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By Ashley McMahon, Head of Therapeutic Operations, Violence Intervention Project (VIP)1
Sevens years ago, in the earliest days of the Violence Intervention Project, we sat with Prof. Peter Fonagy at the Anna Freud Centre trying to think about a difficult question: What actually drives violence?
We spoke about trauma. About marginalisation. About the environments young people grow up in and the ways in which structural inequalities shape behaviour. And we spoke about shame - the emotional experience of feeling exposed, disrespected or humiliated in the eyes of others. At one point, Peter said something that has stayed with me ever since. He said that when we think about violence - and the knife crime epidemic affecting London and the UK - we tend to focus on what it does to the victim and wider society. The harm. The injury. The injustice.
But if we are serious about preventing violence, we have to ask a different question.
What does violence - and the knife - do for the person using it? Violence is not only an act of harm. First and foremost, it is an act of protection. And not simply protection of the physical body, but protection of the emotional and psychological self.
For some young people, the greater threat is not physical injury. It is something harder to see, harder to understand and harder to name. The greater threat is losing face. It is the experience of humiliation and loss of status they’re defending against. A kind of psychological exposure that can feel, in the moment, intolerable, annihilating and worse than death.
This is not theoretical. It is a pattern and narrative we see and hear again and again in our work with young people. It unfolds in our communities and on our streets and more often than not, it is acted out in seconds.
A Moment on the Platform
Recently I was standing on a balcony with a young person, looking out over the estate, when he started telling me about something that had happened a few nights earlier. He had stepped off the train and seen someone he knew on the platform. Not a close friend, but someone familiar. He walked over, hand out, expecting acknowledgement.
The other young person didn’t take it. No handshake. No recognition. “He mugged me off,” he said. So my client responded. “What, you’re too good to shake my hand?”
And that was enough. Within seconds, the atmosphere shifted. The other young person’s friends stepped in. Words were exchanged. The energy shifted. Two of them backed out knives.
My client didn’t step back. He stepped forward. “Go on then, you fucking pussies,” he said. “Stab me.” He started goading them. Calling them out. Challenging them to either stick the blades in or to put the knives down and fight him “like men.”
The whole thing - from a missed handshake to knives drawn - had taken seconds.
Standing there, listening to him recount the incident, bringing it to life in front of me, I found myself asking the same question: How does something so small become something so dangerous, so quickly?
Violence is not random.
Imagine you had been on the platform that night and witnessed this violent incident. How might you have described it – senseless, random? We reach for simple explanations when something feels difficult to understand. The more useful question is not whether violence makes sense, but what made it feel necessary in that moment. Why might violence come to feel like the only available option?
Psychiatrist James Gilligan, who spent decades working with some of the most violent individuals in custodial settings, observed that he had yet to encounter a serious act of violence that was not preceded by the experience of feeling shamed, humiliated, disrespected, or ridiculed. Whether or not one accepts that claim in its strongest form, it offers a powerful lens. What appears, from the outside, to be disproportionate or impulsive may in fact be a response to something much deeper - something that has built up internally over time.
Violence, in this sense, is not random. For the young people we work with at the Violence Intervention Project2, it is a resource. When we look more closely, particularly in the context of serious youth violence, we are not seeing unpredictability so much as the effects of constraint - a narrowing of options shaped by systemic and structural disadvantage.
This is the context in which knives are pulled: a young person with limited access to relational safety, who struggles to make sense of overwhelming emotional states, and who experiences threat - both social and psychological - as immediate and total. In these moments, intense feelings such as shame are activated without the capacity to reflect on or regulate them. Instead, they are acted out - embodied and discharged into the world, increasingly through the point of a blade.
From the outside - as a witness, an observer - violence can look sudden. Senseless. Random. But from the inside, it is often the latest expression of something that has been building over time - something chronic. If that is the case, then the question is not simply why violence happens, but what is happening in the moment?
Violence is a resource
One way of understanding what is happening in these moments of escalation - moments in which knives are drawn, threatened, or used - is through Donald Nathanson’s ‘Compass of Shame’3 which describes how people respond when they experience shame - the feeling of being exposed, diminished, or “mugged off” in the eyes of others. Shame is not experienced in private. It is a social emotion. It depends on the presence of an audience – real or imagined. To feel shame is to feel seen in a way that threatens how we wish to be interpreted, in the minds of others.
Because of this, shame does not sit still. It demands a social response. Nathanson’s ‘Compass of Shame’ helps us make sense of what happens next. It shows how the emotion drives behaviour and how that behaviour is an attempt to protect against the experience of shame itself, particularly in social contexts where status and respect are at stake.
If we return to the station platform, we can see that the missed handshake was not a minor social slight. It was public exposure. A moment in which social status was threatened. And in that moment, the shame did not sit with one individual. It moved between them. What began as exposure for one quickly became exposure for all, as each young person responded to the presence of the other, the audience around them, and the risk of losing status. Their interactions became organised around managing their individual and collective experience of shame.
To describe the rapid escalation that followed, including a willingness to confront an aggressor in possession of a knife, as irrational impulsivity, fails to recognise shame as a powerful driver of behaviour. It fails to acknowledge violence, in that moment, as a protective response - not only for the individual confronting the knives, but for those holding them, each attempting to protect themselves from the experience of shame.
It protects against the experience of shame by displacing it. What cannot be tolerated internally is pushed outward - through aggression, intimidation, and, at times, the use of a weapon. The knife undoubtedly increases the potential for physical harm. At the same time, it increases the individual’s capacity to regulate the excesses of shame - to regain control, repair the social rupture and avoid being seen as vulnerable.
Towards a Different Response
In our work at the Violence Intervention Project, and through the development of the Shame Initiative4, we have come to understand violence not as senseless or random, but as a response to shame. While this is particularly visible in the context of serious youth violence, the dynamics of shame are not confined to it. They shape behaviour across relationships, communities, and the systems designed to respond to them.
If that is the case, then our approach to prevention begins to shift. The task is not only to manage risk, but to better understand the moments in which exposure, status and belonging come under threat and how those moments are navigated, not only by young people, but by the professionals and services around them. Shame does not sit in isolation. It moves through interactions, shaping all our social responses.
This does not make violence acceptable. But it does make it understandable. And in that understanding lies the possibility of responding differently - not only to the behaviour itself, but to the social and emotional conditions that give rise to it. If we are willing to take that step, then prevention may begin not at the point of crisis, but in the moments where shame first takes hold.
Further Reading
[1] Ash McMahon is a registered Child and adolescent Psychotherapist and Head of Therapeutic Operations at the Violence Intervention Project (VIP). He leads the development of Urban Therapy, a community-based therapeutic approach to working with young people affected by serious youth violence. His work focuses on the relational and emotional drivers of violence, with a particular interest in the role of shame, mattering, and mentalizing in prevention and intervention.
[2] The Violence Intervention Project (VIP) is a West London based charity working with young people aged 12–25 who are at risk of, or involved in, serious youth violence. VIP delivers long-term, community-based therapeutic interventions, building trusted relationships with young people who are often excluded from traditional services. Its work is grounded in shame-informed and relational practice, with a focus on creating safety, supporting reflection, and strengthening pathways away from violence.
[3] See too Donald L. Nathanson (1992) Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
[4] The Shame Initiative (TSI) www.theshameinitiative.org.uk - The Shame Initiative is a developing practice and training framework that extends trauma-informed approaches by focusing on the role of shame in shaping behaviour, relationships, and systems. Drawing on frontline experience and interdisciplinary theory, it aims to support.
