Our aim in what follows is to make some practical suggestions as to how youth workers engaged with individual young people might maximise the desistance-promoting potential of their responses to youth violence. For now, we are deliberately seeking to avoid a deterministic reading of these young people's lives. Although we recognise that structural forces (such as chronic poverty) have a massive impact on young people, the evidence we present here suggests that young people are not entirely determined by those forces. Their ‘agency’, or freedom to act, is bounded but not eliminated by the social environment around them. The reality is, we contend, that although some young people clearly have a wider range of choices than others, young people involved in violence either as victims, perpetrators or witnesses do still have hard, but real, choices as to how to act. Inevitably, when dealing with such micro-level notions of interpersonal relationships and individual choices the analysis will have a psychological bias. As Abraham Maslow highlights, psychologists could be accused of:

However, he counters:

The point here is that both the social and the psychic are important (Jefferson, cited in mac an Ghaill, 1996, p 154). Social conditions in the external world create psychological needs, which are then felt and experienced internally, and not all young people within a certain environment will react in the same way to that same environment. One youth worker we spoke to recognised this reality within the community in which he worked.