What is 'serious youth violence' work?
Looking at serious youth violence raises some key questions about how we ‘do’ youth work, and what we should fund
I recently worked with a funder in London to create a broad typology of interventions in the voluntary sector on serious youth violence. My work focused on the hyper-local, and those interventions which are best delivered in the VCS, but I also looked at how those relate to a wider agenda. Linking that to evidence overviews showed a lot of excellent practice (and also, sometimes, the conceptual limitations of the evaluation industry - but I digress). But it also raised some interesting broader questions.
Is it really about youth violence?
One of these is what exactly constitutes a ‘serious youth violence intervention’. There are a huge number of specific projects which deliver some kind of intervention, which propose a specific, highly scalable, targeted intervention. Some are really fascinating, and highly creative - Groups like Red Thread, or Street Doctors, are particularly exciting examples. Then of course, there are the many education programmes, from conflict resolution workshops (such as those provided by Leap Confronting Conflict), to classic school assembly work, to the many (many) arts organisations always happy to provide content-based art activities for young people on any social issue. Social action and campaigning/ awareness raising projects, local and national, also form a substantial part of the market.
And then of course, there is the most common ‘hyper-local’ work, which is the classic place-based ‘youth work’ model. I was appalled when I worked for a major youth work membership body to hear many people in the wider world asking ‘do people still do that, then?’ The answer, of course, is that yes, they do. And many (if not all) do it very well, especially where they have managed to stay relevant, to stay connected to their community, and to balance targeted work with universal preventative activities.
Many of its strengths are the same as they have ever been - building cohesion in communities; helping young people build peer relationships which cross divides (especially vital in preventing SYV); creating opportunities for young people to learn and achieve (to ‘broaden their horizons’); and of course, building trusted relationships with adults, who become role models as well as confidantes and mentors. As a former youth worker myself, I remember how vital all of those things were, and have seen first hand their transformative power.
At the same time, there’s a reasonable concern about what is really ‘youth violence’ work. Some are concerned that inappropriate work could be simply ‘rebranded’ without a proper theory of change and model that will directly impact the SYV agenda. Some funders have been anxious about being seen to ‘pile in’ on the issue themselves; importantly, I think some of the most sensitive and sensible of them have been realising that a huge range of the work they already fund for young people has a positive impact on the SYV agenda. Let’s face it - many funders are already supporting employability work; projects to build interpersonal skills, confidence and hope for the future; projects to improve mental health; creating leisure opportunities and spaces for informal education; providing support for learning disabilities; or promoting better relationships with peers and trusted adults. Those are all key strands in the SYV intervention evidence base that show positive outcomes. Many funders, locally and nationally, could look at their portfolios and see a spread of ‘youth violence interventions’ across the piece.
‘Interventionitis’
And yet, especially at a political level, there can still be a desperate search for the off-the-shelf product that will solve the issue quickly and easily, and ‘measurably’. And, let’s face it, cheaply.
In these discussions, I’m always reminded of the early 2000s work on teenage pregnancy, once of the key youth social issues New Labour set out to tackle - and quite successfully. That, like SYV, took a public heath approach, which looked at the causes, drivers, and risk factors, analysed and ‘surveilled’ where the need was, tested and measured interventions, and targeted those most at risk. I’m proud to have been involved in some small way in that success. But I do also remember how much easier it was to get people to take seriously something that was called, say, ‘X Teenage Pregnancy Project’, rather than a project that worked day-in-day-out with vulnerable young women for a range of reasons, perhaps improving their education, building their confidence, giving them greater hope for the future. The latter was often by far the better bet, and well-supported by the evidence. But the thirst for a ‘product’ or ‘solution’ which was easily commissioned, measured, and scaled was very much there in, say, 2009; meanwhile, that desire has only become stronger in the climate of developing ‘solutionism’.
