Boy From Peckham

In many ways Attack the Block reflects the hegemonic representations of youth identity, namely that young people and teenagers are defined as belonging to gangs, with lives dominated by crime, violence, anti-social behaviour, and conflict with adult society and the police. These mediated representations of youth identity can be read in many different ways, with the complex anti hero character of Moses who begins the film by mugging an innocent woman, but ends it by renouncing his criminal past and his desires to be a drug dealer. Whilst reinforcing the dominant reading of youth in the media, as the urban street gang, uneducated, using slang, alienated and disaffected, the film ends with the youth characters 'saving the world'. As David Gauntlett states, this "Identity is complex" and the collective identity of the youth characters in the film can be read in many different ways, as both a deviant threat and in a more compassionated preferred reading, one where young people and adults are forced to work together as seen when

“But theatre kept John out of trouble completely. The theatre was his second home, it was the only place I saw him.”

“A lot of boys in his year are now in prison or dead,”