GRV is a continuing issue in the lives of young people. Recent events include reporting widespread harassment in schools (Women and Equalities Report, 2016), the continued refusal to make PSHE statutory and cuts to youth and specialist services.  The emphasis on educators’ responses to GRV comes at a time where there have been increased calls for compulsory Sex and Relationships Education in response to the recent women and equalities report and the levels of sexual harassment which clearly persist in schools. In response to such critical issues, BERA’s Sexualities and Genders and Youth and Informal Education SIGs jointly hosted a recent event in order to consider the following key issues:

• Challenges and new approaches within young people’s contexts to tackle GRV;
• Curricular issues in formal/ informal education relating to GRV and consent;
• Responding to violence and rage in the context of broader inequalities;

The event, entitled ‘Gender-related violence and young people: Critical responses in research and practice’, took place on 9 June 2017 at York St John University and was attended by academics, practitioners and activists.

The event opened with an inspiring keynote talk by Emma Renold (Cardiff) entitled ‘Rotifers and Ruler-skirts: Co-creating ‘Agenda: A Young People’s Guide to Making Positive Relationships Matter’. AGENDA is Wales’ first online tool-kit developed for young people on how they can safely and creatively raise awareness of gender-based and sexual violence. Renold explained how AGENDA aims to support young people to engage with a vast range of issues from commercial sexism and equal pay to sexual exploitation and transphobia through case studies of how other young people and organisations have addressed them. Following an overview of Wales’ policy context, and the ways in which the making and on-going training of the resource is informed by queer/feminist materialist and posthuman scholarship, Renold’s talk critically engaged with two of the case studies from the resource.

Vanita Sundaram’s (York) talk – ‘A continuum of acceptability: using young people’s views on violence to inform cultural change in learning communities’ – explored ways in which young people’s views on violence can be used to inform prevention initiatives in learning communities. Sundaram proposed that in terms of understanding why young people accept and excuse gender violence, it is helpful to think of their views as existing on a continuum of acceptability. Drawing on interviews with young people, Sundaram showed how young people do not straightforwardly conceptualise violence in binary terms of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and their positions on this continuum are heavily influenced by their views on what is appropriate or ‘normal’ gender behaviour. While it is clearly imperative that young people are taught that violence against women and girls is wrong, Sundaram suggested that this might not be an effective way to challenge social and cultural norms that inform young people’s thinking about violence. Instead, she argues for moving away from individualising, ‘bullying’ discourses, focused on legalistic frameworks, proposing that work should develop active bystander work for schools that recognises the primacy of destabilising gender norms.

Ideas from the two keynote talks were subsequently taken up in two interactive workshops. Entitled ‘Resources of hope’, the first workshop, facilitated by Janet Batsleer (Manchester Metropolitan) involved a retrospective look at the Feminist Webs archive dating back to the late 1970s (www.feministwebs.com). Delegates were able to look at print copies of archived issues. Alarmingly, a key point of discussion was that the ‘old’ material raised remarkably similar issues concerning gender-related violence and young people as are being debated and addressed in the present day. Batsleer referred to the concept of ‘cultural amnesia’ – the failure of new generations to recognise issues identified by previous generations of activists – and identified the need for more inter-generational and inter-professional dialogue in order to tackle GRV in a more informed way.

The second workshop – ‘Ways ahead politically and practically for research and practice’, facilitated by Zahra Tizro and Lynne Gabriel (York St John), engaged delegates in important discussions around the types of challenges that exist for those researching GRV. Not least of these are issues associated with securing ethical approval for research, lack of access to target research populations – especially children and young people. A finding from Tizro and Gabriel’s recent research indicates lack of understanding of the true nature of domestic abuse. For example, there is less awareness of youth to parent or caregiver violence. Additionally, they draw attention to an evident lack of understanding and an associated lack of services and funding for research on GRV. Workshop discussions also raised the important issue of considering the impact (potentially negative) of investigating GRV on researchers themselves with delegates calling for university ethics committees to ensure access to well-bring provision for their researchers.

In the final presentation of the day, Pam Alldred and Richard Walker (Brunel) explored ‘Tackling GRV in young people’s lives: what can be learned from sexualities education?’ They identified two areas of existing practice and research that could inform the 2016 Women and Equalities Report. The first is youth work practice around sexualities education and the second is sex and relationship education research. Alldred and Walker examined what might be learnt from the sex education literature and the pedagogic practices in informal education for work with students in HE.