Ethnopraxis in action

This chapter presents a practical example of an active youth worker’s research-based practice with young people involved in violence, thereby providing a tangible case study of the activity we call ethnopraxis.

Responding at the personal (P) level

This chapter outlines how workers can respond on a personal, individual level to youth violence. The authors illustrate how the unpredictable nature of the physical and social space in which youth workers operate requires them to capitalise on and privilege spontaneous encounters and not be afraid to use them to begin to challenge or constructively confront violent behaviour. The authors show how these behaviours are meeting deep needs and that youth workers need to find ways to get young people to understand and acknowledge that, and identify how they may be able to meet these needs in other, less destructive, ways. Part of this process may involve presenting oneself as a blueprint for change, in the context of a relationship that needs to be characterised by warmth, trust and respect, but which should not collude with neutralisation of violence or abandon the young person in the face of structural forces. The authors argue that supporting young people to move into voluntary and paid roles where they can help and support others creates the opportunity for them to move into a generative phase of their own life cycle.

Embedding community work

This chapter details a community-based project in Bradford that, through the use of ‘home-grown’ workers, manages to deliver meaningful responses to youth violence with Asian young men, despite prevailing policy regimes in the UK. The authors offer an alternative lens on such work, introducing the idea of ‘near peer’ youth work and international exchanges, where workers and young people are purposely situated in peer relationships and environments close enough to build affinity and rapport, but sufficiently different so as to expand horizons on aspects of their identity. The authors make the argument that the most effective youth work will simultaneously work on building bonding and bridging capital and recognise the dynamics and tensions between these two concepts.

Rethinking some youth worker ‘tales’

This chapter begins by challenging workers to critically interrogate what the authors see as archetypal youth work ‘tales’. The authors highlight how some youth workers can over-privilege and idealise their own relationships with young people and need to be wary of over-identifying with them to such an extent that challenging their violent behaviour falls off the agenda. They also argue that youth workers need to develop greater conceptual clarity, especially around notions of respect and trust. With the former, for example, workers may need to make distinctions between earned, intrinsic respect, and respect that is based around fear. The chapter explores how workers might encourage young people to reflect on self-respect and how status is constructed in their community and culture, working on alternative attainable and sustainable ways to develop it. The authors then cast a critical eye over the relationships between youth workers and professionals from other agencies, arguing that youth workers should not develop a crab mentality towards these agencies but rather seek to present the distinctive, but not unique, contribution they can make.

Using participatory research methods to study youth violence

The chapter is primarily intended as an introduction to participatory research methods for practitioners. After outlining in detail the research methods they employed, the authors present some ideas that they feel make a contribution to the existing literature on participatory research. Specifically, they identify five significant areas for the practice of participatory research in contexts such as youth violence. The first of these areas is the need to continually affirm the epistemological stance of participatory research to all parties. Secondly, the need for critical analysis of local ‘expert’ knowledge. Additionally, the need for participatory researchers to cultivate an improvisatory disposition, and the use of peer researchers and the contingent nature of self-disclosure engenders ‘proxy trust’ and the symbolic as well as instrumental value. Finally, the need for notions of ‘action’ and ‘impact’ in participatory research to be understood in contexts other than the achievement of structural social change and to include recognition of the pedagogic and personally empowering products engendered through the research process.

Imagining realistic alternatives

In the conclusion the authors first summarise the insights and policy recommendations generated by their research and then, through a fictional narrative, present an imagined alternative vision for worker attributes, training and supervision, project structures and policy environments. In doing so, the authors provide a summative and accessible vision for what might constitute a more meaningful youth work response to youth violence.

Exploring ‘confrontational pedagogy’

This chapter details a therapeutic method developed in Germany to illustrate some of the contested theoretical and practical issues involved in violence reduction, especially the potential pitfalls of an overly person-centred approach. Through an analysis of some of the therapeutic and educational methods employed, the authors try to provide a stimulus for further debate as to what ‘constructive confrontation’ might look like within the context of youth work practice.

A sports-based response to youth violence

This chapter critically examines a project in Cologne, Germany that exclusively uses sport to engage with young people and employs innovative delivery methods to respond to violence, such as the use of football and, notably, street based-boxing activities. Through the use of a detailed case study, the authors illustrate how sports such as boxing can, when delivered by a reflexive youth worker, create opportunities for young people to ‘play with the moment of escalation’ and become more reflexive too, thereby opening up possibilities to construct alternative identities.

Responding at the existential (E) level

This chapter posits that existentialist philosophy may present youth workers with an alternative framework for understanding some aspects of their practice when working with young people involved in violence. An existentialist perspective on choice, relationships and personhood could help to sustain workers facing the daunting challenge of bringing about some discernible change in offenders’ behaviour and ultimately their desistance from crime and violence. Workers should also encourage young people to take some solace from small, and again, symbolic achievements. Building on Baizerman’s (2001) work, the authors explore how workers need to encourage young people to look less at the chronology of their lives or events and instead emphasise the meaning that they put on their experiences. In the process, the authors highlight the possibilities presented to workers of two theoretical trajectories within existential practice, one rooted in Christian existentialist thought, and the other, less theistic in hue, that would place an emphasis on the responsibility that radical freedom brings.

Our theoretical frame

The authors set out their own distinctive analytical frame that combines elements of critical theory, psychosocial criminology and applied existential philosophy to produce a practical conceptual basis for work with the young people that youth workers will encounter on a daily basis. This involves the authors seeking to augment the existing youth work ‘canon’ with some key concepts from criminological thought, primarily around the study of desistance and masculinities. The authors seek to locate the criminological subject within a social context, whilst taking psychodynamic ideas of the “defended self” seriously, and existential philosophy which serves to foreground notions of self, choice and meaning within considerations of violent behaviour and desistance. These are then linked to what the authors see as 4 possible levels of meaningful response: personal/psychological, community/cultural, structural/symbolic and existential.