In this part we present the cornerstones of our research findings. We hope these chapters will be of particular relevance to those youth professionals practising in the area of youth violence prevention who may be seeking to find a language to capture their ongoing activity or looking for new ideas and approaches. We employ our theoretical framework to produce a multi-level practice model that incrementally moves from ‘micro’ to ‘macro’ responses to youth violence, supporting our suggestions with qualitative data gathered from young people and youth workers.

We show how psychosocial criminological perspectives, including desistance theory, can help inform the understanding and practice of relationship-based work with young people, and how existentialist philosophy can generate useful perspectives on those relationships, the self, and individual meaning-making in the face of hopelessness. Utilising community work literature and critical theory, we then widen the vision of youth work responses to include responses that seek to challenge, not collude with, violence that originates in and is mediated through communities and wider society. This all amounts to an admittedly wide conceptualisation of youth work practice that encompasses one-to-one work within relationships, community work, efforts to challenge structural oppression and the struggle to find hope and meaning within the daily lives of young people.