Addicted to the Risk, Recognition and Respect that the Graffiti Lifestyle Provides: Towards an Understanding of the Reasons for Graffiti Engagement

This paper, details from an educational perspective the reasons graffitists give for their involvement in graffiti. Data gathered from interviews, web-blogs and newspaper reports were analysed within the grounded theory tradition allowing the core category of, addicted to the risk, recognition and respect that the graffiti lifestyle provides to emerge. In this regard, adolescent graffiti-writers contend that sustained involvement in graffiti-writing provides a rush experience, which over time becomes addictive as it rewards them with a non-conforming social identity, recognitional status, and the highly-prized graffiti-writer reputation. However, as they move out of adolescence into early adulthood, the addictive rushes previously gained from engagement in illegal high-risk acts of graffiti tagging, they claim, morphs into an obsessive desire for obtaining community respect. Thus, the outcome of the study suggests that the issue of graffiti-proliferation goes beyond the confines of educational/criminological research and enters the sphere of mental health, opening up different treatment options for recidivist graffiti-writers.