This chapter is taken directly from an action research project conducted by a youth worker working in a gang intervention project in the Midlands, UK. We have stayed faithful to his original written style in order to capture the character of his approach, as well allowing the reader to reflect on its limitations. We feel this illustrates how ethnopraxis might potentially be used to understand youth violence and how to shape local, meaningful responses to it.

Within this chapter I am going to describe a piece of action research I carried out to improve my practice as a youth worker. Part of my work is to prevent young people from joining gangs. Gangs continue to be presented by the government and the media as a threat to the general public and young people who live in disadvantaged areas. In 2011-13, the Home Office committed £18 million of funding with the aim of preventing young people from engaging in a life of crime (Home Office, 2011b), with £4 million being specifically invested to inhibit their involvement in knife and gang crime (Home Office, 2011b). Research into why young people engage in gang activity is currently a priority for many academics and young people's organisations. This research seeks to further explore the experiences of young people and identify a range of influences linked to their involvement in gang activity in the area in which I work.

I also used three definitions to describe types of gangs.

• • ‘Wannabe groups’: young people who band together in an unstructured group primarily to engage in activities and exciting, reckless, criminal activity, including collective violence against other groups of youths. Wannabees will often claim ‘gang’ territory and adopt ‘gang-style’ identifying markers of some kind.

• • ‘Street gangs’: groups of young people and young adults who band together to form a semi-structured organisation, the primary purpose of which is to engage in planned and profitable criminal behaviour or organised violence against rival street gangs. They tend to be less visible but more permanent than other groups.

• • ‘Criminal business organisations’: groups that exhibit a formal structure and a high degree of sophistication. They are composed mainly of adults and engage in criminal activity primarily for economic reasons and almost invariably maintain a low profile. Thus while they may have a name, they are rarely visible.