In this chapter I will explore the ways in which the participants talked about trying to achieve independence and gain a sense of their own emerging agency as young men. This will include analysis of violence in school as a way to gain peer kudos as well as a form of self-protection. There will also be a discussion of the ways the young men felt financial pressure to earn money and support themselves and sometimes their destitute mothers, which inspired an emerging involvement in drug dealing and running. These narratives will be explored using a gendered analysis, looking to the specific ways these pressures were related to the context of the participants’ sense of subordinated masculinity at home and their attempts to redress this balance and become ‘a man’. The participants indicated that they inhabited contradictory masculinity positions at a young age. They were living in a violent context where there was a male perpetrator who was performing protest masculinity, dominating the mother and the children in the house.