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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
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- Book:
- Contextual Safeguarding
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 23 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 20 July 2023, pp 30-43
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- Chapter
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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.
2 - From peers and parks to patriarchy and poverty: inequalities in young people's experiences of extra-familial harm and the child protection system
- 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 17-29
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- Chapter
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Summary
Tackling the social conditions of abuse
Many myths have circulated about the COVID-19 pandemic, a novel flu pandemic that, at the time of writing, has had a global impact for two years. One of those myths, now well documented, was that ‘we are all in this together’. This was a phrase adopted by the current British Conservative politician and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak. Intending to acknowledge that the virus does not discriminate, Sunak, who was announcing his first economic budget for the country at the start of the first UK national ‘lockdown’, wanted to let the public know that the British government wouldn't either. Over the past two years, a polyphony of voices have pointed out that, actually, we weren't all in this together. People living in poorer areas of the UK were nearly four times more likely to die from the virus than people living in affluent areas (Suleman et al, 2021). British Black Africans and British Pakistanis were two and a half times more likely to die from the virus than white British people (Platt and Warwick, 2020). These figures revealed huge disparities in how the virus impacted communities across the UK, dependent on social class, ethnicity or disability.
They also revealed something else: many driving forces of this disparity were structural and systemic in nature (we will return to a definition of these terms). People living in poorer areas were not simply dying at higher rates because they were poor but because they were more likely to be exposed to the virus, working in essential jobs that continued through the most virulent stages of the pandemic. British Black Africans and Pakistanis account for a significant proportion of the British working class, and many were essential workers and are frontline health and social care workers (ONS, 2020). Those living in poorer areas had fewer options for self-isolation, with lower household incomes and overcrowded housing making staying home from work, or isolating from family members, harder. Many did stay at home despite these additional challenges (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2021: 21).
These structural inequalities determined who was most exposed to the virus and least protected from getting sick, and also who was least protected from getting sacked (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2021: 36), or, on top of that, from being charged with a litany of new ‘COVID’ offences introduced through a series of emergency parliamentary measures.