Tackling Child Exploitation programme — Young People’s voices in strategic decision making. #Week 6: 22nd January 2021

As we welcomed the New Year, Isabelle and I started to identify actions for the next phase of this work. Revisiting the aims and sharing our thoughts and questions aloud has been valuable. During the past week, we had an especially helpful discussion with colleagues from The Children’s Society — it was both enlightening and encouraging to hear how others share our commitment to participation.

Questions that were consistently raised during this conversation included:

· Is there appetite amongst professionals to hear young people’s voices?

· Whose interests are being served when we seek to have young people’s voice feature in our strategic work to develop responses to exploitation — young people, professionals, strategic leaders or all three?

Isabelle and I need to prioritise asking young people if this piece of work is of interest to them. If they are interested — what problem do they want to try to solve? We reflected on my previous experience as a caseworker for a child exploitation service. When professionals referred young people to our service due to reports they were being exploited, young people would rarely identify exploitation as the problem they needed support with. On most occasions, they asked for help due to isolation from peers or school, family breakdown or had noticed a decline in their emotional well-being. So I ask myself, why are we so determined to include young people’s voices in our work, without knowing that they want to contribute or influence? How we frame this piece of work to young people will be crucial. We need to ensure that what we are asking makes sense to young people, and avoid using language and jargon that will be meaningless to them.

Another key reflection has been in relation to the way we talk about ‘young people’s voices’. We need to consider how we are defining young people’s voices as part of this work, whose voice(s) do we want to and are able to hear.

Youth voice can be present in multiple ways. Some hold the view that unless you name the young person who provided a specific quote then their contribution holds lesser value. Others dismiss a piece of work if there are no quotes from a young person. We must ask ourselves — what is the value of work, such as strategies or commissioning specifications, if young people were not involved in their development? For example, we reflected on the fact that professionals want to hear quotes from or have a young person present in training on child exploitation. However, when we ask professionals how they include young people’s voice in other elements of their work, there seems to be less space and less value for young people’s voices to be heard. To what extent does this reflect dynamics of professional power and control? Where are we willing to give up power? Where do we feel more anxious or reluctant? What about from the young person’s perspective: how far does their interest and/or willingness to contribute to this kind of work depend on what their personal experiences have been?

The literature tell us that the voices and experiences of child sexual exploitation victims are far more likely to have been heard than young people who have been criminally exploited. We are keen to explore why. We think this could be due to the differences in empathy that can at times be shown towards victims who have been criminally exploited compared to sexual exploitation victims. If a young person has been arrested for a crime such as possession with intent to supply and we know they are being exploited, then their experiences should and will hold value. While the issues regarding peer-on-peer abuse are complex, children and young people under the age of 18 who offend and/or are exploited are still children, with the right to have their voices heard as set out in Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

A common, crosscutting theme in current thinking about young people’s voices is that of power, which will definitely feature for the duration of our work. My colleague Jo Petty’s blog references the power dynamics in design work with young people, describing it as an area ‘requiring leaders to be courageous — who are able to cope with the vulnerability associated with departing from ‘business as usual’.

We have also acknowledged that young people’s voices can be influential at different stages in the development of work, and that there are multiple ways of gathering information from young people even in terms of consultations and participation. So we want to consider how we can expand the concept of youth voice to promote and develop opportunities, and how we can be smarter about sharing their influence and contributions.

Something I want to leave you with for your own reflection is the ‘butterfly check’ that my wonderful colleagues Chloe Dennis-Green and Adam Groves asked Isabelle and I to use in order to check if we are on the right path. The butterfly check is: ‘if we’re feeling uncomfortable we’re doing something right’ and, ‘if we are truly being brave and ambitious, we will sit with butterflies’.

So far, so good.

Ellie

Twitter: @EllieFairgrieve or @isabellebrodie4 or by email: ellie.fairgrieve@childrenssociety.org.uk and Isabelle.brodie@beds.ac.uk