These childhood experiences often perpetuated further problems during adolescence, thereby exacerbating the identity crisis. For instance, all respondents except one who were from African-Caribbean backgrounds and raised by their mothers or grandmothers also became young single mothers themselves. They mostly viewed being a teenage mother as a traumatic time where they had to face practical and emotional hardships such as poverty and even homelessness. Jamila, a third-generation British African-Caribbean respondent in her thirties and a single mother, spoke of how despite moving out of the family home and trying to be independent as a teenager, she still felt discontented:
Something was missing, and even though I was independent something was missing. I remember being with my friends and saying, “I’ve got to go back to the church”. My mum raised me as a Christian, she didn’t go to the church herself, but she sent us every Sunday.
Factors such as an adolescent leaving home, getting a job or starting to have sex all contribute to a decline in religious observance, since the emerging adult is no longer ‘protected’ by parental religious involvement (Roberts and Yamane 2016:109). Salient here is that Jamila was able to make this connection between her personal feelings and a lack of religiosity, which highlights the link between aspects of one’s childhood socialisation and identity formation as part of the ongoing conversion process:
Rahima also had a baby as a teenager. She described her adolescent years as “lonely”—she had a failing relationship with her baby’s father and felt let down by friends, both important sources of support in “the process of self-definition” (Kroger 2000:63; also see Giddens [1990/1994:92-100] for discussion on trust and ontological security):
I was working but struggling on my own. My dreams were unfulfilled, and times were hard. So, I asked myself, is this what we’re here for? At times I was really destitute.
While exploring “meaningful life philosophies, social values, religious or spiritual orientations, and values regarding important relationships” are considered important ventures in the lives of many mid-adolescents (Bishop & Inderbitzen, 1995; Markstrom-Adams & Smith, 1996, cited in Kroger 2000:63), for Rahima, these were also clearly coupled with deep frustration towards the lack of opportunity to explore vocational directions. These are “often marked by a serious assessment of one’s abilities and goals in preparing for further education or work after high school”, and include an “assessment of one’s skills, interests, and talents, as well as [other] channels for expression” (Kroger 2000:63).
Malika described how, by the age of 21, she had left home, been in a bad relationship and was caring for a child whose father was in prison. She ended up taking various jobs that she failed to hold down and described herself as “going off the rails”:
I wasn’t happy with my life, struggling to make everything come together. My friends were in similar situations. We were all living a hedonistic life, nightclubbing a lot. I started to think about where I was heading—that I have to do better. I was fighting with society.
Saffa, a second-generation African-Caribbean respondent in her thirties, also linked her feelings of insecurity and uncertainty to existential questions about her life. Like Malika, she was a teenage single parent to a child whose father was in prison, and felt desperate to be connected to something:
I wanted to be a good girl so I would say 10 ‘Hail Marys’ and one ‘Our Father’ in front of a statue in church, but there was absolutely no connection—nothing. So, I thought: “Does that make me bad?”
What stands out about these experiences in the context of religious conversion is that integrating an emerging sense of sexual identity into these respondents’ “sense of personal identity, a key task of mid-adolescents”, resulted in feelings of extreme devastation (Kroger 2000:70). Thus, feeling down and depressed was strongly connected to the guilt and shame of having ‘sinned’ in premarital sexual relationships, in addition to the stigma of having had a child out of wedlock and being a single mother. For Kroger (2000), such experiences indicate a lack of social institutions within a culture to “provide a general framework in which identity [can] take shape and is allowed expression” (Kroger 2000:66). In other words, “most societies and their socializing agents are clear about what they wish their mid-adolescents to avoid (e.g., drugs and alcohol, delinquency, teenage pregnancy, to name but a few targets), [but] they are not very clear about what they wish their adolescents to achieve” (Kroger 2000:67).
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