In order to supplement the existing and extensive body of literature surrounding youth work and youth violence, we felt we needed to set out a distinctive theoretical grounding for our enquiry. This involved selecting those theoretical perspectives we believed most insightfully illuminated our data. While seeking to remain open to the potential explanatory power of a wide range of perspectives, we opted to build on the broad conceptual and philosophical undercurrents of youth work and youth violence outlined in Chapter One. We wished to retain a politically engaged standpoint that seeks social transformation, but to augment this with perspectives drawn from other fields that we felt were most relevant to our enquiry. From our own professional experience as youth workers as well as our ongoing academic analysis, we wanted to avoid absolutisms that could essentialise the phenomena and individuals we were working with. We felt strongly that the circumstances surrounding these young people and the choices they face were more complex than some traditional binary conceptions and disciplinary boundaries imply. Such binaries include those around social categories such as race, class and gender, and the relative primacy of psychological, sociological and criminological perspectives. So in the limited space available to us here, we have set out in summative form how we have sought to incorporate this multidisciplinary approach into our analysis. Mindful of the need for youth work to be able to convincingly occupy the terrain of anti-violence work and to respond to violence as it manifests in contemporary society, we offer a critique of existing conceptualisations.

Post-structuralism and intersectionality: a critique of identity politics

Throughout its history, the youth and community work academic and professional community has engaged in challenging stereotypical and discriminatory social constructions of groups of young people (Seal & Frost, 2014). Such efforts led to the identity politics that dominated youth and community work in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. Unity was found between those groups that were pathologised, and there was much emphasis on the formation of counter-hegemonies through allegiances to black, women's and LGBT movements. In youth and community work this manifested as ‘anti-oppressive practice’ that sought to challenge how people within oppressed groups were discriminated against and build alliances between them.