Young People and Interfaces Report - Institute for Conflict Research

YOUNG PEOPLE AND INTERFACES
4. Discussion and Key Findings
If as Margaret O’Brien argues, one of the main principles of a ‘just city’ is that it enables the
free movement of children through it (O’Brien et al. 2000: 258), then it is debatable whether
or not Belfast as of May 2012 would qualify. While clearly some young people living at the
interface feel relatively free to go where they please, there remain issues associated with a
restricted sense of movement in and around the interface for many others, particularly with
regards to accessing particular services and facilities.
Despite the fact that many young people did not uncritically or passively accept narratives of ‘safe’
and ‘unsafe’ space as told to them by their friends, family and others (Leonard 2010c), it remained
the case that for many there was a wariness associated with the ‘Other’ community and in moving
through the territory of the ‘Other’. This was particularly the case in the evenings and during the
summer months when various trigger events can increase tensions between communities.
For teenagers who feel they are too old to get involved in standard youth club activities and for
whom there seems little else to do, wandering the streets where they live becomes a regular
occurrence and in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, this ‘neighbourhood
nationalism’ (Webster 2003) and attachment to an area where friends and family live is an
important part of developing a sense of place bound identity (Matthews et al. 2000; Laughlin and
Johnson 2011). However, the difficulty in Northern Ireland occurs where locality, territory and
ethnicity intersect, particularly when groups of young people encounter one another at the interface
(Healy 2006).
The visible presence of groups of young people on the street is also often perceived by adults as
young people being ‘up to no good’ which in turn alienates young people further from local adults
and wider society (Radford et al. 2005). The constant moving on of young people from public
spaces, which while understandable in some ways as a response to resident fears of large
numbers of young people in public, does little to alter perceptions that they are regarded as little
more than a ‘nuisance’, and this can also feed into negative perceptions of the police who are
responding to residents’ concerns.
Of course there are young people who gather at interfaces with the intention of, or indeed actually,
getting involved in violence. This is clearly a key issue which needs to be tackled by the police and
other organisations to, if possible, prevent a young person from coming in to contact with the
criminal justice system. The 174 Trust have begun a ‘Together Stronger’ project which will run until
2015 and which aims to improve community relations at the Carlisle Circus interface. One aspect
of this project will be to engage with marginalised young people in the surrounding areas who may
be at risk of engaging in interface violence and coming into contact with the criminal justice system
– this project and others like it should be welcomed as a step in the right direction in terms of
improving engagement with young people at the interface.
Despite the potential of this and other similar one-off projects, all young people in public spaces
should not be judged as being ‘up to no good’ purely on account of their age and their appearance
in public space. The position of many young people in interface areas and beyond is often on the
periphery of citizenship, without a full sense of place in the community, where they are viewed as in
the process of ‘becoming’ adults, but they are not yet complete social beings (Blitzer 1991;
Leonard 2006b: 1129). This may mean that in times of interface violence, getting involved to
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