Triple violence: Conceptualising interwoven structural,psychological and interpersonal harm

Abstract

In this paper, we propose that the idea of ‘triple violence’ can be a fruitful conceptual tool for scholars, policymakers and practitioners concerned with interpersonal physical violence between young people. Building on and adapting previous theoretical analyses of the multi-layered, relational nature of violence, we set out a conceptualisation intended to articulate the dynamic relationship between structural, psychological and interpersonal forms of harm. Grounded in interviews and focus groups with youth practitioners and young people from Glasgow (Scotland) and London (England), we outline the similarities and differences in experiences of violence across the two cities, as well as exploring their interconnectedness. In a UK policy context which tends towards a narrow conception of interpersonal violence, we suggest the need for attentiveness to the tightly interconnected phenomena of structural and psychological harm, to which the concept of ‘triple violence’ offers a helpful shorthand.

Introduction

Violence involving young people is a global social problem. As a result, governments around the world have developed varying policies to address its causes and effects, ranging from punitive ‘scared straight’ programmes to welfarist early intervention measures. These divergent policy choices are affected by a multitude of factors, including varied conceptions of violence. On one hand, policies centred squarely on the direct perpetration of interpersonal violence focus investment on law enforcement strategies and short-term programmatic interventions which seek to reduce such violence in the immediate term (Stevens et al., 2025). On the other, policy paradigms which take a broader view of violence, such as the ‘human security’ framework, tend to incorporate a variety of initiatives aimed at holistic societal change (Abello-Collak and Pearce, 2018). Recently, in the United Kingdom, an increasing policy consensus has emerged around the ‘public health approach’ (Hansard, 2018), premised on multi-agency activity to address the wide-ranging social determinants of violence. With origins in the United States (Mercy et al., 1993), this approach is grounded in an understanding of interpersonal violence as a public health issue with a range of social, cultural and economic causes (WHO, 2016), leading to a multi-level policy response including early prevention, targeted intervention, and measures to enable desistance from violence.

The public health approach has been credited with achieving significant violence reduction during the early twenty-first century. In Scotland, for instance, its adoption is widely considered to have enabled a significant reduction in homicide rates: from 2.69 per 100,000 persons in 2004, to 1.1 per 100,000 persons in 2015 (a 59% decline) (UNODC, 2023). This subsequently led to the UK Government's adoption of putatively similar public health approaches in England and Wales, as well as discussion of the model in Sweden, Canada and Australia (Fraser et al., 2026). As the public health approach has evolved within the UK, however, concerns have been raised about its implementation. Tensions have been evident between public health discourses and a prevailing focus on risk and interventions more consistent with an individualised conception of violence (Rosbrook-Thompson et al., 2025). This raises important questions, not only about how policy ‘talk’ and policy ‘action’ can diverge (Pollitt, 2001), but also the transferability of public health approaches between jurisdictions – even between neighbouring nations (Fraser et al., 2026).

In this paper, building on previous theories of the multi-layered, relational nature of violence (Cusset, 2018; James et al., 2003; Johnson Dias, 2024), we set out a novel conceptualisation – ‘triple violence’ – that is intended to articulate the dynamic relationship between structural, psychological and interpersonal forms of harm. These three forms of harm are interwoven and compounding, and as such, we argue, holistic violence reduction policymaking requires attentiveness to their tight interconnectedness. We set out the argument in four stages. First, we situate the idea of triple violence within existing bodies of criminological scholarship, positioning it as both analytical lens and conceptual ‘boundary object’ (Fox, 2011) supporting fruitful dialogue between research, policy and practice fields. Second, we introduce the research underpinning this paper, a three-year study of violence reduction in the UK. Third, we centre the voices of young people and youth workers to convey the interwoven forms of violence ‘upon’, ‘between’, and ‘within’ young people in Glasgow and London. Finally, we reflect on the degree to which the public health approach, as implemented in the UK, is adequately addressing the complex interplay of these three forms of harm in young people's lives.

Conceptualising triple violence

Since the late twentieth century, a growing number of policymakers and scholars have argued that violence should be conceptualised as entailing more than direct, physical, interpersonal harm. The World Health Organisation (Krug et al., 2002: 5), for instance, notably advanced a definition of violence which includes not just the use of physical force, but also the use of power, in a manner which results in ‘injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation’ – for an individual, group, or community. This definition of violence encompasses a wide range of acts, including profound economic immiseration, ‘denying access to basic services’, and psychological abuse, for instance (Krug et al., 2002: 6‒7). Likewise, successive generations of scholars have sought dynamic, multi-scalar conceptions of violence that bring individual and systemic forms of violence into dialogue. In his influential approach, for instance, Galtung offered a definition of ‘structural violence’ as ‘avoidable limitations society places on groups of people that constrain them from achieving the quality of life that would have otherwise been possible’ (cited in Lee, 2016: 110). More recently, in the Swedish context, Barker (2017) refers to state strategies of coercion and control as exerting a form of ‘benevolent’ violence. Bourdieu, meanwhile, asserted close connections between macro-scale structural violence and micro-scale, ‘everyday’ forms of violence: ‘structural violence exerted by the financial markets […] is matched sooner or later in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, a whole host of minor and major everyday acts of violence’ (1998: 40). These conceptualisations can be described as having a definitionally broad approach to violence: a wide range of acts (including acts of omission) beyond interpersonal physical harm committed by individuals are seen to “count” as violence.

