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This paper is concerned with two components of public action concerning inner-city or neighborhood youth: on the one hand, the teams/units providing intensive educative support (UEER), which practice a pedagogy of rupture (or division), and, on the other, the incivilities that have served to highlight acts of a non-penal character. A study of the official texts shows that these two elements were identified and dealt with in the context of the urban policy of the Juppé and Jospin governments. The concept of age of security makes it possible to describe and interpret on the one hand a historical period which emerged in the 1980s and, on the other, an age of life identified by the insecurity that it provokes.