Draft Paper: Please do not quote without author’s permission

ESRC RESEARCH SEMINAR SERIES: Girls and Education 3-16

Lancaster University, 7th June 2006

Fin Cullen

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Goldsmiths College

TITLE: “Two’s up and poncing fags.” Young women’s smoking practices and gift exchange”

Introduction

In recent years there has been a growing concern that teenage girls in the UK are smoking in greater numbers than teenage boys (Lloyd, Lucas, Holland, McGrellis & Arnold, 1998; Higgins, 2000; Department of Health, 2005; Department of Health, 2006; ASH, 2006). Whilst illicit drug use has often been seen as a ‘masculine practice’, various recent studies have noted an increase in substance use by young women. (Piri, 2001; Measham, 2002). Cigarette use, unlike other substances, has long been marketed specifically towards women as a way of managing weight, enhancing sexual attractiveness and coping with unwanted emotions (Jacobson, 1988; Ettore,1992; Bordo, 1993; Tinkler, 2001). This paper is based on findings from my small scale PhD research into young women’s use of tobacco and alcohol in a town in Southern England. This paper explores how young women’s reciprocal networks of cigarettes operate to underpin friendships and mobilize power within girls’ social networks.

Moreover, that through reciprocity, young women gain status and learn the gendered rules of the group. Within the girls’ friendship groups, the flow of cigarettes as a resource, highlighted alliances, inter group rivalries and provided a space for identity formation. The phrases, “two’s up” and “ poncing fags” of the paper’s title, relate to sharing an individual cigarette between two people, or “poncing” meaning to borrow a cigarette from a friend or acquaintance. In order to share a cigarette, a young person would shout ’two’s up’ or “go twos” or “saves” to the individual with the cigarette, who would then choose whether or not to grant the request and share. Prior work on young people and smoking has begun to look at the role of non commercial sources of cigarettes in supporting youth smoking and has called for further research in this area. (Harrison, Fulkerson & Park, 2000; Croghan, Aveyard, Griffin, Cheng, 2003; Turner, Gordon & Young, 2004) In this paper I explore how such trade underpins girls’ friendship groups and challenge some of the assumptions underpinning ‘peer pressure’ models of young people’s tobacco use.

The research originates in observations I made as a practicing drugs educator within secondary schools and youth centres prior to commencing my studies. I felt that much of tobacco and alcohol education I witnessed was ineffective to student’s needs, because girls did not identify with many of the messages given, and I wished to look at the area from young women’s own perspective. I grew increasingly uneasy with the dominance of peer pressure as a concept within drug education discourses that continued to be used in many of the classroom interventions. Furthermore, as observed by a variety of scholars (Coggan & McKellar, 1994; Cohen, 1996; Ungar, 2000; Denscombe, 2001a; Denscombe, 2001b) the peer pressure thesis within drugs education, denies both the pleasurable aspects of drug taking and young people’s own individual agency. Moreover, much drugs education within the classroom remains gender differentiated, and seems based around a normative heterosexual femininity that focuses on fertility and motherhood.

Various commentators have noted how drugs education as a practice within schools and youth work settings remains a relatively under theorised area (Cohen, 1996; Evans, 2001; Blackman, 2004; O’Malley & Valverde, 2004; Lancelott, 2005), and deficit models of drug users and young women continue to underpin many drug education interventions. I highlight how notions of peer pressure flatten and over simplify the complexities of girls’ tobacco use, by perceiving such practices as forming part of negative peer pressure in peer group relations. Moreover, as Denscombe (2001a, 2001b) argues young people’s uses of cigarettes, for example may be about an individual negotiation of risk taking behaviours and the development of a ‘cool’ persona, which stresses individual agency, rather than openly admitting to adhering to a peer group norm.

I discuss the gendering of girls’ smoking practices and the various ways that young women used tobacco as a social currency in the field settings. Trading cigarettes was one of a range of gift giving practices taking place amongst teenage girls. Young women exchanged a variety of other material goods, including snacks, music files, clothes, text messages, mobile phone credit and photographs within the field settings. However, this paper focuses on cigarette exchange, due to its relative ‘illicit’ status, and that unlike these other exchange practices, young women’s tobacco use provides a site for education and health policy interventions. Whilst non-smokers generally did not participate in the informal exchange of cigarettes, they often accompanied smoking friends to the smokers’ corner, or lent others money in order to purchase tobacco. Young women’s cigarette exchange must thus be viewed as one of a range of practices that are intimately connected to a host of informal daily trades and favours that pass between young women, and establishes their place within their friendship groups. This paper initially outlines the research settings, before analysing some of the ways the informal trade in cigarettes between girls was used to negotiate status and perform smoking identities. By drawing upon social theories of gift giving, I problematise the uncritical use of peer pressure, and instead reframe young women’s tobacco use as a wider process of sharing, and the construction of individual and group identities. Using examples from my fieldwork, I highlight how cigarettes are used as an informal currency to negotiate group relations, power structures and individual and group identities.

Background

This research took place between October 2003 and March 2005 in an affluent borough on the edge of a large city in England. Although the area is relatively prosperous, the young women involved in this study came from a wide range of social, cultural and economic backgrounds. These were a generic youth centre and youth provision in a large further education college. The young people who used the youth centre were from the immediate local area, and were predominantly white British aged between 14 and 18. The college students were older aged 16-19, and were ethnically mixed, as the catchment area for the local college was extensive, with students often commuting large distances across the city.

