Introduction

If there is one central message of this book, it is this: we should not just aim for less violence between young people, we should aim for our society to be a far better and less harmful place in which to grow up. These goals are inseparable.

With that in mind, this conclusion is composed of three parts:

• • First, we retrace our steps and summarize the main arguments of the book.

• • Second, we indulge in a brief excursion into dystopian futurism, painting a grim picture of what the year 2030 could look like for our children and young people.

• • Third, we describe some of the changes that we believe would help to make Britain a less harmful and a safer place for children and young people. We start this section by outlining the importance of addressing the maldistribution of four Rs: recognition, resources, risk and (state) retribution, building on many of the themes from earlier chapters of the book. We then move on to describe the more specific changes to policies, systems and institutions that we believe are needed to improve young people’s lives.

We are conscious that much of this book has been written in a critical register, and so the vast bulk of this conclusion is dedicated to the third of the preceding points: to specific suggestions of the economic, political and social changes that our young people need. We do think it is important, however, to put this positive vision in the context of the more harmful future that we could be headed to, if certain tendencies discussed in this book continue, in order to further draw out the importance and urgency of significant social change – hence the dystopian excursion which makes up the second part of this conclusion.

The central arguments of this book: social harm, mattering and violence between young people

In the first chapter of this book, we laid out the latest statistical data available to us on the phenomenon of violence between young people.