There was constant political pressure, i remember, to commission a then well-known project that brought together teenagers and babies for a limited time intervention - at some expense and complexity - because surely that ‘product’ would solve the issue. But sure enough, the evaluation later showed that this ‘product’ had no greater impact on teenage pregnancy than any other standard youth work intervention. (Although as a standard youth work intervention, it did that very well.) People were just thrilled by the branding and the concept, and the fact that it seemed to tell a compelling story. It captured the imaginations of those looking for a symbolic, as well as a practical solution.
[I also remember trying to set up general schools-based educational support groups for young women at risk of teenage conception and a range of other issues, and being told by a very senior figure in education to ‘stick to handing out condoms’. People found it very hard not to think rather, ahem, literally. And usually, in terms of the most simple ‘intervention’ they could.]
In this sector, I call this ‘interventionitis’. It’s the desperate search for a single ‘intervention’ that will solve any complex. nuanced, social problem, usually born of multi-generational poverty and degradation, cheaply and efficiently. A laudable aim, but so often simply not possible. Indeed, there is a tendency then to pile intervention upon intervention, and the idea that simply treating people as clusters of problems requiring a shopping list of isolated interventions will solve all social ills. Sometimes each intervention looks like the social sector equivalent of the kind of thing a hedge fund would invest in as an online service: something with a cute name and colourful branding. A product that does one thing, which you can sum up in a sentence. No surprise, then, that it’s often a popular choice for ‘social investment’.
Again, over the last year, I’ve been extremely impressed by the sensitive, forward thinking, way many funders and commissioners are approaching this current issue of SYV, and I think it’s a sign of maturing philanthropy among many trusts, and the light years of progress in professional strategic commissioning over the last few years. They’re starting to see that intervening directly in the contributing factors - the risk factors, and protective factors - is a vital, long-term, part of any programme. (Especially in terms of prevention.) Alongside that, don’t get me wrong, there are also many high quality, short-term, targeted, ‘solutions’ which are absolutely vital in any strategy.
But on balance, in terms of SYV, just as it was the case with teenage pregnancy, I think it’s very clear that much of the wider youth and community work which used to happen as a matter of course is likely to have a direct, positive impact on youth violence. And this has to exist alongside targeted ‘solutions’, in partnership, within an ‘eco-system’ of interventions and preventative measures. The drive to think about right-now solutions to a crisis, but move over time (and starting now!) to a long term approach which seeks to prevent and protect, can only work if we balance these two types of work out. Short-term, targeted specialist interventions, and long-term, preventative work based on relationships and community development, have to work together, in a complementary way.
Taking a long view
So what about that longer-term work then: the relationship building and mentoring; the community development; the aspirational work; the routes out of poverty? The classic work of the local youth and community sector?
Well, yes, we still do it, and have to. Despite, I’m afraid, the best efforts of austerity..
The facts are well-rehearsed, but forgive me for reiterating them. In London, there’s been a 46% cut in local authority expenditure on youth work, and a cumulative £26.3m reduction in that expenditure over the last 7 years. There’s an expected further £1.2m average cut per Local Authority this year. All of that means that there is increasingly little left of the wider, preventative, holistic youth work measures which previously existed. Indeed, since so many centres have been closed, even environments where more targeted interventions can usefully take place are becoming thin on the ground. Much as A&E is a brilliant place to do crisis interventions, it’s a sign of the times that some of the best known youth violence interventions are happening there, just as the NHS as a whole tries desperately to move interventions upstream.
Most of us who have worked in the field would argue that the removal of generic and ongoing work since 2012 is one of the reasons that demands for specific and immediate responses have arisen. It’s no small irony that youth services were brutally decimated after the biggest outbreak of youth violence in 20 years (I remember losing all the music equipment for my youth project in the riot, and having to evacuate the building when young people were getting rather too feisty on the street). And no wonder, perhaps, that individual youth-on-youth violence has only continued to increase since. As a senior youth sector colleague remarked recently, for all that it may be difficult to prove direct causation, if we cut all the youth work services in London, do we think good things will happen, or do we think bad things will happen? I think the phrase we’re all looking for is ‘Duh.’
So overall, a mixture of specific interventions, and importantly, a return to generic, ongoing, relationship-based youth and community work, both have to be a substantial part of the solution to SYV.
Holistic, open- access, generic youth work, has been a key part of interventions and prevention for youth violence and other social ills since the dawn of youth work practice 150 years ago. These things are likely to have a positive effect on reducing youth violence, as they always have. I always find the claims that this can’t be proven suspicious. It seems to me to be a case of constantly moving goal posts - the number of projects I’ve been involved in where even external evaluation has seen a massive positive impact on young people, seems to constantly suggest this is not the case. I remember in, I think, 2003 (?) when the Neighbourhood Support Fund came to an end, being involved in my first evaluation, as a youth worker. A huge national evaluation, talking to hundreds of young people over tens of projects, looking at the difference it had made to their lives, and finding, I was reliably informed later, that there had been very substantial positive impact. ‘Excellent,’ I thought. Now it’s been proven. And then, guess what. We 15 years later, we still have to prove it. Every. Single. Time.
We are still told that methodologically these cannot amount to anything. Which does make you wonder if there is a problem with the methodology - or indeed, the epistemology - that ideologically polices the work we do, as if we simply aren’t allowed to succeed. After all, it would be quite inconvenient for some to discover that long-term, relationship based, community-focused interventions are the most effective. They’re very hard to start up and close down within a funding cycle, or to promise a few quid for in an election, after all.
At the same time, looking both at evidence reviews for SYV, and in terms of the day-to-day experience of practitioners I talk to, there is as strong a recognition as ever that so-called ‘diversionary’ activities, those which allow informal learning and achievement, and which also permit and rely upon relationships with trusted adults, are the largest part of the solution. The GLA gets this - their Young Londoners’ Fund has been very squarely focused on arts, sports, all of that stuff. This stuff is not the icing on the cake. It’s the flour.
If we think that such work - informal learning, relationships - is not sufficient to the task of dealing with high risk, or crisis interventions, we ought to note that those activities form a major part of almost every targeted, specialist package of support which is put together for a young person getting involved in youth violence, as a matter of course. The smaller, targeted interventions often rely precisely on having the longer term, open access work to refer to. That is very rarely noticed or acknowledged. How is that going to be possible if there’s less and less of that kind of work left for professionals to refer people to?
A Sisyphean task?
What strikes me most of all, especially when I look at comparisons between the teenage pregnancy and serious youth violence agendas, is that to a huge extent we are always dealing with the consequences of intergenerational poverty and deprivation. Add to that bad housing, under-investment in social services, under-invested education, collapsed communities, and people with little reason to hope for any kind of future. Then add a bucket-load of the problems with mental health that come both from poverty and an increasingly dysfunctional media, and you have a toxic brew which will continue to produce whichever social ill, requiring whichever attempted quick fix intervention, ad infinitum.
For all that New Labour and its Teenage Pregnancy Unit had its problems, one thing it did believe in was dealing with intergenerational poverty, and creating better ‘life chances’. (Given how I felt about it at the time, I’ve been slightly annoyed with myself to start hearing myself quote Giddens recently. My 25 year old youth worker self would lambast me as one of them.) Its unarguably technocratic approaches also lent themselves well to the public health approach that helped with teenage pregnancy, and approaches which are now starting to be applied to serious youth violence. But combining those effective public health approaches with those which recognise the vital importance of relationships, of community, of support, and of hope for the future is the key. Most of all, we need to understand, and have to constantly target, the dreadful, unending, intergenerational hopelessness and poverty that the key drivers of all these problems. That is fully possible with the right will, and the right people in the room.
In the end, we can put people on the pill to stop them conceiving, or give them a workshop about knife crime to stop them stabbing each other, but the factors that create those issues are only getting worse. Any solution, built from clusters of ‘interventions’, that doesn’t at least try to holistically combat the core effects of poverty and deprivation is doomed to a truly Sisyphean labour.