Context for Our Research Work with Boys and Young Men

Abstract

At this point it is important to acknowledge the context in which our work with boys and young men has developed over the past 18 years. For over 40 years boys have grown up in Northern Ireland facing particular difficulties that have impacted upon their development and behaviour. The sphere of cultural, political and individual identity has been fiercely contested with young people developing their sense of ethnic identity in the midst of widespread social, economic and political upheaval through a period of prolonged conflict. The fact that young people growing up in Northern Ireland live in a multi-problem, multi-stress and divided region has been well documented (Cairns and Cairns, 1995; Muldoon, 2004; Browne and Dwyer, 2014) with 93 per cent of children attending schools that are wholly or predominantly Catholic or Protestant (Sommers, 2015).