Introduction

Through the course of this book, we have attempted to convey both the internal and external complexity of young people’s lives. In our discussion of mattering and social harm, we have sought to describe the psycho-social difficulties that young people can face, particularly those whose biographies and communities are characterized by a concentration of structural harms. These are fostered and reinforced by the profound historical maldistribution of recognition, resources and risk in contemporary Britain, which leaves some young people to enjoy substantial affluence, freedom, prestige and safety, and forces others to negotiate a crushing combination of scarcity, shame, danger and powerlessness. This multifaceted inequality characterizes our historical conjuncture, and means that, though growing up is never easy, different young people face very different predicaments when attempting to establish a sense that they matter – that they are a significant and consequential part of the world. All young people of course have choice and agency in how they navigate their lives and in how they seek to secure a self-perception of mattering. But there are vast disparities in the material and social resources available to young people and in the structural harms that they are exposed to, shaped in large part by a young person’s social class, gender and racialization. The extent and nature of this problem is hugely important in itself: the structure of our society is harmful to far too many children and young people. There are also good reasons to believe, as demonstrated in Chapter 5, that the issue of violence between young people is closely connected to these societal conditions.

These arguments are not wholly novel – they build upon and echo many other studies of young people’s lives and of violence, but we hope that we have offered a fruitful perspective on these issues.

Introduction

We all want to matter: to be a person of significance and consequence in the world. The concept of mattering has received substantial attention in academic psychology during the 21st Century (see especially Elliott, 2009; Flett, 2018, 2022; Prilleltensky and Preilleltensky, 2021), but its impact on related disciplines – such as social theory and criminology – appears to remain relatively limited (there are exceptions – see, for example, Lewis, 2017). In this chapter, we make the case for the value and helpfulness of the concept of mattering for grasping the internal and external complexity of young people’s lives, particularly when it is deployed in a psycho-social mode – reckoning both with the intricacies of inner worlds and with the profound effects of social, economic and political structures. If the concept of social harm is a fruitful tool for considering the factors and forces which have a damaging effect on young people’s lives, we believe the concept of mattering is a fruitful tool for understanding the development of their subjectivity (in later chapters, we bring the two lenses together).

This chapter is in two parts:

• • First, we undertake a detailed exploration of ‘mattering’, deploying it as a psycho-social concept which can help us to understand the development of individuals’ subjectivity: the connections between a person’s inner world and the consequential relationships, social groupings, structures, institutions and systems which make up their outer world.

• • Second, we explore the wide-ranging social changes and global processes of the past fifty years which we think may well be making it harder for people to establish a secure sense of mattering.

As in Chapter 2, violence will not take centre stage. This and the previous chapter provide the conceptual and theoretical backdrop for the following chapters, in which we discuss connections between social harm, mattering and violence. Proceeding in this order is in keeping with our wider commitment to avoid defining young people by violence, and to ensure that the attention given to interpersonal physical violence is kept in proportion: if we are to improve the flourishing of children and young people in our society, it is imperative that we do not just look at their lives through the lens of violence.

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.

A harmful society

For far too many children and young people, Britain is a harmful society in which to grow up. Across the country, social harms of various kinds blight the lives of our youngest generations – they are harmed by institutions, policies, norms, systems, organizations, services, adults and, in some cases, one another. This book explores the harms that affect young people in today’s Britain, in the hope that they could be more effectively reduced and prevented (see Box 0.1 for our definitions of young people and of Britain).

One particularly contentious, divisive and visceral form of harm is physical interpersonal violence between young people. Whether labelled ‘youth violence’, ‘serious youth violence’, ‘gang violence’ or – when a blade is used – ‘knife crime’, the violence which occurs between young people is a source of national consternation. It is neither a simple ‘moral panic’ nor an uncontainable epidemic. It is a type of harm which requires urgent attention and immediate action. It is also the case that it already attracts substantial attention and prompts widespread action, and that some of this attention and action can be, in itself, a source of further harm.

