Breaking networks of youth serious violence

Youth violence is an area of major public concern, both about young people as victims and perpetrators.

Why is this important?

Previous research has tended to focus on the individual factors – such as trauma, adverse school experiences, and living in high-crime communities – that make young people more vulnerable to involvement in serious youth violence. However, the role of relational factors and networks in contributing to this vulnerability – who is connected with whom and why – remains understudied.

What does it involve?

Using data from police force area (Cambridgeshire) from a four-year period, this project will inform the development of better-targeted interventions to prevent serious violence among young people. Social network analysis will be used to address a series of key aims:

1. Describe the network of individuals involved in youth violence (as perpetrators and victims), which may not be apparent even to the young people involved. Build on this to construct an indicator of vulnerability, which will be compared and combined with more traditional measures of risk based on individual factors.
2. Investigate the combined impact of individual factors, relational factors, and community factors on the likelihood of involvement in violence among children and young people for incidents that came to the attention of the police.
3. Determine the potential of using relational networks for understanding and countering ‘contagions’, clusters, and cycles of violence. Investigate how the stages in youth development might affect the evolution of the relational network structure, and how this evolution is connected to future violent offending and victimisation.
4. Examine the implications of key actions such as (i) a decision to carry a knife and (ii) the police’s decision to arrest, rather than take a less interventionist action, on young people’s subsequent violent behaviour. The interplay between these actions and someone’s position in the overall social network will also be examined.   

How will it make a difference?

Findings will be developed into a toolkit and workshops tailored to a practitioner audience. The research will also be presented to police forces, local authorities, and central government. The research will be completed with the support of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary.