Funded by the Youth Endowment Fund, the #iwill Fund (a joint investment between The National Lottery Community Fund and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) and the Co-op Group, PAC is a pioneering network of Peer Researchers and changemakers.
Peer research is research steered and conducted by people with lived experience of the issue being studied. It is a way to meaningfully involve young people in decision making, research design and delivery, and policy making. A peer researcher is someone who has had similar experiences of something to the people they are ‘researching’ – this could be based on place, or it could be based on experience, for instance, shared use of a specific health service for the researcher and research participants. Peer research aims to reveal authentic insights into people’s lives and experiences, which non peer ‘academic’ researchers would struggle to gain.
The PAC young researchers have conducted ground-breaking research to find out about young people’s experiences of violence and their views on how they can help make their communities better places to live, work and grow up. They have focused on topics such as racism, violence against women, cyber bullying, drugs and alcohol and school exclusion.
Their findings have highlighted major issues young people in the North East face and also produced a number of potential solutions The biggest commonalities across the projects were a lack of mental health support and a lack of appropriate and effective education. The Peer Researchers concluded that there was a lack of education on sexual violence, a lack of education on different cultures and racism, a lack of education on drugs and alcohol, particularly how to stay safe if you chose to use substances, a lack of support for young people with behavioural and educational needs in mainstream school and an overall lack of adults in their lives talking to them about serious subjects which surround serious youth violence.
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