Ram raiding the colony: Māori youth crime in capitalist ideology

ABSTRACT The 2023 New Zealand general election was marked by media narratives about a youth crime crisis, with special emphasis placed on ram raids and the Māori children and young people blamed for perpetrating them. We show that empirical data do not support the claim that youth crime is surging, and argue that fears of ram raids tap into longstanding beliefs about Māori. Using archival sources from the era of early European settlement in Aotearoa, we show that Pākehā settlers constructed Māori children and young people as uniquely dangerous delinquents. Using Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology and subjectivation, we argue that this delinquentisation played a key role in constituting a colonial ideology that would justify primitive accumulation, colonisation, and the imposition of the capitalist mode of production in Aotearoa. Looking to the contemporary neoliberal era, we argue that moral panics about ram raids continue this colonial ideology of delinquentisation. By subjectivating children and young people as delinquents, the capitalist class is able to use the criminal justice system to displace responsibility for the crisis of social reproduction precipitated by neoliberal economic policy. We conclude by showing the limitations of this strategy and arguing for intensified struggle against the ideology of delinquentisation.