Transitional safeguarding for girls and young women - Dez Holmes
The notion of Transitional Safeguarding was the focus of a 2018 Research in Practice briefing, intended to capture the need for a more fluid, developmentally attuned approach to helping citizens be safe.
Young people and professionals alike have often highlighted the challenge of the ‘cliff-edge’ facing young people as they turn 18 – and much has been done in recent years to address this in certain parts of the system. Services for those with special educational needs and disabilities are available for many – though by no means all – until the age of 25. Those young people leaving care, and defined as ‘care-leavers’, are entitled in many cases to elements of support until the age of 25. The Care Act 2014 places a duty on local authorities to conduct transition assessments for many young carers. All of these measures recognise the need to support people as they move from adolescence into adulthood.
Within the field of safeguarding, however, needs and support are still largely considered through a rather binary lens whereby childhood and adulthood are wholly distinct and marked simply by a birthday. The established wisdom – scaffolded by various aspects of statutory guidance, legislation, policy frameworks and practice norms – remains that a person is a child until the age of 18, at which point they overnight become an adult, with all the self-efficacy, resilience, and self-reliance that entails.
This neat, linear construct is at odds with so much of what we know now about young people’s transition to adulthood and the type of harm they can face. Transition, as Prof Danielle Turney often reminds us, is a process not event. It does not magically happen at the stroke of midnight, and it is affected by a range of internal and external influences.
This polarised view of adult/childhood does not reflect recent research by Sawyer et al in 2018, building on previous research within the justice sector (see for example Prior et al, 2011), which makes a compelling case for adolescence itself to be redefined. Some studies into brain development & effects on behaviour show some elements of brain growth – eg development to more mature affect regulation, social relationships and executive functioning - continue into the 20s. Sawyer et al propose that “a definition of 10–24 years corresponds more closely to adolescent growth and popular understandings of this life phase.”
A fairly obvious point, yet one that bears repeating, is that harm does not stop at 18 – and nor do the effects of harm. Indeed, for many young people facing ‘extra-familial harm (as sexual or criminal exploitation often is) their vulnerability increases at this point as professional support peels away. Transitional Safeguarding explicitly chimes with approaches such as Contextual Safeguarding (Firmin, 2015), for precisely this reason.
The ongoing impact of trauma, stigma, fractured relationships – and these can be the effects of professional intervention, not only of the harm itself – is something that many young people carry with them into adulthood. They can find that they are not deemed eligible for statutory support from adult services, and indeed they may feel mistrustful towards such services.
A number of local areas are working hard to provide support to adults who might not meet the formal criteria for adult safeguarding. The emphasis on prevention and wellbeing within the Care Act provide a strong basis for this kind of innovation. And of course, helping young adults to address needs relating to their safety and wellbeing makes good economic sense as well as being the right thing to do.
Transitional Safeguarding is not only about bridging the gap between children’s and adults’ safeguarding – it is about boundary-spanning more generally. The highly interconnected nature of issues such as mental, health, homelessness, trauma, exploitation, poverty, and adversity demands a highly integrated system of support.
These intersections are evident when we look at girls and young women in the justice system. Transitional safeguarding requires us to notice and address gaps and disjointedness that affect people’s ability to live safe lives – for example, the conceptual and practical links (or lack thereof) between safeguarding and justice.
Experience of violence, abuse and exploitation is common amongst girls and young women in the justice system, with evidence that coercion in relationships with partners, family members and peers, as well as violent responses to abuse, can result in criminalisation (Bateman & Hazel, 2014). Mental ill-health and substance misuse are also pressing issues for girls and young women in the justice system (NHS 2017; MoJ 2020, respectively). And of course, all of these adversities can affect a person’s parenting – so enabling these young women to live safe, healthy future lives could play a role in ensuring their children are safe and healthy too.
Helping these young women to play an active part in their own safeguarding, whilst recognising they are not responsible for the harm they have faced is one means by which we can support a sense of self-efficacy and resilience. For young women in the justice system, many of whom have already experienced a high degree of coercion or exploitation, it is particularly important to strive for highly participatory practice, with young people afforded as much voice and choice as possible.
The task facing practitioners working with young people, whether in a safeguarding role or a justice role, is not simply to assess or manage risk – nor is it to only ‘keep them safe’. Rather it is to prepare and equip them with the skills, relational connections and self-belief to lead safe, fulfilling lives.
This requires leaders to think about the whole system, to break down barriers between services or age-groups, and to create the conditions for coherent courageous practice.
Find out more about girls and young women’s transitions to the adult justice system in the Young Women’s Justice Project briefing Falling Through the Gaps.
Funded by Lloyds Bank Foundation and run in partnership by Agenda and the Alliance for Youth Justice (AYJ), the Young Women’s Justice Project provides a national platform to make the case for the needs of young women aged 17–25 in contact with the criminal justice system, including of the needs of girls transitioning into adult services as they turn 18.
We are keen to continue collaborating with others working in this space, with both lived and learned experience of the issues. If you work with girls and young women in contact with the criminal justice system and would like to get involved, please contact maggie@weareagenda.org.