Distinct from (but not incompatible with) these definitionally broad approaches to violence is a rich seam of scholarship which articulates close associations between interpersonal physical violence and other forms of harm, deprivation, difficulty, or constraint – without necessarily classing these as violence. For instance, extensive empirical work has demonstrated the connections between structural disadvantage, humiliation and violence – “losing” a violent encounter can drive an urgent desire to achieve violent domination of another, particularly within an incendiary context of structural belittlement (Toch, 1972; Winlow and Hall, 2010). In studies of the so-called ‘code of the street’, oppositional, violent ‘street cultures’ within marginalised communities are positioned as cultural artefacts that emerge in opposition to structural exclusion and racism (Anderson, 1999; Bourgois, 2003; Brookman et al., 2011).

A related strand of research has sought to convey the complex social ecology of violence within particular communities. Vigil's (1988) concept of ‘multiple marginality’, for instance, draws together historical patterns of immigration, socio-economic structures, and psychological difficulties into an over-arching framework for understanding the precipitants of violence within particular neighbourhoods. Contreras’s (2013) study of drug robberies in New York similarly takes in the fluctuation of cocaine markets over the early twenty-first century alongside the individual emotional struggles and the physical violence of its protagonists. Such studies provide accounts of the multi-scalar ecosystem of violence, drawing attention to the ways in which different social structures interact to heighten its likelihood. In the UK, Contextual Safeguarding scholars have explicitly emphasised the need for interpersonal violence and harm to be understood ecologically, as opposed to behaviourally (Owens and Lloyd, 2023), and recent research has demonstrated the preponderance of household-based harm in the early lives of young men who commit acts of violence (Levell, 2022; Dodzro and Goode, 2023; Gray et al., 2023; Anderson, 2025). Compatible with this, criminologists from life-course and quantitative traditions have demonstrated the cumulative effects of risk factors across different aspects of life through an individual's biography (e.g., TenEyck, Barnes and El Sayed, 2023), thereby, from a different methodological standpoint, complementing ecological theories of violence.

In recent years, the evolution of the ‘public health’ approach to violence reduction broadly follows this ecological logic. Building on earlier work (Mercy et al., 1993), the public health approach to violence was championed by the Surgeon General of the United States (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2001), who noted that the ‘the public health approach offers a practical, goal-oriented, and community- based strategy for promoting and maintaining health’ (2001: 200). The World Health Organisation similarly made a powerful case for the adoption of a public health approach to violence reduction in 2002, arguing that the causes of violence are best understood as operating across four different ecological levels: the societal, the community, the relational and the individual (Krug et al., 2002). These ideas have been influential in many jurisdictions, including in the UK, with then-Prime Minister Theresa May announcing in early 2019 that the public health approach was official government policy. However, its implementation in the UK has arguably been hampered by both fiscal austerity and New Public Management (Pollitt andand Bouckaert, 2011): the associated emphasis on audit cultures, efficiency and performance measurement has led to a narrowing of the policy lens toward individual and group-level interventions (Fraser et al., 2026). Thus, there has been a rhetorical commitment to addressing the ecology of violence, but a narrowing of activity towards its more immediate and individualised manifestations.

In this paper, we seek to build on the scholarly tradition of both definitionally broad and ecological approaches to violence, arguing that Francois Cusset's (2018) concept of ‘triple violence’ can be a helpful conceptual tool for asserting the close interconnections between structural, psychological and interpersonal harm. Mobilising data from two UK communities, we advance two suggestions: first, there is empirical substantiation for the theoretical contentions underpinning the triple violence concept, and, second, it has the potential to be a useful policy idea, counteracting the narrowing of violence reduction thinking in the UK. Whilst the idea of triple violence complements, rather than challenges, previous conceptualisations of violence, our research suggests that it is especially resonant with the lived experience of those in the communities we studied, and that it may be a particularly compelling conceptual tool for articulating the central point that structural, interpersonal and intrapersonal tensions, pressures and harms tightly interweave within the biographies of individuals and the histories of communities. The idea of triple violence can help to ensure that structural harms – such as poverty, institutional oppression, and systemic marginalisation – are not relegated to the analytical background, nor viewed only through their individualised manifestations: it was clear from our research that harms derived from political-economic arrangements, institutions, systems and policies have a direct, daily effect on communities, reverberating through both individual psychological tensions and interpersonal hostilities.

Cusset originally deployed ‘triple violence’ to critique the effects of neoliberal political economy, discussing three interwoven forms of violence: violence ‘upon’ (constraints of structure); violence ‘between’ (interpersonal rivalries), and violence ‘within’ (internalised). He suggests that they interact closely, through ‘ripple or derivation effects’:

Neoliberal logic exerts…a triple violence. Violence upon us, by the constraint of structures and the arbitrariness of powers. Violence between us, through the rivalry…between economic subjects. And violence within us, through the still little known, and badly treated, psychic ravages of the invisible hell of work.

Through this article, we seek to adapt this concept as an analytic lens through which to interrogate violence in the lives of young people living in the UK. In our usage, ‘violence upon’ refers to the structural and systemic forms of harm experienced by young people: the intersecting meshwork of structural inequalities that frequently press upon young people involved in violence (Bourdieu, 1998; Bourgois, 2003), and the connected systems of criminal justice and policing that further entangle their lives (Mwale andand Williams, 2023). ‘Violence between’ refers not only to forms of economic rivalry but forms of territorial conflict between young people, as well as, more directly, to interpersonal physical violence. And ‘violence within’ alludes to emotional and psychological difficulties resulting from multiple marginality – internal tensions which arise from experiences of trauma, precariousness and inequality. This ‘triple’ reading of violence is summarised in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

The triangle of triple violence.

