Having worked as a youth and community worker in Glasgow for 15 years, Dr Stuart Waiton is now a sociology and criminology lecturer at The University of Abertay Dundee. In 1997 Stuart helped to set up a youth research group - Generation Youth Issues - to examine and to challenge what he saw as the over regulation in society of children and young people’s lives. He remains the chair and a director of this charity. In 2010 he founded the campaigning blog Take a Liberty (Scotland).

Dr Waiton has been a regulator contributor to the Times Education Supplement in Scotland, now writing for the Scotsman, and is also a regular contributor on Scottish television and radio current affairs programmes. Author of Scared of the kids: Curfews, Crime and the Regulation of Young People, this book published in 2001 was the TES Book of the Week and was re-published in 2008 by Abertay University Press. His newest book The Politics of Antisocial Behaviour: Amoral Panics was also published in 2008 by Routledge.