In this introductory part we first clarify and contextualise the two concepts that are integral to our study – youth work and youth violence. We recognise from the outset that readers who may be unfamiliar with the historical and ideological development of the youth work profession may need this set out, although we anticipate that those immersed or well versed in the management and delivery of youth work might welcome revisiting this as a way to challenge and revitalise their own practice and understanding. So we cover, in considerable depth, what we feel is distinct about youth work from other professions that engage with young people and how youth work is currently conceived (theoretically) and practised in the different geographical and cultural contexts we have spent time in. We hope this provides a conceptual basis as our arguments develop and we begin to illustrate how different national political structures can affect youth work practice on the ground. In order to augment rather than simply reproduce established theoretical perspectives, we then set out some distinctive theoretical ideas that we feel became central to our analysis, incorporating ideas drawn from other disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, sociology and criminology.

Finally, we present a detailed exposition of our research methodology; that is, how we gathered the findings that populate the subsequent chapters. We feel strongly that any meaningful response to youth violence needs to be rooted in an effort to understand how it is manifesting within people's lives and communities. So we set out our research method in detail in order to provide both academic researchers and youth work practitioners alike with a model on which they can construct their own attempts to understand the problem of youth violence from the ‘inside out’. This is integral to our overarching case – that practitioners need to conceive of themselves as researchers too – and manifests in concrete form in Chapter Fifteen where we include a worked example of such ‘ethnopraxis’ provided by a youth worker working on a gang prevention project. Through this, we hope to show how methodological approaches to research can mirror a general stance on knowledge creation in line with the critical principles that form the bedrock of youth and community work practice.