Teenage fights and pointless, passionate, violence are nothing new. There are few parents of adolescent boys who do not fear that they might receive that late-night knock on the door from the police.
But behind today’s headlines of knife crime and gangs, there are young people working as peer mediators, helping their friends to resolve conflict. “There are thousands of young people around the country who are just quietly being peacemakers,” says Jenny Rogers, chief executive of Leap Confronting Conflict.
Her organisation, which was named Charity of the Year at last night’s Charity Awards, runs the PeerLink project, which trains teenagers in how to deal with discord without anyone getting hurt. “Conflict is inevitable but violence is preventable,” Ms Rogers says. “We know that conflict resolution works but we have to make sure that we give people the skills and support that they need.”
The idea at PeerLink is that coaching young people in the techniques of conflict resolution will help to stop disagreements escalating into much more serious disputes. “We are trying to put these skills into place so that young people can work with each other to prevent violence,” Ms Rogers says. “It’s also about understanding that young people are more than capable of sorting out their own problems, but that we have to train them and support them to do it.”
Part of the training is simply helping them to see that they have options. “As long as they are clear about their choices, they realise that they can change them,” says Samson Osinnowo, a youth development worker at Leap, who also shows teenagers how quickly situations can become difficult. “We do an exercise that shows how fast conflict can happen and how fast one choice can lead to another, so that they realise the choices that they need to make early on,” he says.
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The hope is that young people will then have the insight to recognise the early stages of conflict and the self-confidence to make the choices that will stop it. “It helps them to say ‘I know where this is going and I don’t want to go down that path’,” he explains.
Mr Osinnowo, who joined Leap as a volunteer, says that much of the work he does in schools concerns dealing with apparently minor things. For example, he shows young people how to make their voices heard without winding up peers or teachers, so reducing the chance of conflict. “In the workshops we hear the same things a lot. People don’t recognise how broad conflict is. They start off thinking it’s fights and arguments and don’t realise that it’s also not being able to communicate their ideas.”
The PeerLink programme starts by taking the whole of a school’s year nine or year ten pupils — that age group is chosen because they are mature but not yet caught up in exams — through a two-day training programme that covers language, “red flag” behaviour that can trigger conflict, and how to handle difficult situations. From that group, 20 or 30 young people undertake further training so that they can mediate between other pupils at their school.
“They have a room in the school that they use and there will be posters advertising their services,” Ms Rogers says. Any student can come in to see the peer mediators, who work in pairs with the support of an adult. “We asked [students who had used the service] what they thought of it and more than 80 per cent said things such as that if they had not gone to mediation, there would have been a big fight and it would have caused a lot of trouble.” Teachers in schools that have peer mediators report lower levels of violence and say that they can spend more time teaching, she adds.
Leap, which grew out of the Quaker philosophy of non-violence, also works with communities and gangs. This is much more complicated than simply talking to gang members and trying to teach conflict-resolution skills: Leap’s staff spend a great deal of time working with local police, community leaders and other professionals to train them before getting involved with gang members.
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“We are working with some young people in Westminster at the moment who are carrying knives or at risk of doing so,” Ms Rogers said. “We have put huge amounts of time in with the local police, the council and others to work with them first. We don’t just charge in and start doing things.”