January 28, 2021 Learning and Reflections, Minoritised voices & expertise by experience, Programme Blogs, Programme Themes Young People’s Voices in Strategic Decision Making – Diary Entry reflections by the Tackling Child Exploitation programme ResourceBy Ellie Fairgrieve, Dr Isabelle Brodie Diary #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: How do we retain flexibility and ensure that the project can respond to what we are hearing? 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? 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? 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 Diary #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
December 2, 2020 Learning and Reflections, Minoritised voices & expertise by experience, Programme Themes, Reconfiguration of services TCE Year 2 Priorities: Children and young people’s voice By Ellie Fairgrieve, Dr Isabelle Brodie, Anna Racher Action ResearchChild ExploitationParticipationProfessionalsYoung person's voice