YOUNG, Ahead of Print.
The article analyses how online audiences discuss the ‘street gang’ phenomenon in Finland, a topic that has garnered a considerable amount of public attention and concern. The public discussions have been clearly gendered and racialized, and young immigrant men have been constructed as the main culprits. Gangs have been constructed as a threat to Finnish values and national security. The discussions resemble the moral panics emerging in times of societal uncertainty. Consisting of comments on news articles about street gangs, data for the article were collected from three online media news sites (hs.fi, yle.fi and svenska.yle.fi). The analysis combines critical discursive psychology with an intersectional approach to show how intersectional categorisations, such as age, class, gender and ethnicity, are mobilized by the general public to construct accountability for society, the family or the individual.