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“How are young people supposed to stay safe when we have nowhere safe to go?”

 

VISION was pleased to support the Lambeth Peer Action Collective (LPAC) with funding and mentoring in their recent project, Built on Trust: The role of youth spaces and trusted adults in reducing young people’s exposure to violence. Working at the community level and with young adults was inspiring – and the impact was powerful particularly for Dr Elizabeth (Lizzie) Cook, Dr Estela Capelas Barbosa and Dr Alexandria (Andri) Innes, the mentors. Many congratulations to High Trees, LPAC and their partners for the hard work and brilliant report. Please read the blog below, written by the young adults who conducted the research and wrote and delivered their report which can also be found below. They are an amazing group!

 

“How are young people supposed to stay safe when we have nowhere safe to go?”

 

by Anisa Hassan on behalf of the Lambeth Peer Action Collective

 

The Lambeth Peer Action Collective (LPAC) recently published their newest research Built on Trust: The role of youth spaces and trusted adults in reducing young people’s exposure to violence. LPAC was launched by High Trees Community Development Trust in 2021. It’s made up of young people and six local youth organisations working together to create better futures for young people in Lambeth through youth-led research and social action.

What was the research about?

This round of research explored what can be done to reduce young people’s risk of experiencing violence. With the support of High Trees, VISION, Partisan and other LPAC partners, we worked on this project for nearly 18 months, conducting and analysing 46 peer interviews. We found that with access to trusted adults and trusted spaces young people were less likely to be exposed to different types of violence.

This produced four key findings:

  1. The violence affecting young people takes many forms and is often complex in nature.
  2. Youth organisations provide unique spaces where young people can feel safe and build belonging.
  3. When youth practitioners can build trust with young people, they are able to provide them with practical and emotional support to navigate violence.
  4. Youth organisations offer young people alternative pathways and visions for their future.

An afternoon of conversation and community

The launch event was a chance for the LPAC team to connect and show stakeholders and community members our research, get feedback and start to think about how we can work together to make change. Attendees described the event as “hopeful”, “inspiring”, and “empowering”, with many of them pledging support. The team left the event with hope for the next phase of the project – social action that builds long-lasting change for young people in our communities.

What’s next?

“No research without action”

Since the research launch in October, the LPAC team have been busy, taking action in response to our findings.

We were invited to the Lambeth Safeguarding Children Partnership’s Annual Conference to present our research findings to organisations at the forefront of protecting young people. This event gave us an opportunity to highlight key insights from our research and how they can shape safeguarding practices and policies.

We have also been designing our own trusted adult training workshop, which takes inspiration from interviews with young people focusing on characteristics and practical advice that youth practitioners can use to build and maintain trust. We are planning to trial the training with local youth workers early next year.

LPAC team members have also attended workshops hosted by the Met Police and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), where we had the opportunity to ask questions and make suggestions about their MPS Children’s Strategy based on young pe  ople’s experiences that they told us about through our research.

LPAC at High Trees were thrilled to win the Power of Community award at the Locality Awards 2025 in Liverpool. The award celebrates community organisations working with local people to shape their own future and to build a fairer society where everyone in the community thrives.

We are also proud to announce that in the new year LPAC will be starting a new round of research, funded by the Youth Endowment Fund, focusing on mental health support for young people affected by violence, and we are excited to continue our collaboration with VISION on this project.

If you’re interested in finding out more about LPAC’s work visit www.lambethpac.com  or get in touch with us on action@high-trees.org.

Photographs provided by LPAC.

Frontline practitioner’s understanding of the roots of violence, and why it matters for policy and prevention

Violence continues to be a concern for policymakers and communities, notably so in urban contexts in which socio-demographic change, retrenched social support and evolving forms of exclusion affect its distribution and intensity. While many European cities experience relatively low levels of violence, the caveat to this is that many sub-areas and specific communities experience considerable variations in the form and intensity of such violence.

In this paper, Violence reduction in a changing European urban context: Frontline practitioner’s understanding of the roots of violence, and why it matters for policy and prevention, the research team, including VISION Co-Investigator Dr Elizabeth Cook, present findings from a comparative, qualitative study investigating how key stakeholders – civic and policy actors working at the interface of violence prevention and European urban communities – perceive its cause and overall nature.

Lizzie and colleagues explored the accounts of key support workers, practitioners and local policymakers because they represent essential intermediaries in processes of policy implementation, transfer and reform. The perspectives of practitioners provide insight into how social problems are constructed and under what conditions, which groups are most affected by these conditions, how solutions to such problems should be delivered in city settings (and delivered more effectively) and who should be assigned responsibility for generating effective responses. 

Informed by scholarship on street-level bureaucracy and local knowledge, the paper presents accounts that connect the risk of violence with austerity conditions and their erosion of vital social and institutional fabrics, which thereby worsening localised violence in these ‘ordinary’ cities.

The research team identified the key operating theories, ideas and observations circulating among civic actors tasked with tackling urban violence. Local practitioners understand violence to be linked to macro-economic conditions and social inequalities that sit outside their jurisdiction, but which ultimately present major challenges to the fabric of local urban life and risks to particular communities. Their commentaries build a cumulative picture that is in many ways at odds with the main thrust of many of the policies, political discussions, policing priorities and resource cuts evident in many cities across Europe in recent years.

The strongest shared conclusion is that urban violence cannot be tackled where these deeper conditions, influences and a lack of resources remain unaddressed.

Recommendations

  1. Support and invest in long-term collaborative partnerships and policy initiatives which take account of the spatial discrepancies within cities.
  2. Encourage connections between civic and state authorities which could help to relieve these frustrations, rebalance power relations and provide accountability in top-down approaches to cities experiencing destructive social, political and economic change.
  3. To increase trust in political institutions, policies must also tackle the scarcity of investment in public services, while encouraging better representation of marginalised communities in decision-making processes.

To cite: Cook, E. A., Jankowitz, S., & Atkinson, R. (2025). Violence reduction in a changing European urban context: Frontline practitioner’s understanding of the roots of violence, and why it matters for policy and prevention. European Urban and Regional Studies, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/09697764251386774

For further information: Please contact Lizzie at elizabeth.cook@citystgeorges.ac.uk

Photograph from Adobe Photo Stock subscription