In mobilising the concept of triple violence in this way, we echo other scholars’ tripartite conceptions of violence, in suggesting that these three forms of harm are frequently entwined in the lives of people from marginalised communities (James et al., 2003; Johnson Dias, 2024). As Brewis has put it, violence between individuals is often ‘an expression of intergenerational psychosocial harm’ (Brewis, 2024, 76). Violence ‘upon’ and ‘within’ can be historically interwoven, producing social conditions which render physical interpersonal violence more likely. In addition to offering a heuristic to understand the dynamics of multi-level violence, the notion of triple violence, we argue, can also act as a conceptual ‘boundary object’, concisely encapsulating the lived complexity of violence for research, policy and practice audiences. Boundary objects are ‘entities that enhance the capacity of an idea, theory or practice to translate across culturally defined boundaries, for instance between communities of knowledge or practice’ (Fox, 2011, 70-71). Triple violence, we would suggest, is an idea that can be fruitfully explored and debated within research publications, policymaking circles and community organisations alike. Importantly for its potentially broad, boundary-spanning appeal, it can be interpreted both literally – to suggest that harms ‘upon’, ‘between’ and ‘within’ individuals should all be considered as violence – but also figuratively, as a metaphor that trains attention on the significance of all three forms of harm, whilst adhering to a narrower definition of ‘violence’ as referring specifically to intentional acts of interpersonal physical harm.

In what follows, we outline the methods and data of our study, before discussing our findings in relation to each of the three sides of the triple violence triangle – ‘violence upon’, ‘violence within’, and ‘violence between’. After a brief discussion section, we then conclude by further elaborating on how triple violence can act as a fruitful ‘boundary’ concept across scholarly, policy and practice settings, drawing attention to the complexities of violence, and to the associated need for a holistic response.

Methods and data

The study that this paper is founded on – Public Health, Youth, and Violence Reduction – accrued insight from both elite actors invested in violence reduction policy and those who live and work in communities affected by violence. Combining both policy and community fieldwork enables a better understanding of the complex dynamics and discord between policy intentions and grassroots realities as they play out in the real world (Shore et al., 2011). In doing so, the study sought to ground analyses of violence reduction policy in the everyday settings in which such policies are intended to operate. The methodological approach of the study was influenced by the positioning of the researchers, three of whom developed or had long-standing professional relationships with youth workers and young people in the study locations. To a large extent they had ‘insider’ status, as they shared particular attributes and a value base with the ‘practitioner identity’ of participants (Fox et al., 1991). This provided practical benefits often associated with this positionality, including access and rapport, but also required explicit and reflective consideration throughout (Bukamal, 2022). As such, the data collection and analysis was shaped by the researchers’ own professional and personal understandings of the subject area, and their proximity to the real-world impact of relevant issues on the lives of young people and communities.

The team undertook community case studies in areas impacted by violence in both London and Glasgow between 2021 and 2023. In London, the study focused on the north-east boroughs of Hackney and Waltham Forest. Hackney has been described as one of the most diverse places in the world (Wessendorf, 2014), with over a third of Hackney residents born outside of the borough as of 2024 (Hackney Council, 2024). Communities in both Hackney and Waltham Forest experience systemic harm: child poverty in Hackney is 43%, and 37% in Waltham Forest (Trust for London, 2024a, 2024b). In Glasgow, the study focused on the city's east end. The area is the most ethnically diverse area of Glasgow, and the city as a whole has the highest percentage of Black and global majority people of all Scottish cities (Glasgow City Council, 2024). It is also an area which has faced profound economic hardship for over a century (Paton et al., 2017). Despite attempts to regenerate Glasgow East, spatial immobility continues to limit young people's access to employment or training, opportunities, support and leisure (Batchelor et al., 2017).

We engaged directly with those living and working in communities affected by violence through interviews and focus groups which we undertook between 2021 and 2023. 43 semi-structured interviews (Glasgow n = 17; London n = 25) were undertaken with community leaders, youth practitioners and other grassroots actors (referred to as ‘youth practitioners’), many of whom had worked in their organisation or local area for a number of years. These interviews explored everyday experiences of violence at a community level, the impact and extent of policy and practice changes at a community level, and perceptions of changes over time to the nature of violence experienced by communities. In addition, some participants drew on personal experience of violence within these communities. In addition, 37 young people (aged 12–23) took part in focus groups, engaging in wide-ranging discussions about youth culture, community and service provision in their area (see Table 1). Complementing this, we carried out an ongoing, eighteen-month action-research initiative with a group of four young men affected by violence in Glasgow, who we refer to (at their request) as the ‘Wise Men’. Working closely alongside the researchers for a prolonged period provided significant insight into the everyday reality for these of young people. A table summarising the background of participants is included below.

Community data were collected in person, with interviews and focus groups lasting between 30–90 min. All data were collected on a confidential and anonymous basis, recorded and professionally transcribed. The data were analysed thematically (Braun and Clarke, 2006) using NVivo software, and reviewed in combination with local crime trend analysis and desk-based area profiles. Initially, thematic analysis was undertaken within each jurisdiction, generating codes such as community cohesion; changing violence; and social media. The codes generated were then compared and combined to explore the similarities and differences across the two locations and refined to produce a single thematic framework. Data were analysed iteratively, generating thematic codes clustering around structural/systemic forms of violence; interpersonal or group violence; and self-directed violence or psychological harm. Over time, these thematic categories were refined into the triple violence framework as a way of distinguishing the drivers of violence, while emphasising their relational nature in a way that was authentic to participant accounts.

The study received ethical approval from the University of Glasgow Ethics Committee. Throughout the project, ethical considerations were approached in an open, ongoing manner, centring the voices and experiences of young people affected by violence. For example, insights from our work with the Wise Men have sensitively informed the project findings, and we created space for them to produce materials of their choosing, in the form of film, music, podcasting, and written accounts of their experiences (see Fraser et al., 2026).

‘Violence upon’

One of the most striking themes in our data is the frequency of references to deep poverty and inequality affecting communities in London and Glasgow. The recent growth of inequality in the UK is well-documented (Dorling, 2018) – a feature of its ‘extractive capitalism’ (Lansley, 2021) – and this was felt in both communities as a material, moral and emotional pressure which pressed down ‘upon’ young people and families. Far from operating as ‘inert background’ factors, these phenomena had a tangible daily effect on young people's lives (Bakkali, 2019; Billingham and Irwin-Rogers, 2022). One Glasgow community worker described ‘poverty trap’ as a form of tight constriction affecting young people (Glasgow Youth Practitioner 1). Echoing this, another Glasgow practitioner described the financial constriction and hopelessness which result in a kind of temporal stifling experienced by those they work with:

A lot of the times it's just daily. There's no long term. People are just living day to day and just trying their best to get by and young people growing up in those situations, that's what they see, that's what they know. (Glasgow Youth Pracitioner 2)

This was seen to limit young people's ability to make positive choices in the moment, be hopeful and to think about the future. Concern was expressed about young people ‘returning to old ways’ as a result of these conditions; the ‘old ways’ designating patterns of harmful or risky interpersonal behaviour, including interpersonal violence. London respondents spoke in similar terms, when discussing contemporary drivers of violence in the city:

It's just hunger, it's poverty, it's just going home and not having certain things in the cupboard but the next man does, a man's driving this or he's got a nice car and this and that. It's just not equal, isn’t it, so everybody's just after something and wanting something…literally just to survive. (London Youth Practitioner 1)

One London young person (London Young Person 1), similarly, used the striking phrase ‘financially dead’ to describe the situation afflicting many of their peers. Apparent here is what Charlesworth (2001) refers to, drawing Bourdieusian language, as the ‘choice of necessity’. Economic compulsion pushes young people towards criminalised activities, including participation in drug markets, known to heighten risk of violence victimisation or perpetration – perhaps ever more so in contemporary Britain (Hales, 2021). The idea of ‘financially dead’ young people engaging in harmful activity, aligns with Kalkan's (2024: 422) contention that marginalised young people, ‘having much to gain and little to lose’, can ‘take greater “ice-cold” risks more easily’.

Compounding these structural changes is a sense of ‘de-socialisation’ (Streeck, 2016: 41) as community organisations and institutions diminish, resulting in a form of systemic harm. Our respondents reported a growing dearth of what Currie has called the ‘essential institutions of care, nurturance and opportunity that all communities need’ (Currie, 2020: 15). In many cases, this was connected directly to UK Government austerity policies, which have resulted in the thoroughgoing erosion of municipal and community provision (Blyth, 2013; Seymour, 2014). A youth worker in London spoke about the effects of reduced provision in his local neighbourhood:

That's when all the cuts were, like there was no more youth clubs, no more anything. And I was, like, how am I meant to help this group of young people, everyone's coming to me, parents are coming to me? I'm talking as young as, like, eight, nine year olds. I'm trying to find the right support, trying to do everything. And it just wasn’t happening, like, it just didn’t work. (London Youth Worker 2)

Palpable in this interview was a sense of isolated futility and scarcity of community resources. Similar frustrations were common across community interviews in both cities. One London worker said that austerity policies ‘ripped our youth services apart’ (London Youth Worker 3), whilst Glasgow respondents discussed there being ‘less teachers, more competition for funding, less service’ (Glasgow Community Practitioner 3) and provision for young people ‘running at capacity’ across both public, private, third and voluntary sectors. As a result, a chaotic picture was painted by respondents where ‘we can’t support [young people]’, and that young people are ‘running round in the streets’ (Glasgow Community Practitioner 4). Evident across both cities was not just an organisational concern for resources, but an awareness of growing needs among young people that were not being met, with significant and harmful consequences. These concerns are substantiated by statistical analysis: Villa's (2024) recent study has demonstrated that in areas of London affected by substantial youth club closures, the rate of young people aged between 10 and 17 committing crimes increased by 14%.

When discussing systemic forms of harm, there was a particularly stark contrast between our Glaswegian and Londoner participants’ descriptions of local policing. In Glasgow, while young people made reference to their interactions with police, their views were generally ambivalent. Youth workers suggested that the proactive community policing that had become customary in the early 2000s now had a growing and ‘notable absence’. The presence of community police officers was ‘few and far between’ and cuts had affected the police's ability to respond to incidents, leaving neighbourhoods feeling abandoned or neglected (Youth Practitioner 5). This was juxtaposted with positive reflections on previous efforts for police to be part of a multiagency offer of preventative community-based support. By comparison, London respondents more commonly discussed over-policing and police oppression. One young person vividly described witnessing six officers ‘practically jumping a 16 year-old boy’ in front of dozens of other young people, ‘all because the young person was missing’ (London Young Person 1). A London youth worker, discussing interactions with police during his younger years involved in street culture – known locally as being ‘on road’ (Gunter, 2017; Levell, Young and Earle, 2023) – mentioned ‘police brutality’ and being dragged out of cars, and dropped off in rival areas, stating that the police ‘done us dirty’ (London Youth Worker 4). A young person from London portrayed the deep distrust for police among their community:

I know firsthand people who have PTSD from incidents with the police.…The response when [name anonymised] loses his life due to a stop and search pursuit or any other incidents…relating to young people, young Black people in particular…the response, there isn’t real emotion and empathy there. So people are going to look at that, oh, these people don’t really care, so why should we trust him? Why should we respect them if they don’t respect us?. (London Young Person 2)

