Tackling Child Exploitation programme — Young People’s voices in strategic decision making. #Week 5: 8th January 2021

For the last three months, the Tackling Child Exploitation (TCE) Support Programme team have been working on a project, looking at how to include the voice of children and young people in local area responses to child exploitation. When we embarked on this important work, we assumed that it would follow a streamlined project management path — with Gantt charts, clear tasks and solid deadlines. The reality has been quite different.

The problem of focusing on planning is that the importance of being clear about the questions that need asking and how best to answer them can be overlooked. We thought that the findings from our Twitter conversation would steer us in this, but in fact, it has left us feeling much less certain about what we are trying to do, and whether we are going in the right direction.

What we know about participation work with young people is that it can too often be ‘one off’ or tokenistic, even harmful if it is not a positive experience for those involved or fails to generates positive change. This concern was reflected in the Twitter conversation — it is clear that there are some who feel disillusioned about achieving meaningful participation and see a gap between rhetoric and practice.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) does not help. It feels harder to ask people to get involved, undertake work that is over and above the day-to-day. However, we can’t help wondering if that reluctance mirrors wider behaviour in respect to listening to young people? Are we treating it as an add-on, rather than a core part of strategic thinking?

We are conscious of our privileged position within the TCE Support Programme: there are resources for this work, and we are anxious to use them wisely. Whilst being reluctant to charge ahead without careful thought, we are also acutely conscious of the need to progress this work to ensure the youth voice is heard.

Our thinking has brought us to four key questions to be addressed:

1. How do we retain flexibility and ensure that the project can respond to what we are hearing?

2. It is time to start hearing from young people in this project — what do we need to ask them? What arrangements need to be put in place to make that happen?

3. What are the key questions for this project? To what extent are they distinct from and add value to other work that has previously taken place?

4. What is the significance of COVID-19 to this project? What can we learn from this last year to usefully inform how we can best facilitate young people’s participation in this work?

Isabelle

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