Anecdotal reports from grass-roots service provision indicate that boys who experience domestic violence and abuse (DVA) and later on-road and gang involvement are largely invisible from the perspective of Child Protection and domestic violence/abuse DVA services in the early years, but then come to the attention of youth offending services in adolescence. This is gradually being reinforced through empirical research, which will be discussed in this chapter. As I will outline, boy child survivors of DVA have been sidelined within mainstream feminist discourse, which has resulted in their invisibility in services. This is in contrast with what can be seen in the criminal justice approaches to boys who are labelled as gang-involved, which at times has been used as a broad-brush label to characterize swathes of young people as either engaged in criminality, or ‘at risk’, sometimes prior to any conviction. It appears then that boys’ experience of invisibility in relation to DVA as well as hypervisibility in relation to gangs, are both based on a pre-existing set of stereotypes and assumptions of what the ‘ideal’ victims and perpetrators look like. The labelling, and the stigma around this, which results in some young people being more readily identified as either ‘at risk’ or ‘a risk’, are reinforced by intersectional axis of oppression (Crenshaw, 1991). Race, class, and gender operate in a way which leaves Black urban young people more likely to be ‘adultified’ and seen as less in need of safeguarding support (Davis and Marsh, 2020), as well as more likely to be stopped, searched, and ultimately labelled and criminalized (Williams, 2015).

The polarization of victims and perpetrators as disparate identities has contributed to the invisibilities of young people. This is partly due to siloed language: services look for victims or perpetrators, or, in the case of ganginvolved child survivors, victims or offenders, exploited or exploiters. This was typified in 2021 with the creation of a national Commission for Young Lives, aimed preventing the ‘conveyor belt of vulnerable children falling into the hands of gangs and criminals’ (Anne Longfield, quoted in Farrell, 2021).