This research project engages with racially diverse young people and community leaders in Harehills, Leeds to understand their experiences of youth violence and safety in the area.
The project explores racially diverse young people and community leaders’ perceptions of interactions with the police and media representations of Harehills. It examines the effectiveness of youth and educational services in the area for providing safety and support. The project runs from May 2025 – April 2027.
“This important project shines a vital light on the experiences of young people of colour in Harehills, particularly their interactions with police and support services. By working closely with the community, it not only seeks to understand youth experiences of violence but also challenges harmful perceptions and in doing so it seeks to drives positive change. Through evaluating the effectiveness of local services, this project offers a crucial step toward building trust, improving support and creating a safer, more inclusive environment for all young people in Harehills” ~ Richard Burgon, Labour MP for Leeds East.
Moments of worry within a community, known as social anxiety, are often shaped by wider social pressures such as rising deprivation, reduced local services, or negative media coverage. These anxieties can sometimes lead to moral panics: situations where fears become exaggerated and directed at particular groups.
In Harehills, this has meant that young people of colour are often placed at the centre of concerns about crime, disorder, and youth violence. These narratives do not appear out of nowhere. They develop in a context marked by years of austerity, deepening deprivation, and shrinking access to youth services, all of which significantly impact young people’s everyday lives and opportunities in the area.
Against this backdrop, this project examines how young people of colour in Harehills experience and interpret policing, public debate, and the heightened scrutiny placed upon them. Their encounters with police, often shaped through practices like racial profiling, reflect wider social processes in which state institutions respond to structural inequality through enforcement rather than investment. This means that the effectiveness of policing cannot be understood in isolation from the withdrawal of welfare, community provision, and youth services.
The media also plays an important role in amplifying fears around youth violence. By spotlighting isolated incidents, media coverage can contribute to a moral panic that obscures the social and economic conditions that shape young people’s lives. These narratives frequently cast young people of colour as threats rather than as individuals navigating constrained opportunities and reduced service provision. The project seeks to challenge this framing by focusing on young people’s own perspectives on safety, belonging, and risk.
Adopting the Centre’s anti-racist framework, the project focuses on the lived experiences of racially diverse youth in Harehills. Evidence from the lived experiences of racially diverse young people is important to highlight and address inequalities, as well as challenge negative mainstream narratives. It can also provide positive counternarratives about the role racial identity plays in youth violence and police (in)justice.
This project aims to change the narrative on youth violence and police (in)justice in the Harehills community by focusing on the lived experiences of young people of colour to critically understand their needs, their concerns, and their priorities. Specifically, the project team will answer the following research questions:
- How do young people of colour perceive policing and safety in the area?
- In what ways are their vulnerabilities exacerbated by their racialized identities?
- How do young people of colour feel about negative media reporting on Harehills in relation to youth crime?
- What have been the effects of cuts to public services on young people in the area?
- As racialized minorities, to what extent do young people in Harehills feel excluded by support services?
- What are young people’s visions for change in Harehills?
This project uses youth and community-based participatory action research methods to:
- frame the problem
- design the methods
- interpret the findings, and
- co-produce outputs.
The team is working with four community organisations in Harehills, and has convened a Youth Advisory Board comprising youth representatives from each partner organisation to help guide the direction of the project.
Data will be collected using art-based activities in focus groups with young people and semi-structured interviews with community leaders.
Lead investigators
- Dr Katy Sian (University of York)
- Dr Nadia Jessop (University of York)
- Professor Kate Brown (University of York)
Postdoctoral researchers
- Dr Rosie Campbell (University of York)
- Dr Amy Loughery (University of Leeds)
- Dr Öznur Yardımcı (University of York)
The team works collaboratively with participants to centre the voices of young people of colour and collectively develop sustainable solutions to empower young people to address issues of youth violence and police (in)justice in Harehills. Specifically, the team will coproduce the following outputs:
- A youth summit where findings will be shared with a wide cross-section of the local community including young people, community leaders, practitioners and policy makers.
- A co-produced, accessible community report and creative arts-based summaries of findings and recommendations.
- A youth and community-led action plan
