I got caught up in a gun fight in Brazil in 2007. Young people from the barrios (slum areas) were shooting at each other in the stylish streets of Ipanema while my friends and I ducked in a taxi as bullets flew overhead. My action wasn’t that of a skilful youth worker – I was definitely avoiding the street conflict!

One of my first casework issues as a national official of the CYWU union in 1987 was to deal with the trauma suffered by a member in London who had been locked in a youth centre by a 10-year-old, who had been high on cocaine, wielding a loaded pistol.

At one level youth violence is neither new, nor confined to Britain’s 1,300 worst estates. But at another level it is a worsening part of urban life in increasingly unequal societies. The conditions of the most disenfranchised young people embody the accumulated neglect caused by 30 years of deindustrialisation and economic liberalism and totally inadequate youth policies. For the first time since the reforming zeal of the late 19th century, the next generation is being abandoned.

Yob rulers

Curious about my overseas taxi experience in Brazil, I watched the film City of God, about street children in the Brazilian slums who knew nothing except gang membership and the callous disregard for life that goes with it. I reflected how this environment was a matter of degree away from the ‘dangerous places’ in Britain observed by Bea Campbell in her 1993 book Goliath (Campbell, 1993). I also thought of Francis Gilbert’s work Yob nation (Gilbert, 2006), where he shows how yobbish behaviour has become more and more woven into the fabric of our institutions. It has cascaded through various subcultures, like the bullying workplace, and has moved from the state to the streets.

I have asked dozens of union members, skilled youth workers, working with street gangs and the most vulnerable and disadvantaged young people in Britain, what causes such irrational gang-related violence.