All London respondents who discussed policing mentioned institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), a contention corroborated by the recent Casey Review (which also found institutional sexism and homophobia in the MPS – see Casey, 2023). One London youth worker suggested a parity of fear among young people when evaluating their risk of harm from peers and from the police and criminal justice system:

[Fear of] being criminalised on the one hand whilst also being…in danger of being a victim of crime…[both are] threats to physical safety. Let's put it that way. And that can come from the police and it can come from other young people. (London Youth Worker 5)

In both cities, then, communities were experiencing similar forms of structural pressure, as well as comparable kinds of institutional hollowing. Young people in both places appear to experience varieties of ‘structural humiliation’ (Young, 2007: 54). The patterning of policing offered a clear point of contrast. The suggestion from our respondents is that while London was over-policed, Glasgow was under-policed. This arguably represents two opposite forms of systemic harm: a version of state oppression in London, and a type of state neglect in Glasgow.

‘Violence within’

In recent years, there has been growing recognition that psychological stress and tensions are widespread among young people in Britain, and that access to support is lagging far behind what is required (Chollet et al., 2024). Across both locations, practitioners expressed awareness that an increasing number of young people are experiencing a broad range of unmet psychological issues which manifested though self-harm, risk-taking behaviour, drug use, mental health crises, and a more general sense of hopelessness. A sense of psychological crisis was evident in both cities:

Mental health became so prominent in the area amongst young people, it was like I could visually see how everything was…everybody looked like zombies…they were just lost and scared and didn’t know what to do. (London Youth Worker 1)

The majority of child wellbeing and protection issues we get is young people with mental health [issues], with thoughts of suicide, self-harming, anxiety, not able to function effectively because of how they’re feeling in their mental health, aye, a major issue across all the programmes. (Glasgow Youth Pracitioner 6)

The images portrayed in these interviews here, of young people as ‘zombies’, or ‘not able to function’, starkly conveys the debilitating effects of their emotional struggles, in terms reminiscent of Vigil's (1988: 166) depictions of ‘soul death’ or ‘psychosocial death’. Practitioners were clear that while mental health concerns are not a new issue in the lives of the young people they support, the difficulties appear to be worsening. This was linked to the recent period of disruption, loss and isolation experienced due to COVID-19. In addition, longer-standing issues of intergenerational trauma and the struggles of deepening poverty and inequality were frequently referenced, reinforcing the relationship between ‘violence upon’ and ‘violence within’, where social inequality in relation to class, racialisation and gender disproportionately affected the psychological wellbeing of particular communities and individuals. Interpersonal and structural harms and humiliations compound one another, resulting in a bleak reality:

I think we’re probably seeing a bit of a challenge right now with people who are going into real tough times…people seeing no way out. And I think that's impacting a lot of youngsters. I think they’re seeing hard times ahead with no real light at the horizon. It worries me. (Glasgow Youth Practitioner 1)

Further exacerbating this problem was a lack of relevant services to diagnose or respond to young people's particular needs. One Glasgow worker stated that: ‘a lot of them will be undiagnosed and it will be anxieties, it will be really low mood, it will be sort of loneliness’ (Glasgow Youth Pracitioner 4). Psychological and socio-economic difficulties entwine, and in the absence of adequate support, harmful coping mechanisms are relied upon, with violence and drug use often linked to unmet needs and underlying trauma. Psychological tensions, the lack of adequate support, and the ongoing ripple effects of the pandemic were described by one Glasgow practitioner as a ‘perfect storm’, resulting in a host of wellbeing issues being left to ‘bubble away’ (Youth Practitioner 3).

While inner psychological struggles were identified in both locations, their expression appears to be a point of difference. In London, young people drew direct connections between violence ‘among’ young people and psychological struggle ‘within’:

If you actually think about all the root causes of all the violence… it should be like properly a [mental] health crisis right now… Instead of thinking, oh yes, it's a young people's problem… [or] it's drill music… Like no, look at the health reports. Look at the mental wellbeing. (London Young Person 1)

When you are in a violent situation, whether you’re the perpetrator or the person being chased, your reactions… you can’t control that, that's all that emotion coming out… It needs to be where we go back to the root cause of what's affecting you… going back to [the] emotions that have been built up and basically clogging their mind, and the heart. (London Young Person 2)

These quotes echo the concerns expressed in previous research, in which a chronic sense of meaningless has been identified as a driver of violent harm (White, 2020). Based on her study of Newham, East London, White suggests that some young men in the neighbourhood live on a ‘nihilistic plane’ in which ‘no-one cares and nothing matters’. For them, she writes, ‘there is nothing to win and nothing to lose, it is a zero-sum game…life – even their own – has little value’ (White, 2020: 24, 94–7).

In Glasgow, the perception was that violent harm between young people had, to an extent, been replaced or superseded by violence directed towards the self. Mirroring the reduction in youth violence in the city, one practitioner said ‘instead of worrying about them fighting on a Friday, Saturday night, you worry about them self harming all the time, every night’ (Youth Pracitioner 7). In the aftermath of reduction in levels of serious violence between young people, there was a sense in which this form of ‘violence between’ had been replaced by ‘violence within’. Another youth worker referred to the growing use of ‘mind altering substances’ among those they support, as a means to ‘escape their reality’ (Glasgow Youth Pracitioner 2). The structural and systemic harms discussed above can produce for some young people ‘a psychological dynamic which is difficult to bear’ (Renault, 2017: 145). However, there was concern in our Glasgow data that inner psychological tensions, if unaddressed, can become ‘violent emotions’ (Retzinger, 1991), expressed through interpersonal violence, but more so through violence against the self:

So, rather than the traditional offending we were getting, the things that they are coming with much more was about self-harm, suicide. Sort of violence, yes … but it usually now comes with self-harm, suicide, mental health… (Glasgow Youth Practitioner 7)

But aye, the confidence, the body image, you know, them being happy in themselves, that's now a massive thing for us. As opposed to the drugs and alcohol and the gangs and violence, that's, kind of, your, like, secondary… (Glasgow Youth Practitioner 3)

In both locations then, according to our respondents, intense psychological pressures ‘within’ overlapped with structural and systemic harm ‘upon’, either manifesting outwardly in violence among peers or turned inward, leading to self-harm and substance use.

‘Violence between’

While interpersonal violence ‘between’ young people in Glasgow and London was a recurrent theme in both policy and community contexts, there were notable divergences in community experiences of violence between the two cities. While noting violence was still an issue among young people, in Glasgow respondents reported that interpersonal violence had shifted from a ‘normal’ phenomenon to a more anomalous event. Respondents commented on the tangible change within their own period of experience:

Walking to school, people used to shoot air rifles at us, and we used to have gang fights in the morning, after school, whatever else. And that was normalised, it was just normal behaviour. Nowadays, you see somebody getting stabbed and it's like, top news on BBC. (Young Adult 1, Glasgow)

Back in 2003, you know, I would come in on a Monday…I would always have heard there’d been a stabbing over the weekend, if not a fatality within the city… And I just am so happy that it's nowhere near as bad as it was then as it is now. (Glasgow Youth Practitioner 8)

Without suggesting that issues of interpersonal violence had been solved, both participants offered a resounding sentiment that levels of violence were not as they once were. Our study suggests that this de-normalisation was achieved through an array of both long-term, national measures and a series of more localised activities – including policy developments, multi-agency strategies, and community engagement undertaken by agencies such as the Violence Reduction Unit (Fraser et al., 2026). The inherited nature of territorialised gang association was seen to be less engrained within communities, with increasingly blurred territorial lines.

The recurrent message from respondents in Glasgow communities, however, was that violence reduction cannot be viewed as a permanent or a secure achievement of peace, but may instead represent a fragile containment. Particularly in light of ongoing structural harm and psychological struggle, compounded by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing austerity, we heard of tensions simmering in Glasgow:

Particularly young people at the moment who have really been severely impacted by the COVID pandemic there is a risk there. It is bubbling, we are starting to see that territorialism, not in the sense of what it was 20 years ago, but we are starting to see that come in. (Glasgow Youth Practitioner 8)

Effective, multi-level activity may have reduced the normalisation of violence in Glasgow for a period, but this may have largely centred on one form of ‘triple’ violence: interpersonal. The forms of structural harm ‘upon’ the community and psychological struggle ‘within’ risk generating the emotional states which are known to precipitate interpersonal violence (Retzinger, 1991; Gilligan, 1997). Indeed, since the period of data collection, there have been several incidents of high-profile serious violence in Glasgow.

In London, by contrast, continuity of territorial violence was a prominent theme. Respondents suggested that decades-old tensions were still affecting younger generations today.

You had three generations who were just on money and beef, money and violent stuff. So everything that they were doing had a domino effect on us… That's what caused us, like, to get into a lot of situations because the olders are bringing a lot of beef to the area. (London Young Person 3)

Multiple respondents used the language of generations, describing territorial flux, changing cultures and shifts in allegiances. Notably, however, the specific details of these generational rivalries often faded into uncertainty or mythology. One youth worker, for instance, suggested that hostilities and rivalries between areas in his neighbourhood ‘started out from a fight that no one knows who won’ (London Youth Worker 4).

Our respondents offered varying perspectives on the role of social media in the instigation of violence ‘between’ young people in their communities. In Glasgow, there was a shared sense that, as one youth worker commented, ‘if there's nothing in their communities and there's nothing happening, then they’re going to build a community digitally’ (Glasgow Youth Worker 9). Similarly, a young person relayed their experiences on digital forums and their impact on violence in the community: ‘you start arguing over snapchat, two full schemes going at it…telling them you’re going to kill them and aw that, saying were gonna chop fuck out you… it's no good man, it's frightening’ (Young person). Across the London practitioners, perspectives varied: whilst some suggested ‘it hasn’t changed anything’ and that the community situation remains ‘very similar’ despite social media (Youth Worker 6), others asserted that social media ‘makes [violence] faster’, and has ‘made things more violent’ (Youth Worker 7).

Perhaps more importantly, though, in conveying the multi-dimensional triple violence affecting young people in Glasgow and London, our participants situated social media within the broader context of intersecting structural, psychological and interactional factors, thus encouraging a nuanced approach to community change and continuity (Lane, 2018). Social media may accelerate ‘beef’, enflaming conflicts over disrespect and violation, but such conflicts are energised by centuries-old cultures of ‘martial masculinity’ (Earle, 2011; Ellis, 2016), as well as by localised histories of territorialism. Strikingly, in other interviews, the origins or the aggravation of a long-running territorial beef were clearly grounded in the legacies of a particular death. Youth workers and young people alluded to a kind of ‘after-life’ of death reverberating down generations; a specific murder rippling through the community over time, engendering pain, tension, discord, and further violence.

