A harmful society

For far too many children and young people, Britain is a harmful society in which to grow up. Across the country, social harms of various kinds blight the lives of our youngest generations – they are harmed by institutions, policies, norms, systems, organizations, services, adults and, in some cases, one another. This book explores the harms that affect young people in today’s Britain, in the hope that they could be more effectively reduced and prevented (see Box 0.1 for our definitions of young people and of Britain).

One particularly contentious, divisive and visceral form of harm is physical interpersonal violence between young people. Whether labelled ‘youth violence’, ‘serious youth violence’, ‘gang violence’ or – when a blade is used – ‘knife crime’, the violence which occurs between young people is a source of national consternation. It is neither a simple ‘moral panic’ nor an uncontainable epidemic. It is a type of harm which requires urgent attention and immediate action. It is also the case that it already attracts substantial attention and prompts widespread action, and that some of this attention and action can be, in itself, a source of further harm.

We need both to take seriously the violence which is inflicted on some young people by a tiny minority of their peers, and to place that violence in a wider perspective: in the context of the many other harms which damage, diminish, degrade and demoralize too many young lives. These harms are significant in themselves. Their importance is not restricted to the role they may (or may not) play in encouraging other social maladies. There are, though, connections that can be drawn between harmful social circumstances and violent individual actions. We need to hold individuals responsible for the acts of violence that they commit, and to acknowledge that there are social, cultural, economic and political conditions which ‘predictably breed violence’ (Currie, 2016, p 89). Explanation is not exoneration. The communities which experience the greatest concentration of social harms are also those affected by the highest rates of interpersonal violence.