Effective Strategies for Responding to Youth Violence: Insights from Pete Harris, Newman University, Birmingham, UK
Outreach workers can respond meaningfully to youth violence by understanding the various dimensions of violence, adopting a model of meaningful responses (Existential, Structural, Cultural, Personal), and engaging at both the individual (P-level) and community (C-level) levels. Strategies include relationship-building, constructive confrontation, community engagement, and leveraging local resources for long-term impact.
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Presentation Transcript
How can outreach workers respond meaningfully to youth violence? PETE HARRIS NEWMAN UNIVERSITY, BIRMINGHAM UK
Young people can be Victim Perpetrator Witness
Violence can be Physical the use of physical force, knives, guns, sexual attack, fights Psychological verbal threats, bullying, intimidation, humiliation, ridicule, stalking, ostracising Material inflicting damage on property or other inanimate objects Structural/state the systematic failure of the state to provide for the basic needs of individuals, or harsh or discriminatory treatment at the hands of the state Symbolic the control and use of symbols, discourse, images, meaning and geographical space to oppress and dominate
Our model of meaningful responses (Harris and Seal, 2014) Existential Structural Cultural Personal
The balancing act.. Challenge Collusion
Responding at the P level Working through our relationships to find alternative means of meeting young people s needs belonging, identity, loyalty, respect, security, excitement, status, money . Moving from collusion with neutralisation to constructive confrontation Acting as a container for projections and recognising subjectivity Facilitating street divorce and knifing off through redemptive scripts into generativity Identification - the worker as a blueprint self to create a new replacement self Working through epiphanies and improvising through teachable moments
Responding at the C level Long term, embedded community work - not chasing violence but targeting through universalism Engaging with peer groups, families and the community as generators and mediators of a violent habitus Challenging crab mentality Improvising to interrupt and deter violence in/between communities Facilitating group activities/events that develop community self-efficacy and self-belief, intergenerational and intercultural community cohesion building bonding and bridging capital Utilising the leverage of home-grown workers Engaging with geography - local planning processes and mapping communities
Responding at the S level Challenging (not colluding with) direct state violence e.g. police brutality, harassment and racism Exposing symbolic violence surveillance Asserting rights of young people to be in public space Helping young people to become the media and create counter narratives , making the invisible-visible Political action and education to facilitate legitimate expression of grievance
Responding at the E level Learned helplessness and hopelessness Live for today , nihilism and spiritual deficit Being there during epiphanies and existential crises Asserting personhood of the other Encouraging real not notional apprehension Recognising the limits of dispassionate professionalism and the value of passion Encouraging the search for transcendence, meaning and purpose. What is valuable and enduring in life?
Responding meaningfully to intersectionality Hyper-masculinity - empowering to dis-empower ? Late modernity de-centred, multiple identities recognising oppression but not essentialising Young women as perpetrators and victims of sexual violence? Disrupting their embodied and linguistic investment in patriarchal discourses - the baby mother the bitch Taking father absence seriously within communities without stigmatising? Intersectional Interventions that mix it up ?
Themed responses: Sport Hooks for change with currency Sport Street based boxing fair play football Incapacitation Mirror of social contract and as an alternative community of practice new role models Sublimation and cathartic release of aggression Playing with the moment of escalation The strength to walk away or just fitter gangsters? Never on its own value communication by reflexive workers
Creativity Art, music, film, drama, photography Composition, performances and recording as a vehicle for building reflexivity and counter narratives
Environmental The outdoors Getting away and into new, natural environments Challenging, pro-social activities Travel and exchange
Outreach youth work tales No conceptual clarity when working with respect and trust The cult of personality Un-reflexive complicity Not knowing when to inhabit and when to shake up subjective life-worlds Failiure to recognise existential deficits
Problematic worker identities The too-wounded healer projecting their own baggage and unable to contain that of others The colluder unwilling to risk relationships and issue a challenge The rhetorical radical - inertia owing to a wholly structural analysis and determinism The pathologiser - working exclusively at P level, not challenging structural violence The evangeliser - indoctrinating and converting The evangelical materialist refusing to acknowledge existential deficits
Back to our model Personal Cultural Reflexivity Structural Existential
