In this final chapter we hope to present an accessible, realisable vision for research, practice and policy in the field of youth work responses to youth violence. This is a vision that needs to be brought alive. First, we summarise some of the main findings and recommendations from our project. Then, perhaps less typically, we produce a fictional scene from an imagined youth work project, one that might exist if some of our recommendations were actualised. We acknowledge that many barriers to this vison will inevitably remain within different national and local contexts. We have taken a good deal of poetic licence in describing events and people, but we hope that this snapshot will stimulate some debate as to how it might be possible to shape worker attributes, training and supervision, project structures and policy environments that can more meaningfully respond to youth violence.

Key findings and recommendations

• • Youth work needs to be framed as a socio-educational approach to violence prevention and encourage interventions at personal, community, structural and existential levels.

• • Workers should capitalise on spontaneous encounters and not be afraid to use them constructively to confront violent behaviour.

• • Workers need to recognise how violent behaviour is meeting psychological needs and help young people find ways to meet these needs in other ways. Part of this process may involve the worker presenting him or herself as a blueprint for change, in the context of a relationship characterised by warmth that does not collude with neutralisation or abandon the young person in the face of structural forces.

• • Workers need to remember that a community can both resist and exacerbate violence.

• • Initiatives aimed at preventing violence should focus on helping the community overcome its learned helplessness and develop self-efficacy and self-belief.

• • Workers need to help communities explore the part violence plays in their culture and the organic solutions to combat such violence. Workers may need to be embedded in the community for a number of years before they become truly effective and funding/evaluation regimes should reflect this.

• • An emphasis should be placed on building bridging as well as bonding social capital.

• • Other agencies should understand that youth workers may at times need to keep a professional distance from those aspects of partnership working that hinder the maintenance of relationships with young people involved in violence.