Youth Involvement in Illicit Economies: Beyond Crime, Choice, and Victimhood

This chapter reframes youth involvement in illicit economies as a patterned social outcome rather than individual deviance. Illicit economies are conceptualised as embedded systems of production, exchange, and governance that operate alongside formal institutions in everyday life while exploiting regulatory gaps. Youth is analysed as a structural position often shaped by blocked transitions from education into employment, punitive policing, and restricted mobility, and by the psychosocial pressures these conditions can generate, making young people available to illicit labour and expendable within it. The chapter traces pathways into illicit economies through overlapping constraints, opportunities, and narrative seduction, then examines life inside these worlds as work, socialisation, identity production, and moral ordering. It foregrounds harm, coercion, and risk concentration at the bottom of illicit hierarchies, showing how agency becomes bounded over time. Disengagement is treated as a relational process of re-embedding that requires material security and new narratives recognised by institutions and communities. The chapter concludes with implications for inclusive policy and prevention, as well for academic research.