Enablers Not Experts
We’re not experts (or magicians), we’re enablers
‘I’m afraid we’re at capacity…’
It’s every concerned social worker/teacher/police officer [insert professional here]’s most dreaded phrase.
But it’s true, we are. Always.
In The Children’s Society’s Disrupting Exploitation programme we have never really understood the idea of fierce voluntary sector competition for work. When we hear that another voluntary organisation has received funding to work on child criminal exploitation we whoop for joy, another one for us to add to the list of people we can call on when we are so full to the brim with young people who need support that we can’t possibly take on any more. The sad reality is that, for the moment at least, where the exploitation of children is concerned, there is always enough work to go around.
Being constantly at capacity is of course one of the reasons that as a programme, on Disrupting Exploitation we work not only 1:1 with young people, but also on changing the systems around them to try and create a society where exploitation can’t happen in the first place. We’re trying to work ourselves out of a job.
We recognise that this requires being in it for the long haul. There is no easy fix and perpetrators work to outsmart improvements in the system at every turn. But the fact that we’re still having to turn away professionals who want an ‘expert’ to support thinking and decision-making in relation to a specific young person, has got us at The Children’s Society thinking about our role as the ‘experts’. The truth is that we are not experts. We can’t possibly be experts when those who perpetrate child criminal exploitation are infuriatingly so adept at finding new ways to evade detection, that we can’t keep up with the myriad of ways that they change their tactics to exploit children. We also don’t have a set of magic wands hung on the wall in our workplace that enable us to ‘fix’ a young person’s circumstances and wave away the people who are perpetrating crimes against them (although that would be really cool and if anyone does ever invent one of those be sure to drop me a line).
Very often, a partner agency’s initial panic at the fact that we can’t come in with a magic wand, can be allayed by what we call a ‘consultation’ — a chat about what’s going on for the young person and what they as a professional can be doing to support. Sometimes we provide information on legislative frameworks, how the law works in relation to trafficking, resources to use or further reading homework, but more often than not, we listen to a professional talking about how they are handling the situation and we give them a sounding board, a new perspective on the same situation and a bit of headspace to think about things differently. They often go away with a new confidence to try something else, to delve deeper into the root cause of a problem and to come up with a creative solution that might not be the norm. We enable them to disrupt what is happening using the tools they already have to hand.
There’s a lot we do that I could tell you is special. We draw on our collective expertise, the amazing skills of our staff team and our organisation that have been carefully gathered and stored over the years. Our blend of leadership and management is a precise balancing act, not a magic formula, that combines trust and letting people get on with what they do best with careful guidance and direction. We take all of this from our vast library of experience (sorry it’s not one that you can visit yet — we’re working on it) and then we listen, and we learn.
We listen to our partners and figure out what constraints they are working within (ridiculous workloads, broken bureaucracy and silo working are just some that come to mind)
“The police sometimes just want to lock them up, the housing providers just want to evict them, social workers just want to hit every statutory threshold.”
“If a school opens itself up then it’s almost problem solved, but trying to get them to take notice is hard — people are overworked.”
We listen to parents and carers telling us what their worries are for their children and what their own needs are in helping to support them.
“I needed to express how I was feeling about my son, in every session I spoke about him and she listened”
And perhaps most importantly, we listen to young people. We listen to them telling us what they like, what they don’t like, what’s frustrating them about the system, what’s happened to them, how they want to move forward, who is important to them, how they prefer to work, what they want in life and what help they need from us.
“I felt very relieved because at least I have someone to listen to me. I felt so comfortable with her to be open and share anything I want to share.”
Once we have taken in and computed all of this information, our job is most often as an enabler, not an expert (or a magician for that matter).
We make connections where they didn’t exist before, from linking police teams to social care teams to improve information sharing, to linking parents to schools and helping smooth out those relationships. We enable creative thinking by providing structured space for organisations to soundboard their ideas and gain a critical perspective on their blind spots, from helping schools to reflect on the unintended consequences of zero-tolerance behaviour policies that exclude children without thought to the underlying causes of behaviours, to teaching social workers systems change strategies to help them identify and address procedures that are confusing for young people and inefficient for staff. We help to implement small changes in people’s day-to-day work that ultimately improve responses to exploited young people.
In all of this, the real experts are the young people we are here to support. They are the ones who can tell us the intricacies of what isn’t working, who have ideas based on their own unique experiences about how things could have been better for them and who hold the keys to making systems better for children in the future.
With young people as our experts and our team as the enablers helping to amplify those young people’s voices and give partners the tools to hear them, we’re hoping to do even more creative and wonderful things in the coming year. In particular we’re thinking about how we can create some headspace for communities and grassroots organisations to change systems and how we can be the glue that links large infrastructures (like children’s social care and the police) to the communities they serve. There are other things on the cards too. Off the back of our Youth Voice webinar on the issue of school exclusions, we want to create more opportunities for those expert voices of young people to shine through and to make sure that those in power are really listening and making change. Ultimately, we’re here to make tackling exploitation once and for all a goal that’s shared by everyone, to work ourselves out of a job so that we can hang up our wands and go and have a cup of tea.
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Beck Fedia is National Programme Manager of The Disrupting Exploitation Programme at The Children’s Society.