We need both to take seriously the violence which is inflicted on some young people by a tiny minority of their peers, and to place that violence in a wider perspective: in the context of the many other harms which damage, diminish, degrade and demoralize too many young lives. These harms are significant in themselves. Their importance is not restricted to the role they may (or may not) play in encouraging other social maladies. There are, though, connections that can be drawn between harmful social circumstances and violent individual actions. We need to hold individuals responsible for the acts of violence that they commit, and to acknowledge that there are social, cultural, economic and political conditions which ‘predictably breed violence’ (Currie, 2016, p 89). Explanation is not exoneration. The communities which experience the greatest concentration of social harms are also those affected by the highest rates of interpersonal violence.

Introduction

Britain has the resources to ensure that all of its children and young people have ample opportunities to flourish, and are protected effectively from significant harm. For too many, this is not the reality. In this chapter we bring together the conceptual lenses of the previous two chapters, exploring the extent and nature of particularly prominent social harms in the lives of young people in Britain, and the effects that these harms have, particularly on their sense of mattering.

We believe that analysing some of the most damaging social harms affecting young people – and in particular those which can be described as structural harms – is valuable for a number of reasons. First of all, it helps to put interpersonal violence between young people in perspective. As illustrated in Chapter 1, it is a relatively small number of young people who are affected by violence from a peer. We will go on to see in this chapter how, compared to those who experience this specific kind of interpersonal harm, there is a far larger proportion of young people who are affected by the deeply injurious effects of other social harms. To emphasize again: this is not to suggest that violence between young people is not important – as we explained at length in our Introduction, and will go on to explore further in Chapter 5, interpersonal physical violence is a devastating form of harm which requires far more effective societal responses. It is to suggest, however, that if we are invested in the improvement of young people’s lives, we will not be helped by a myopic, tunnel-visioned focus on street-based violence between young people: we must attend to the myriad other forms of social harm which damage and diminish young lives, particularly those structural harms which result from the nature of various policies, systems and institutions in this country.

Secondly, and moreover, the social harms discussed in this chapter connect in significant ways with the problem of violence between young people.

Introduction

To best make sense of interpersonal violence and address it, we need an accurate picture of the nature and scale of the problem. When asked about levels of violence in society, however, people consistently overestimate its prevalence and (often wrongly) perceive things to be getting worse – something commonly referred to as ‘the perception gap’ (see Roberts and Hough, 2005; Mohan et al, 2011). There are many potential causes of the perception gap, including sensationalist, agenda-driven media reporting (Peelo et al, 2004; Humphreys et al, 2019) and the ‘law of small numbers’ – people’s tendency to generalize from a small number of cases (Tversky and Kahneman, 1971). This is particularly important, given the political nature of interpersonal violence. Violence – and crime more generally – frequently dominates media, political and public discourse. Crudely put, money and political capital can be made from distorting the reality of violence and framing it in certain ways (something we discuss at length in Chapter 6).

This chapter provides an insight into the nature and scale of interpersonal violence based on the best available empirical data at the time of writing. We would like to stress that it is primarily descriptive. It presents an account of what violence looks like currently and historically, but it does not generally attempt to provide explanations for what is observed. As such, the chapter serves two main functions. First, it reveals key aspects and trends concerning interpersonal violence, which we hope readers will find interesting and useful in and of itself. And second, it provides an essential grounding for the arguments and analysis that we develop in the remainder of the book. The chapter is structured is as follows:

• • We begin by outlining the different data sources drawn upon in this chapter, discussing their main strengths and limitations.

• • Next, we explore what violence looks like at a national level in England and Wales.

• • Finally, as much of this book focuses on England’s capital city, we provide a more detailed insight into interpersonal violence in London.

The roots of this book lie in a chance encounter back in December 2018, when the authors met in London at an event commemorating the 18th anniversary of the death of Damilola Taylor. As the event drew to a close, we spoke briefly and arranged to spend an afternoon together at Hackney Quest, the youth centre where Luke has worked since 2016. That afternoon, we discussed a range of topics, including the work of the cross-party parliamentary Youth Violence Commission, on which Keir was lead criminologist, and which Luke would later join as co-author of its final report.

