Ending Youth Violence Lab: an evidence manifesto

In the year ending March 2022 there were 33,000 proven offences committed by children in England and Wales. Around 8,000 children were first time entrants to the criminal justice system, whilst just under 3,500 proven knife and offensive weapon offences were committed by children. Supporting children to avoid serious violence is one of the most critical social policy problems we face. Unfortunately, despite good intentions, services and programmes won’t always achieve the outcomes we strive for. Or, to put it simply, sometimes things just don’t “work”. To tackle this problem, we need to know which services have the most impact. Eager to play our part in supporting and furthering the excellent work that has taken place over the last 10 years, we spoke to a number of experts. We wanted to learn from the experiences of the last decade, learn about how we could best deliver on our aims, and learn how to avoid the pitfalls involved in working with complex behavioural interventions. Based on this we have set five goals for the Ending Youth Violence Lab. These build on our strategy, and relate to ways we can better design, refine and evaluate services. If services are evaluated as well as possible, research can contribute even more to tackling the problem of youth violence. We decided to publish these five goals for two reasons. The first is to share what we have learnt with the research and evaluation community - we think these goals should be shared by all of us who want to build the evidence on how to end youth violence. The second is to publicly commit ourselves to best practice in social policy design and evaluation (hence 'manifesto') and to build on the efforts of others.