Responding to Youth Violence Through Youth Work

Abstract

The ‘problem’ of violence involving young people and how to respond meaningfully to it continues to occupy the minds of policy-makers and other stakeholders across Europe. Based on a two-year multi-national research project examining youth work responses to youth violence, this book develops a unique analytical frame that presents a model for meaningful responses to youth violence at 4 levels – the personal/psychological, the community/cultural, the structural/symbolic and the existential. The authors develop a number of original themes, namely that for street based youth work to have an impact on street violence it needs to be challenging and avoid collusion with violence, and that interventions need to be aimed at individuals, their communities and the state. Additionally, the authors discuss the transformative potential of an existential approach to youth violence, i.e. one that focuses on meaning making, interpersonal encounter and the privileging of improvised ‘in the moment’ interventions. They also examine how the disciplinary split between sociology and psychology can hinder understanding of youth violence. The authors argue for a psychosocial theoretical approach such as the need to re-think the character of worker-young people relationships, emphasising the complexity of the inner and outer worlds of young people involved in violence. Creating public policy for good practice involves contesting social policy narratives that demonise young people by simplistically identifying them as a threat to others; The need for street based youth workers to meaningfully inform policy responses by seeing themselves as simultaneously practitioners and as ethnographic researchers – an activity we call ethnopraxis.