Since then, we have worked together closely, not only on this book, but writing journal articles, book chapters and blogs, attending academic and practitioner conferences and, most latterly, on a three-year ESRC-funded project exploring public health approaches to violence reduction. Daily and varied contact over e-mail, phone, Zoom and WhatsApp has resulted in our becoming close friends as much as we are colleagues. We now share as many photos and videos of our own children as we do messages about our work and research.

The relationship we have developed has enabled us to have open and frank conversations about often very difficult and sensitive topics. While our views converge on a great many things, there have also been periods of (in)tense disagreement – we’ve included a footnote in Chapter 2 which summarizes our argument about the value of virtue ethics, for instance. These disagreements could of course have been avoided had we chosen to write separately. However, we believe this book has benefited in numerous ways from the bringing together of two rather different perspectives – one from someone who has worked primarily as a youth worker, and one from someone who has worked primarily as an academic researcher. In part, such benefit lies in what we hope will be the bookߣs broad appeal, to an intended audience that includes practitioners, policy makers and academics. The book reflects a degree of both professional and academic knowledge and experience that it would have lacked were either of us to have approached the task of writing it alone.

Introduction

It is perfectly possible – desirable, we would suggest – to both recognize the distortion, exaggeration and demonization which too often accompanies the portrayal of violence between young people (see Chapter 6), and to acknowledge that too many young people are committing acts of interpersonal violence against one another. There is no value in being squeamish about this violence. We are not ‘against youth violence’ because we wish to deny that there is violence occurring between young people, or because we believe there is any worth in being evasive or euphemistic about the brutal reality of this violence when it does occur, or about the gravity of its consequences.

We do believe, however, that it is impossible to get very far in understanding violence between young people if we only train our lenses sharply downwards, on an apparently bounded world of youth. Interpersonal violence of course requires agency – it requires a decision to be made, consciously or otherwise, and an action to be taken. Indeed, violence is not at all easy to undertake, it requires significant emotional and physical exertion: ‘violence is hard’ (Collins, 2008, p 20). But, following on from our analysis in the previous chapter, we would argue that, in order to understand how interpersonal violence between young people can become possible – to grasp the conditions which make violence more likely in certain places and particular times – we need to attend to the ways in which social harms intrude upon young people’s everyday lives.

In Chapter 4, we tended to look upwards, towards the policies, systems and institutions which exert harmful forms of downward pressure on the lives of young people. In our discussion of mattering in Chapter 3, we looked outwards, from the perspective of the young – we began to explore the experience of subjectivity for young people in 21st century Britain. It is largely through the latter perspective that this chapter will proceed, focused on the small minority of young people who engage in acts of serious interpersonal violence.

We mobilize the conceptual tools explored in previous chapters to offer some reflections on the precipitating factors which can contribute to this kind of violence.

Introduction

In the early 21st century, an edited collection was published with the title Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously (Hillyard et al, 2004). The book played a central role in drawing people’s attention towards the concept of social harm. In the years that followed, an increasing number of academics – many of whom might traditionally have called themselves ‘criminologists’ (and many who would not) – have been turning to social harm as a means of moving beyond some of the limitations and shortcomings associated with the concept of crime. In this chapter, we develop an approach to social harm that we believe holds value in the context of making sense of children and young people’s lives.

This and the following chapter outline the conceptual and theoretical lenses that are applied throughout the remainder of the book (Chapter 3 explores the concept of ‘mattering’). Its structure is as follows:

• • First, we consider the critiques and limitations associated with the concept of crime.

• • Second, we provide an overview of some of what we perceive to be the key debates and points of contention in the social harm literature.

• • Third, we develop and outline our own approach to the concept of social harm.

• • Fourth, we attempt to pre-empt and respond to some of the potential limitations and drawbacks associated with our approach to social harm.

Before we begin, a couple of caveats. For readers unfamiliar with the concept of social harm, there are better places to start than this chapter. For an in-depth account of social harm and its associated field of zemiology, we would recommend reading Canning and Tombs’ (2021) From Social Harm to Zemiology. While this chapter attempts to provide a gentle introduction to the topic and help readers get to grips with a number of key and ongoing debates, it is far from comprehensive in its scope.

Our primary goal is to provide readers with a basic grasp of a conception of social harm that we believe will make good sense to people working with children and young people, as well as to children and young people themselves.