The longer-term problems that drive violence is history. When I say history I mean a lot of these violence, these feuds, they stem from death…A lot of these people that inflict the violence on one another, they have lost people, and often they’ve lost a friend, a lot of them have maybe lost a brother or a cousin…. (London Young Person 3)

Reflecting the substantial research evidence on the traumatic effects of exposure to murder (Zinzow et al., 2009; Smith andand Patton, 2016; Dodzro andand Goode, 2023), another young person spoke eloquently of the connections between losing loved ones, the experience of acute, unexpressed psychological pain, and ongoing cycles of violence:

I've lost my cousin to violence. I’ve lost two of my friends to violence. And I know there was no support.…I imagine these young people who on more than one occasion they have lost someone…we’re not allowed to heal…not allowed to heal as a people, that's when other incidents happen, whether it's with the police, whether it's with rival gangs in the area or whatever, you’ve got all of this emotion inside you, that the moment that you’re triggered, all of that emotion is coming up… not only just reacting to the fact that that person has triggered you, you’re reacting to the fact that you’ve got so much inbuilt emotion inside you. (London Young Person 2)

In this account, the three sides of ‘triple violence’ come together: violence ‘between’ contributes to an accumulation of psychological difficulty ‘within’, exacerbated by a lack of support, and tensions are apparent with the institution of the police as much as between community members. In addition, this interviewee's discussion of ‘healing’ for violence prevention tallies with recent scholarship on peacebuilding in conflict-affected neighbourhoods (Rich, 2016).

Despite apparently divergent experiences of trends in interpersonal violence between the two cities, the forces which were seen to heighten the risk of violence between young people were strikingly similar. Economic hardship propelled young people toward the ‘old ways’ of violent dispute resolution, lack of provision meant a dearth of safe places to dwell, and mental health difficulties were leading to reliance on substances. Whilst London respondents emphasised the ongoing role of these factors in the continuation of interpersonal violence, in Glasgow there was concern about intrapersonal and interpersonal tensions simmering – risking the fragile peace achieved through the denormalization of violence.

Discussion

In the empirical elaborations above, we have sought to demonstrate the analytic utility of the triple violence framework as a means of understanding both continuity and change in violence involving young people. Our respondents presented a clear picture: violence that occurs between young people is inseparable from the particular forms of structural and systemic harm pressed upon them – inequalities, oppression and exclusion – which reverberate within their internal emotional lives. The combination of household poverty and straining community provision, for instance, can drive young people towards a ‘choice of necessity’ engaging in volatile illicit drug markets (Charlesworth, 2001) – which can be both a consequence and an exacerbator of psychological tension. Further, previous incidents of physical violence, whether street-based or within homes, inflicted on peers or partners, have lasting intergenerational effects. Young people inherit these histories of conflict, trauma and pain, too often lacking the forms of outlet, support or nurture which might help them to heal – especially given the rapid contraction of state services and the associated decline in the nurturing relationships and opportunities they provide (Seymour, 2014). See Table 2 for a summary of our findings.

Whilst the triple violence framework enables analytical purchase on the commonalities between community contexts, it also gives space for divergence. In Glasgow, for instance, many community workers referred to reductions in interpersonal physical violence, but expressed concerns on two levels. First, they stressed the prevalence of psychological difficulties affecting Glasgow's young people, leading to self-harm and substance issues, alluding to the idea that self-directed forms of harmful behaviour may reflect the ongoing impact of structural harms affecting their communities. Secondly, evident in some local experiences was the suggestion that territorial violence may have been temporarily contained, but worsening conditions at the levels of harms ‘upon’ and tensions ‘within’ could make this containment short-lived. These insights contribute to extant literatures pertaining to the complex inter-relationship between ‘stuctural, interpersonal and intrapersonal violence’ (James et al., 2003; Johnson Dias, 2024).

Prominent within our London case-study, by contrast, was an emphasis on continuities in interpersonal violence, and the significance of the systemic harm of policing harassment in young people's everyday lives, particularly for Black young people. Intergenerational threads of territorial violence led respondents to talk about the importance of historical deaths in sustaining the emotional energies of ongoing hostilities, and in encouraging mythologies around particular groups, places and incidents (Samanani, 2022). Young people carry the trauma of losing friends and relatives to violence, the effects of which are exacerbated by both a lack of provision for healing (Rich, 2016), and, related, the seeming punitiveness of state responses to violence. Policing practices described as racist and aggressive deepen the sense of belittlement, injustice and alienation among young people experiencing multiple other forms of structural harm, such as poverty and housing inequalities. Histories of physical violence, within a context of structural marginalisation, engender acute emotional tensions requiring care and support.

The triple violence framework, then, as we have applied it to community contexts in Glasgow and London, encourages a nuanced account of intersecting structural harms, psychological tensions and interpersonal physical violence. Violent harm from peers is a significant cause of distress and fear among young people in Glasgow and London, but this should be balanced with considering the harms they experience derived from institutions, policies and systems (Brewis, 2024). This is especially important given recent developments in the UK and abroad surrounding the public health approach to violence reduction. Though premised on a holistic approach to violence, the gap between policy and practice in the application of public health principles has at times been stark (Fraser et al., 2026). For example, in Scotland, recent reports have highlighted a lack of governmental progress in prioritising prevention (The Promise Scotland, 2020; Policy Scotland, 2021). Within England and Wales, a predominant focus on multi-agency arrangements and programmatic interventions has detracted from the systemic changes required for a comprehensive public health approach (Irwin-Rogers et al., 2025). Thus, arguably, in the translation of the public health approach from rhetoric into implementation, certain core components have become neglected. In line with this, scholars of Contextual Safeguarding have critiqued approaches to safeguarding and violence reduction in the UK which continue to situate risk inordinately within individual young people, as opposed to seeking to enhance the safety of the social and institutional contexts that they occupy (Owens and Lloyd, 2023).

