Are Uniforms an Attack on Youth Rights?
Are uniforms, in fact, part of an attempt to control young people on the part of schools, the government or even adults as a whole? The number of cities with youth curfews has increased dramatically in recent years and the criminal justice system has also become much harsher on juvenile offenders in recent years. Are uniforms in schools linked to these shifts? Mike Males devotes a chapter in his 1999 book Framing Youth to debunking the myth that young people are not oppressed. However, he doesn’t see uniforms as anything more than a “cosmetic crackdown.” “School uniforms don’t put a burden on anybody but students and they don’t put much of a burden on students.” Not everyone sees it this way. Cheyenne says that some school administrators “have embraced uniforms as a realistic way to impose control on students.” David Burns and Kerry Rockquemore echo this sentiment in their research. They label uniforms as means of “social control” that “establish boundaries between members of separate
