
	to construct an infrastructure for comparative, multi-method, cross-national research on youth violence in group contexts; and
	to disseminate and effectively utilize knowledge to inform the development of effective local, national and international responses to emerging youth crime and violence issues.”

The Eurogang Project consists of six steering committee members including: Prof. Finn-Aage Esbensen, Dr. Frank van Gemert, Prof. Cheryl Maxson, Dr. Frank Weerman, Dr. Judith Aldridge, and Dr. Juanjo Medina. The Project is open to researchers throughout the world who are interested in gang research. There have been as many as one-hundred researchers representing as many as 15 countries who have been involved in Eurogang Project related research.

According to Weerman (Weerman, et. al., page), at the first meeting of The Eurogang Project the following five goals and main principles were established.

	“The group is committed to promoting systematic, empirical research on street gangs.
	The research should be comparative by comparing “gang to non-gang youth, youth in multiple neighborhoods or communities, gang situations in multiple cities and towns, and in multiple countries.
	“. . . (W)e believe that building knowledge about gangs can best proceed with a multi-method approach. We acknowledge the multiple sources of important information and the need for broad, descriptive approaches, as well as rich qualitative methods.”
	The Project recognizes “. . . the importance of separating street gangs from other forms of law-violating youth groups, and to conduct research to understand better the difference between them.”
	“. . . (T)he expansion of comparative, systematic research on street gangs will produce information that can be beneficial for the development of policy and programs.

For additional information about the Eurogang Project, please visit the homepage of the organization as managed by Dr. Finn-Aage Esbensen of the University of Missouri in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

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© 2002 Michael K. Carlie
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the author and copyright holder - Michael K. Carlie.