Despair and repair: using artistic methods to transform violence affecting young people in London

This essay lays out two linked initiatives piloted in a London borough that used creative and community-led methods to explore and evidence violence affecting young people, enabling its prevention and transformation. The first initiative was a Youth Forum series co-designed with professional artists working in a range of mediums. The second was a proposal to develop a living ‘Sensory Archive’, an all-digital, participatory, qualitative evidence base documenting what violence affecting young people looked, sounded, and felt like. Many forms of violence that young people experience are structural and chronic: stigma, suspicion, exclusion, adultification, deprivation, neglect, and more. Despite the harm these forms of violence cause, crime statistics often fail to track them. This is because legal systems for reporting harm may be unable to make sense of how children and young people talk about their experiences. Consequently, the criminal justice system offers inadequate remedy, protection, or deterrence. The Youth Forum and the Sensory Archive, which the Mayor of London recognised as city-wide models of practice, show how arts-based methods provide alternative ways to document and share violence that is traditionally hard to capture. These methods reveal pathways for communities, organisations, and services to work together to reduce harm, prevent its recurrence, and repair the damage. In 2024, the local authority changed its priorities and cut the budget for the Youth Forum and the Sensory Archive. Nonetheless, the multimedia documentation of the Forum and the approach staked out in the Archive proposal can still inform practice.