The multifaceted relationship between youth, violence

Dr Simon Howell – a senior research fellow at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Centre of Criminology – views the term “youth” in several ways beyond the demographic classification of a group of individuals aged 15 to 34 years. The difficulty in defining the youth points to the liminal spaces young people often occupy and from which feelings of discontent and violence frequently emerge.

“Youth Month is in recognition of events that took a dramatic turn in Soweto on 16 June 1976. It serves not only as a reminder of the critical importance of young people as agents of change, but is also an opportunity to address the concerns facing today’s young people, who have a significant role to play in the country’s future,” said a South African Local Government Association (Salga) statement last year.

However, Dr Howell has noted in his extensive research: “I have long argued that violence must be understood not only as an individual act of transgression but as a systemic and spatial phenomenon shaped by enduring forms of exclusion, neglect, and inequality that disproportionately impact young people.”

Central to understanding this point of view, Howell grappled with the question of who constitutes youth other than the age bracket in South Africa, a country with a chequered history. “It’s not an easy answer, however, I think there is a framework for it as the term is both demographic and developmental. The literature tends to look at it as a demographic classification; I don’t think it’s that simple for South Africa … because there is a historical narrative, but also contemporary concerns which make the concept contestable whichever way you look at it.”

“People are hamstrung by structural violence, economic issues, familial obligations.”

The reliance on the age factor leads to a lot of challenges around service delivery because the experiences of a 15-year-old are very different to that of a 34-year-old, he said. “Therefore, in terms of government intervention, you are targeting people at completely different ends of the definition and as such the interventions need to be different.”

Howell continued: “There are concerns around the economic development of the country, and because of the age bracket acting as a liminal space, people are hamstrung by structural violence, economic issues and familial obligations. There’s a term – waithood – where young adults cannot fulfil the obligations of being an adult because they do not have access to the resources required to be one. So, it’s an extended childhood where people are forced to sit and wait in a vacuum for adulthood to come and I think that is where a lot of violence and anger emerges from.”

Fragmentation of social trust

According to the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) released by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) for 2025 quarter one, young people aged 15 to 34 make up roughly 50.2% of South Africa’s working-age population, translating to approximately 20.9 million individuals. Stats SA also revealed that the youth unemployment rate increased from 44.6% in the fourth quarter of 2024 to 46.1% in the first quarter of 2025. Coupled with this is a general lack of trust of police, fragmentation of social trust and the entrenchment of parallel systems of authority and you end up with a recipe for calamity.

Returning to the point of violence as a consequence of structural neglect, Howell discussed with UCT News that if criminal gangs are, for example, running amok in Cape Town, there is more to interrogate to find out why: “They are criminal in nature; however, they are fundamentally based on identity and identity issues. The response of youth to the issues they face is to be part of groups in which their identity can find expression within those spaces.

“[Gangs] become a powerful medium through which people fulfil those identities and as such there is a reason why kids are willing to die for gangs; because they aren’t just a means of facilitating income, but rather the group becomes a fundamental part of who they are and what they believe in.”

Approach to safety

The solutions are ubiquitous, but challenges remain. “To overcome this challenge, there needs to be a multi-sectoral strategy. If you look at it from an inter-ministerial approach, you find that government departments are in competition for state funding, which distorts their own commitments towards crime fighting, for example.

“There should be a line of continuity insofar as the approach to safety goes – projects should have society at heart, not political careers, and until we get to that point, I fear that things will be premised on short-term interventions and that will never be successful.”