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4 - Value-informed approaches to peer mapping and assessment: learning from test sites
- Edited by Carlene Firmin, Durham University, Jenny Lloyd, Durham University
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- Book:
- Contextual Safeguarding
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 23 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 20 July 2023, pp 44-58
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
As local areas have adopted a CS approach, many have increased attention to young people's peer relationships as a source of both harm and protection. This chapter will explore themes which have surfaced while reflecting on the developing practice with peers being piloted in CS Scale-Up sites. We outline some potential benefits and risks, identified in the data, of safeguarding work with peer groups, and use this to reflect on what happens when these practices are employed without the application of the values; how might this impact the young people involved? If CS values are not underpinning the practice with peers, could we do more harm than good?
Within the Scale-Up data, we found multiple approaches employed to help focus on peer relationships and, more specifically, practice which targets the peer group. CS activities can take place at two levels. At level one, professionals embed recognition of extra-familial contexts into their work with individual children and families, using this to inform assessment, decision making and interventions. This might include sitting with the young person and, with curiosity and care, inviting them to reflect on their experiences in their friendships and wider peer relationships, their education settings or the places where they spend their time. Tools including peer mapping or safety mapping (see the CS website) can be used with the young person to facilitate reflections and help understand their experiences of harm in those contexts and, also importantly, their experiences of comfort and support. This can play a valuable role in assessment, decision making and planning for individual young people and their families. At level two, professionals work to actively change extra-familial contexts identified as impacting the safety of young people, meaning the peer group, school or public space could become subject to a safeguarding assessment, meeting or plan. This might include engaging with several members of a peer group, rather than an individual, to better understand the needs, functioning and social conditions which might be contributing to their collective experience of safety. It will also include engaging with the trusted adults who have reach into the group and capacity to provide guardianship to it.
While there is emerging good practice from Scale-Up sites, there is also increasing awareness of potential challenges when establishing practice with peers when this is not underpinned by the values.
3 - Identifying and responding to structural and system drivers of extra-familial harm using a Contextual Safeguarding approach
- Edited by Carlene Firmin, Durham University, Jenny Lloyd, Durham University
-
- Book:
- Contextual Safeguarding
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 23 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 20 July 2023, pp 30-43
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The socio-political power dynamics that shape the world govern the spaces where young people spend their time. Giovanni Rose (2021), a young person living in London, describes this in the poem ‘Welcome to Tottenham’, highlighted in this extract:
Welcome to Tottenham.
The devil's playground.
We fight over streets we don't own,
Knife crime's on the rise because the beef can't be left alone.
Why does no one understand that we just want our youth clubs back,
Why do they claim they’re not racist but label the violence here Black?
Welcome to Tottenham.
As the extract shows us, young people are aware of how their lives, and subsequently, the risks they face, are moulded by forces that span far beyond their families and communities. Structural inequalities, including poverty, racism and misogyny, are felt by many communities and young people every day (RECLAIM, 2020). Chapter 2 outlined the empirical evidence for the relationship between structural inequalities and experiences of, and responses to, harm in adolescence. If we take anything away from Rose's work, perhaps it should be that young people know more than we do about how inequalities shape the spaces they live in.
Extra-familial forms of harm (EFH), that is, abuse adolescents face outside the home, including criminal and sexual exploitation, peer-on-peer abuse and serious youth violence, and the spaces in which they occur, are shaped and reshaped continually by economic, social and political dynamics (Melrose and Pearce, 2013; Irwin-Rogers, 2019; Wroe and Pearce, 2022). These dynamics can be drivers of harm (that is, economic need as a driver for exploitation) and can shape how governments and professionals respond. When responding to EFH, consideration of how these dynamics play out and how they impact young people's experiences of harm and safety is twofold. First, how do we understand in practice the impact that economic, socio-and political (structural) inequalities have on the prevalence of EFH and young people's experiences of it. Second (and interconnected), what role do policy and professional responses have in reinforcing harm and the inequalities that govern the lives of young people and their communities (system harm). This chapter outlines some of the challenges practitioners face when responding to harm in contexts characterised by structural inequality and how, at times, this is exacerbated by professional responses.