ABSTRACT
According to the WHO World Report on Violence and Health being a young man is ‘a strong demographic risk factor’ for violence (Krug et al. 2002: 25), especially if this young man lives in a country with an emerging economy. Latin America, for instance, shows higher rates of violence among young people when compared with other regions in the world (Mercy et al. 2002). Furthermore, violence seems to be exacerbated by large urban contexts, with cities such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Mexico City, Lima and Caracas accounting for more than half the total of the national homicide rates (Briceno-Leon and Zubillaga 2002). However, these statistics refer to a small percentage of the population of young men living in these conditions, reflecting a set of marginal behaviours and not necessarily a generalised set of attitudes in poor communities (Mullins 2006). Traditional public health approaches to the study of young people and risk behaviours – including interpersonal violence – tend to consider individual characteristics, such as social status, age and ethnicity, as risk factors, which can inadvertently generate a blaming discourse in which young people with certain characteristics are widely stigmatised as ‘youth-at-risk’ (Kelly 2000; Sharland 2006). In trying to understand young men's interpersonal violent behaviour, we need to go beyond the individual and explore structural and contextual factors, but in doing so we need to be careful not to assume that individuals are passive recipients of structural forces.