I was employed as a sessional youth worker in the youth centre for over 12 months, and volunteered one day a week at the college youth provision, known here as the common room. The recreational areas within the college were split down subcultural lines and despite the common room being used by young people from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds including, White European, Lebanese, Black British, West African and White British, the dominant culture was white, middle class and ‘alternative’. The common room was seen by other students as a hang out for ‘grungers’[1] and ‘gays’, in contrast to the working class Black British ‘rudie’[2] straight cultural space of the refectory. The young people involved in this research were common room and youth centre users and reflected the diversity of the provisions user profile. The two groups of young people at the college and youth centre were not mutually exclusive. Friendship circles overlapped, and there was a mixing of students and youth centre users, as year 11 pupils began to enrol at the college to take academic and vocational qualifications, and the college students used the youth centre for social events.

The research involved a variety of techniques including participant observation, group and individual interviews, bulletin board postings and visual participatory methods. In all, 27 young women were interviewed either individually or in informal groups. This paper will draw upon the emerging findings from interview and participant observations from these settings. To ensure anonymity, all names in this paper have been altered and where possible, substituted by young people’s own choice of pseudonym.

Defining Peer Pressure

One definition of peer pressure is to be influenced by peers to “do something or to keep from doing something else, no matter if you personally want to or not.” (Clasen & Brown, 1985:458, quoted in Ungar, 2000). The concept of peer pressure remains popular in much drug and alcohol literature relating to young people, where it is often used with negative connotations, and a suggestion of young people being compelled towards ‘deviant’ activities (Ungar, 2000; Denscombe, 2001a). There has been a range of critiques of peer pressure over the past decade (Coggan & McKeller, 1994; Cotterell, 1996; Michell, 1997; Ungar, 2000; Denscombe, 2001a). These critiques are centred on three main areas of contention. Firstly, that the peer pressure model does not take into account the heterogeneity of young people’s experience and the complexity of adolescent social networks (Cotterell, 1996; Michell, 1997). Secondly, that the model presumes passivity on the part of young people and negates individual’s own sense of autonomy and personal agency. The peer pressure thesis is seen to assume a ‘deficit’ model of children and young people who are pushed into a behaviour because of a personal ‘lack’ rather than an active choice (Coggan & McKeller, 1994; Cotterell, 1996; Michell, 1997; Ungar, 2000; Denscombe, 2001a). Finally, such a thesis negates the inherent sense of enjoyment in taking a drug or participating in risky behaviour. Whilst work on drug use has often negated the pleasurable aspects of drug use (Measham, 2004; O’Malley & Valverde, 2004), this pleasure is not only about the pharmaceutical effects on the body, but also the socially cohesive aspects of the practice of drug taking itself.

Michell’s (1997) work on young people’s social networks and smoking, argues that many young people do not smoke, and the likelihood of taking up the habit varied depending on their place in the social network. In Michell’s research, ‘top girls’, ‘troublemakers’ and ‘low status’ pupils were the most likely to smoke. Michell concludes that despite its widespread use, the term peer pressure in relation to school based smoking prevention initiatives were ‘almost meaningless’.

“There is pressure on teenagers, but it is mainly to do with purchasing the ‘right’ image and wearing the trendiest gear and logos. For girls, there is pressure to be seen to attract boys.“ (Michell, 1997: 12)

This tension between individualised and group explanations for young people’s tobacco is further expanded in Denscombe’s (2001a, 2001b) more recent work on young people’s identities. Denscombe suggests that one needs to consider young people’s drug use as part of a wider reciprocal relationship with others in creating their own identities. Much of the material that arose from my fieldwork seemingly supports work that is critical of the unproblematic use of peer pressure in explaining young people’s risk taking and substance use practices. (Cotterell, 1990; Coggan & McKeller, 1994; Michell, 1997; Denscombe. 2001a, 2001b)

As a drugs educator I grew frustrated with the continued dominance of the idea of peer pressure within school based prevention programmes to explain why young people continue to resist health education messages and smoke, drink and take drugs. This is not to say that young people necessarily agree with the idea of ‘peer pressure’, or cannot be resistant to such dominant discourses. In recent Australian work, Martino & Pallotta-Chiarolli, (2003) explored how young men reacted to dominant health education messages within the classroom. These young men in an attempt to perform a ‘cool’ masculinity actively rejected the hegemonic discourses of the health education interventions of the teacher. Martino & Pallotta-Charolli suggest that this is because the drug messages within the classroom did not tally with the young men’s own experiences.

Moreover, I want to argue that social exchange within young women’s social networks, creates space to perform aspirational gendered and cultural individual identities, creating social solidarity, achieving social status and creation bonds of belonging that moves beyond notions of peer pressure as a mere attempt to ‘fit in’. Young women may not always strongly identify as a ‘smoker’, but rather a ‘good friend’ in participating in these exchange networks. Similarly, these social networks may be dynamic and fluid entities with young women choosing to conform to some group codes whilst rejecting others, or instead use the prevailing codes for their own particular ends.

Starting Smoking- Social Exchange

Currently, within the UK it is illegal to sell tobacco products to young people under the age of 16. The young female smokers in this study reported obtaining tobacco from a range of sources including friends, family and from commercial outlets. Young women who failed to ‘pass’ for 16, to purchase cigarettes would therefore either trade with other young people who could, or alternatively there was a word-of-mouth network of which local shops would sell cigarettes either in packs or singularly to children. Girls explained their particular patterns of use and allegiance to certain brands by raising factors such as the cost and the availability.

“When I was in secondary school every one smoked B&H (Benson & Hedges), and if you didn’t have enough money it was Sovereign, but now B&H are £2.50, and I remember when they were like £1.80 for Sovereign. Then my friend smoked Richmond because they gave discount.” (Chloe, White British, 18, Youth Centre)