Permanent exclusion of young men from secondary school and its influence on their offending and social exclusion in Belize City, Belize

Using a qualitative research design, the contextual factors and processes associated with criminal offending and wider social exclusion were examined for six Black young men from the Southside of Belize City. The young men had been permanently excluded from secondary school between the ages of 14 and 17 years and had been criminally charged. Face-to-face, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the young men and their mothers after cross-referencing school exclusion data from secondary schools and youth-based organisations with criminal offending data from the Belize Police Department. The study examined the extent of the influence of permanent school exclusion on the offending behaviour and the multidimensional disadvantages experienced in the post-school exclusion lives of the young men. The findings suggest that multiple disadvantages associated with the social environments of the home, neighbourhood, and peer group served as risk factors that contributed to early offending behaviour. Most of the young men grew up alongside demographically similar peers in lone-parent households in neighbourhoods that had a shared historical experience of social and economic marginality, including poverty, high rates of violence, and a proliferation of gangs. However, permanent school exclusion served as a critical life event that deprived the young men of access to education and the opportunity to acquire formal educational qualifications, which set into motion a dynamic process of social exclusion through multiple forms of exclusion, particularly in relation to their participation in education and training, the labour market, social networks, and their experience of criminalisation. In the end, they experienced a cyclical pattern of precarious engagement in low-quality or unsecured work, unemployment, and short-term training programmes, none of which ameliorated their economic marginality. A concurrent process of criminalisation occurred as the young m