This chapter draws on young people’s experiences to discuss the impacts of local relational and social dynamics, alongside developments within the youth criminal space. It will shed light on why the current young people’s social environment is often more violent, with weapons carrying now more pervasive than before, and why they are more vulnerable now than those growing up ten years ago. Here there will be a consideration of how despite the narrative of gang violence, most serious youth violence involves young people who are not gang affiliated, and serious youth violence should not be considered simply a ‘gang’ issue. The text will show that there was no single group of people on St Mary’s Estate and no hierarchical gang structure. Instead, peer friendship groups emerged as dominant before starting to disperse when the members reached 18 or 19 years old. Each of these groups operated independently, often with individuals running their own drug lines. Yet despite the separation, similar ways of making money, rivalries and violence persist.

The analysis will discuss how local drug market saturation and the emergence of county lines mean that young people are at increased risk of child criminal exploitation. Those who are exploited are exposed to physical violence, threats and humiliation resulting in more young people becoming victims of violence perpetrated by adults.

The chapter concludes by looking at how the experiences of a new emerging group are causing them to show signs of desensitization, putting them at an even greater risk of exposure to violence.

Disconnected simulation

Although the main narrative around knife crime continues to be one where young people become embroiled in a retaliatory cycle of gang violence, this understanding doesn’t necessarily fit the statistics. Most offences (99.6 per cent) are one-off events that do not involve tit for tat retaliation, and less than 8 per cent of victims and 20 per cent of perpetrators of serious youth violence are gang associated (Bailey et al, 2020). Only around 21 per cent of knife enabled homicides were flagged by the Met police as gang related (Massey et al, 2019).