As Fenley (1993), Baker (2014) and a research participant express above, a key to responding meaningfully to violence is to work with (and involve) the community within which that violence is situated. This could be read as a call to bring back old-fashioned community work, and at one level it is. However, as we shall explore in greater detail in Chapter Seven, we need to be mindful of the dangers of simply repeating well-worn youth and community worker ‘tales’ in relation to community work. This ‘tale’ might sound something like this: ‘We should privilege long-term involvement and closeness to community, free of focusing on violence or other targets’ and ‘The worker is a font of community knowledge and instinctively understands its dynamics.’ These oft-repeated tenets can also be accompanied with a nostalgia for a perceived ‘golden age’ of community work when youth workers were accorded respect (Belton, 2015). To avoid a non-critical acceptance of this tale, we felt we needed to more precisely define and qualify the knowledge claims of youth workers, and examine how responses they are implementing at a community level are having an impact on youth violence, and whether they should indeed be privileged.

Here we adopt Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus to describe a community's disposition, by which we mean the lasting, acquired habits, schemes of perception, thought and action that can become part of a community's identity. Using our data, we try to articulate how these then underlie a community's doxas (unconscious beliefs and values that are taken as self-evident). We want to reveal these as subjective positions and epistemologies, which are often partial and contradictory, and can reinscribe aspects of the prevailing hegemony and both mitigate against and exacerbate violence.