Our collective understanding and mission
We are a collective of academics who are passionate about violence prevention. Although the primary remit of our collaboration is to focus on serious youth violence, we recognise that many young people impacted by SYV will have also experienced other forms of violence, harm, and abuse concurrently.
Recognising that many young people that experience violence do so in multiple and diffuse ways, requires acceptance that the victim/perpetrator binary is unhelpful. Instead, we recognise their status as children first and foremost, and our duty as adults to resist processes which adultify or over-responsibilise them for their own experiences of violence and harm.
We are explicitly intersectional in our focus. Children’s experiences of violence, harm, and subsequent help-seeking will be fundamentally impacted by their intersectional identities including gender, race, age, class, income (experiences of poverty), insecure immigration status, education levels etc. We recognise the disproportionate criminalization of certain groups of children and work to address all forms of discrimination.
Our mission is to work together across our disciplinary boundaries in order to ask fresh questions about experiences of violence and routes for prevention. Our aim is for this work to serve the children, parents, families, and communities which are impacted by violence.