As outlined in Chapter Two, we believe that the relationship between youth violence and various social and cultural categories such as gender, race and class is far from simple or mono-causal, and that youth workers need to develop a sophisticated analysis of how these factors are at play within the lives of the young people with whom they seek to engage. We saw merit in employing the notion of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) as a theoretical framework to explain how these categories and other axes of identity interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels, contributing to systematic social inequality and ultimately different experiences of, and explanations for, violence. Oppression can cut across traditional binaries and change over time, meaning that one-dimensional models of power and oppression risk failing to capture the reality of contemporary life for young people. So if we are dealing with a confluence of various kinds of disadvantage, how can youth workers meaningfully address this complexity?

Our research suggests that youth workers seeking to respond meaningfully to youth violence need to consider the hierarchical relationships and conflicts within social categories such as gender, race and ethnicity as well as that between them. So in this chapter we take some key social categories in turn, first examining the correlation of violence with masculinity, employing our psycho-social frame and this idea of pluralised masculinities (Connell, 1995) to try to make sense of it. We look closely at some of the issues young women reported to us that included identities infused with internalised notions rooted in the violence and oppression they faced from men in their daily lives. We suggest some explanations as to what triggers violence within the social lives of young men and how this affects their sense of self, touching briefly on the nuances of the contested debate around ‘father absence’.

We then critically engage with the idea of youth workers as ‘role models’, thinking through some implications for training regimes, especially the dangers of collusion. We discuss the impact of state- and community-sanctioned racialised discourses. Finally, we highlight some of the tensions that arise when seeking to respond to the more fluid, decentred identities we encountered with approaches rooted in identity politics such as ring-fenced services, before citing some examples of the intersectional responses we came across among the research partners and within our own research process that we felt were innovative.