Conclusion

Building on prior literature connecting structural harms, psychological tensions and interpersonal violence (James et al., 2003, Johnson Dias, 2024), we have explored these interwoven phenomena within the lives of young people and the recent history of two UK communities. Hearing from young people affected by violence alongside frontline practitioners, we have outlined the contemporary dynamics of violence involving young people in Glasgow and London, identifying both commonalities and differences. Applying Cusset's concept of ‘triple violence’, we have argued that the dynamics of violence have evolved in ways that require urgent consideration at the policy level. In Scotland and England, interpersonal violence is one aspect of broader challenges facing young people that include acute mental health difficulties, precarious living conditions, and the withdrawal of social supports. Reckoning with the triple violence of London and Glasgow necessitates a holistic policy response, addressing socio-economic realities, territorial hostilities and wellbeing crises – both at the national and local levels. Nation-wide and more localised forms of poverty reduction, mental health provision, conflict resolution and community healing require collective, connected implementation. Ameliorating the social environment that young people are growing up in demands action to address harms and tensions operating upon, within and between them.

In order for these changes to be possible, researchers, policy-makers and practitioners require compelling conceptual tools which can resonate across varied social fields and professional worlds. Fox (2011: 70‒71) refers to such concepts as ‘boundary objects’ that can ‘translate across culturally defined boundaries’ such as that of ‘communities of knowledge or practice’. The concept of triple violence can act in this way, concisely communicating the lived complexities of young people's lives as conveyed by our respondents, whilst inviting further exploration and investigation. Our hope is that, by framing the concept, academics and practitioners seeking to make interventions in policy have a tool that enables a parsing of tightly connected levels of violence and harm. Rather than foregrounding one or other side of the triangle of violence – structural, interpersonal, or intrapersonal – we suggest that equal attention is paid to all three. Triple violence provides a rubric through which to bring together, for instance, the centuries-old systemic oppression of particular communities, ever-evolving territorial conflicts between fluid social groups, and the psychological strains experienced by individuals. Its value, we hope, is in ensuring that approaches to violence and its reduction do not adopt an overly narrow stance, as if interpersonal violence can be ‘separated off’ from psychological tensions and structural harms. In putting forward the concept of triple violence in this way, we aim to contribute to what Uggen and Inderbitzin (2010) have called ‘public criminology’.

The triple violence concept does not represent a grand new theoretical model, and should be read as an exercise in conceptual clarification and theory development drawing on insights from specific urban settings in the UK, requiring additional testing and validation in other jurisdictions. As a relatively small-scale qualitative study, we have been unable to make specific claims as to the causal mechanisms at play between systemic, interpersonal, and internalised forms of violence and harm, beyond their cumulative and relational nature. Likewise, our study has been limited to contemporary perspectives, as opposed to evidencing longer-term trends in the three forms of violence and their interactions. Further research is needed to substantiate the applicability of the triple violence concept to other places and times.

Nonetheless, as a ‘boundary’ concept encapsulating the social complexities of violence experienced by young people, we hope that the idea of triple violence can support researchers and practitioners to highlight shortcomings in both violence reduction policymaking and media narratives. The policy and media context surrounding ‘youth violence’ is all too often myopic, grounded in the assumption that violence is a self-generated property of youth, requiring only corrective interventions targeted at individual behaviour (Billingham and Irwin-Rogers, 2022). Though putatively committed to a wide-ranging public health approach to violence reduction, recent UK governments have exhibited ‘interventionitis’, investing inordinate political capital in the capacity of discrete, time-bound, programmatic interventions to achieve significant social change (Stevens et al., 2025). Such activities may be effective on their own terms; expedient for decision-makers; convenient for commissioners; and favourable for evaluators, but we should not place undue faith in their potential to bring about substantial and lasting reductions in interpersonal violent harm, particularly in those communities most affected by triple violence.

As a boundary-spanning concept with the potential to resonate across sectors and settings, the idea of triple violence points policymakers, scholars and practitioners towards a holistic vision of violence reduction requiring change at multiple levels. Any activities aimed at changing individual conduct or addressing group dynamics will only achieve lasting results if complemented by improved economic conditions, radically attentuated systemic oppression, enhanced social provision, and investment in community healing (see Mwale and Williams, 2023). Cities such as Glasgow and London require policy and practice attuned to the interweaving of physical violence, psychological tensions and structural harm if they are to move beyond periods of fragile containment, towards sustainable peace.

Table 1.

Summary of participants.

	Glasgow	London
Community leader	1	8
Youth worker	12	14
Policing	3	3
Statutory services	2	0
Young people	17	20
Total	35	45

Table 2.

Summary of findings.

Form of violence	Summary of findings in both locations
“Upon”	In both locations, respondents described the multi-faceted effects of poverty, including temporal stifling and financial desperation. In both locations, respondents gave accounts of institutional hollowing and reductions in support services for young people. There was significant contrast between respondents’ accounts of policing in the two locations – in London, we heard of over-policing, particularly in relation to institutional racism, whereas in Glasgow, it was more common for respondents to refer to ‘under-policing’.
“Within”	In both locations, respondents referred to acute psychological struggle experienced by young people, ranging from specific mental health difficulties to a more generalised sense of meaninglessness. In Glasgow, there was specific mention of self-harm and substance abuse as indicative of the severity of young people's mental health difficulties.
“Between”	In Glasgow, respondents spoke of interpersonal physical violence being less normalised than it had been in the recent past, but raised concerns that this may represent a fragile form of containment, as opposed to a sustainable form of peace. In London, it was more common for respondents to talk about inter-generational continuities in territorial violence. In both locations, perspectives varied as to the effects of social media on interpersonal physical violence. In both locations, respondents alluded to the tight interconnectedness of violence “upon”, “within”, and “between.”