We are delighted with the addition of Against Youth Violence to the Studies in Social Harm series. Billingham and Irwin-Rogers provide a piercing social harm analysis that offers fresh insights into a pressing and much debated issue. In doing so, the authors successfully: dissect the true scale and nature of youth violence in the UK, revealing its disproportionate impact on already marginalized communities; locate youth violence in a complex aetiology of injurious forms of poverty, exclusion and insecurity; and detail the construction of the policy issue and current policy approaches that have done little to ameliorate the situation, and have in some instances produced unintended but demonstrably harmful consequences. Readers will find an engaging and insightful account of youth violence that is accessible to those unfamiliar with the social harm approach or from non-academic backgrounds. This does not detract from the weight of the academic argument, it just speaks to the skill with which complex issues are presented throughout.

We wish to use this preface to the book to highlight and reflect on the aspects of Billingham and Irwin-Rogers’s analysis that extend beyond the immediate confines of the pages of this book. We note contributions to the definition and causal analysis of social harm, as well as specific contributions to the violence literature.

First, for those unfamiliar with the social harm literature, what we might or might not consider to be harmful lies at the heart of much that has been written to date on the topic. For critics of the approach, with little social consensus for the term, ‘social harm’ is considered to be relativist in nature. However, as Hillyard and Tombs (2004) first suggested in Beyond Criminology, and as Billingham and Irwin-Rogers themselves recognize, the open-ended nature of the definition and its continued application and refinement, promote meaningful and productive analysis of harm that more effectively captures the complexity of social injury in contemporary societies. The social harm definition offered by the authors, grounded within human needs theories, seeks to extend existing approaches to capture subjective dimensions of harm.