With tens of thousands of migrants and refugees on the move throughout Europe, many of them children and adolescents, there has never been a better time to publish a book that considers how we can make and sustain contact with troubled and sometimes troublesome young people on the streets of our European cities; and how we can engage them in a crucial conversation about the kind of adults they want to become and the kind of world they want to bring into being. This book is one of the very few that has attempted to think seriously about how youth work, or informal education, can be used to enable young people who hover apprehensively on the margins of our societies to become active, reflective, citizens, confident in their emerging identities and ready to play their part in making the world a better place.

While this book is ostensibly about young people and violence, it is centrally about how young lives can be transformed by the intervention of appreciative adults, the parameters of whose involvement grows out of their dialogue with these young people, individually and in their peer groups. It is at least ironic that although there has seldom been a time when workers with the skills and knowledge articulated in this book were needed more urgently, funding for such work is being systematically axed. One of the rationales for the cuts is that youth work's flimsy ‘evidence base’ does not justify its continued support. And yet this is the other reason this book is so important; because the work reported here has been meticulously studied by an international team of researchers who demonstrate clearly that this way of working is effective, for both the young people and the communities in which they live. It is my hope that this book will serve to remind those policy makers and service providers charged with dealing with our most disadvantaged, sometimes troublesome, young people that there is an evidence-based mode of social intervention out there that can make a significant difference to the lives of the young people who most perplex them.