The specific feature of the PeerThink manual is to consider various social categories. Different genders, various sexualities, affiliation to majority groups or to minorities, e.g. belonging to ethnic minorities, and the question of social Class – all this (and more) have influence on the everyday life experience with violence. In other words, the categories have influence on violence and Violence prevention because they affect people’s lives. Our understanding of violence includes all forms of discrimination because of Gender, sexuality, Ethnicity, social class and other social difference causes.

For this reason we use the term Intersectionality in the PeerThink project. With this concept we want to cover the complex reality of young people in a society in which a young person is affected by many social differentiations. Our purpose is to ask, what it means to young people, when they are affected by different social categories at the same moment. Which problems can we analyse, but also what possibilities arise if we consider these different affiliations of young people in different contexts as resources of the young people? An intersectional view on Youth reality is an analytical approach of explaining violence, but also identification of resources for a non-violent behaviour.

Originally the term intersectionality emerged in late 1980s in critical race and feminist studies and focus on black women’s experiences of subjectivity and oppression thus pointing to the “multidimensionality” of marginalized subjects’ lived experiences by exposing differences within the broad categories of “women” and “blacks”. Simultaneously, the category of class joined to the categories of gender and race in feminists’ exploration of multiple dimensions of oppressions. Intersectionality appears as a significant contribution to the general theory of identity by pointing to the multiple oppression experienced by radicalised, ethnicised, poor and gendered subjectivities in particular, although other differences as sexual orientation, age, ableness, Religion etc. are also sites of oppression and are increasingly analysed within the studies of intersectionality. In our analysis we are focusing on categories which originally inspired the concept of intersectioanlity: gender, race and class with extension on sexuality and ethnicity. At the same time we are well aware that the concept should be elaborated on other categories of inequalities too.