Where there is protest masculinity – an exaggerated and aggressive form of masculinity performance expressed as a response to marginalization – there is also a vulnerable masculinity. They are two sides of the same coin. This was brought to the fore in the narratives throughout this book. Protest masculinity is constructed as a strategy to disguise insecurity, whereas vulnerable masculinity is the root of the discontent. Therefore, there can be no protest masculinity without vulnerable masculinity: they are in a symbiotic relationship. What became clear in the participants’ narratives is that although protest masculinity could be used to conceptualize the main, externalizing parts of the participants’ behaviour while gang-involved, it did not account for the co-existing vulnerable masculinities that the men discussed in retrospect. This is significant because, without looking at the emotional aspects of the men's inner worlds, protest masculinity alone can be seen to merely reinforce a marginalized pursuit of hegemonic masculinity: a toxic presentation of violence as an end of itself. However, this does not describe the complexities of how the invulnerable external presentation can be developed to mask complex underlying trauma. Violence was the means through which the men negotiated their position between these poles. Attempting to shift between subordinated childhood masculinity to agentic protest masculinity was a process of navigating the patriarchal world in which they resided. Violence victimization was an expression of vulnerability, which perpetration attempted to invert.

The narratives in this book convey an ongoing relationship throughout between vulnerability and violence, navigated within the pressures of masculinity. This began with participants’ experiences of domestic violence and abuse (DVA), which I outline in what follows as itself an expression of the pursuit of power in marginalized circumstances (relying on the symbiotic relationship between protest masculinity and vulnerable masculinity). The participants inhabited subordinated masculinity in relation to the DVA perpetrator.