ABSTRACT
A variety of theoretical frameworks for understanding violence are laid out in Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide, edited by Rosine Perelberg. This chapter explores the emergence of violence in the lives of three young people of Caribbean background. There is an assumption that children and young people are becoming more violent, and it does indeed seem that rapid social change within a highly materialistic society is contributing to the development of internal worlds that result in higher levels of aggression and violence. Violence-prone young people are not the unintelligent, inarticulate losers they are often supposed to be. Most of the young people perpetrating acts of violence of any sort have never developed what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott defined as "a capacity for concern". Adult foster-care and mentoring would be helpful to young people who know so little about well-enough functioning family life.
