Introduction

It is perfectly possible – desirable, we would suggest – to both recognize the distortion, exaggeration and demonization which too often accompanies the portrayal of violence between young people (see Chapter 6), and to acknowledge that too many young people are committing acts of interpersonal violence against one another. There is no value in being squeamish about this violence. We are not ‘against youth violence’ because we wish to deny that there is violence occurring between young people, or because we believe there is any worth in being evasive or euphemistic about the brutal reality of this violence when it does occur, or about the gravity of its consequences.

We do believe, however, that it is impossible to get very far in understanding violence between young people if we only train our lenses sharply downwards, on an apparently bounded world of youth. Interpersonal violence of course requires agency – it requires a decision to be made, consciously or otherwise, and an action to be taken. Indeed, violence is not at all easy to undertake, it requires significant emotional and physical exertion: ‘violence is hard’ (Collins, 2008, p 20). But, following on from our analysis in the previous chapter, we would argue that, in order to understand how interpersonal violence between young people can become possible – to grasp the conditions which make violence more likely in certain places and particular times – we need to attend to the ways in which social harms intrude upon young people’s everyday lives.

In Chapter 4, we tended to look upwards, towards the policies, systems and institutions which exert harmful forms of downward pressure on the lives of young people. In our discussion of mattering in Chapter 3, we looked outwards, from the perspective of the young – we began to explore the experience of subjectivity for young people in 21st century Britain. It is largely through the latter perspective that this chapter will proceed, focused on the small minority of young people who engage in acts of serious interpersonal violence.

We mobilize the conceptual tools explored in previous chapters to offer some reflections on the precipitating factors which can contribute to this kind of violence.