Breaking networks of youth serious violence

Project Team:
Professor Paolo Campana (PI, VRC - Cambridge)
Dr Noemi Corsini (Post-Doctoral researcher, VRC - Cambridge)
Dr Cecilia Meneghini (project associate, Exeter University) 

Funder: Nuffield Foundation

This project aims at developing evidence-based strategies to prevent at-risk young people from committing and/or being a victim of serious violence by targeting relational factors. It will help practitioners to better target their efforts and grasp unintended consequences. While previous research has explored both individual characteristics of offenders and community-level factors, the role of relations in generating – and sustaining – violence has been largely neglected. Yet, as in many aspects of social life, networks matter also in generating, and preventing, adverse outcomes.

This project integrates network factors into a tailored approach exploring the risk of committing violence (and being a victim of violence) as a function of individual factors and network (relational) factors. Based on the analysis of a large-scale dataset encompassing 42-month of police recorded crime events from Cambridgeshire, and employing a set of cutting-edge statistical techniques, the project explores mechanisms underpinning serious violence among young people, including relational distances from organised crime members and a range of criminal activities and risky environments.

This project aims at developing evidence-based strategies to prevent at-risk young people from committing and/or being a victim of serious violence by targeting relational factors. Our overall objective is to better understand relational risk factors to help practitioners target their efforts and grasp unintended consequences.

This project benefits from Cambridgeshire Police’s support and is made possible thanks to the financial support of the Nuffield Foundation 

https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/project/breaking-networks-of-youth-serious-violence

Materials:
Final Report (available in February 2026)
Toolkit for Practitioners (available in February 2026)