The Impact of COVID-19: AYJ in conversation with Khulisa
AYJ member Khulisa, a national charity that provides wellbeing support to vulnerable young people in schools and prisons, talks us through how COVID-19 has impacted their work in youth justice and how they have adapted to this unprecedented year.
2020 was a challenging year for all. At the start of the crisis, facing significant losses of income, 88% of charities reported that they were likely to reduce service provision to young people, despite 73% of organisations in the sector anticipating heightened demand for services in that period. Khulisa was no different.
COVID-19 compounded an already critical situation for young people, bringing into focus inequalities that existed long before the pandemic between children from different backgrounds. Unfortunately, despite the increased demand for our services, social distancing measures meant that we could no longer deliver services in prisons and in most schools. In light of these challenges, we took swift action to mitigate further risks by adapting our delivery model to ensure we could continue to support young people when they needed us most.
Before the pandemic, we had never delivered any online programmes. However, rising demand for our services led us to explore alternative means of delivery that would allow us to provide critically needed support. Within the first 12 weeks of the lockdown, we developed new digital safeguarding and privacy protection processes as well as a suite of digital programmes and supporting toolkits which gave young people and the professionals and family who care for them constant access to our resources.
The first suite of resources we created was a five-week series of webinars for young people. At a time when they could not access support elsewhere, we gave young people:
A trusted professional to talk to: Relationships with trusted adults are critical and the most protective factor for a young person's mental health and capacity to buffer Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). When young people needed us most, our facilitators were there to support them.
Access to a safe space: When placed under extreme stress children often adopt a survival response (fight/flight). Access to a safe space that allows them to relate to others is key to turning off this stress response. At a time when young people were unable to access much needed support, we were there to give them a space to share, create and actively process thoughts, feelings and concerns that might otherwise turn into inappropriate or challenging behaviours.
Support using creative techniques: Arts based activities help improve young people’s capacity to communicate effectively with others, exercise empathy and work in collaboration with others in group settings. They also keep young people connected and create a means of expression for those who struggle with emotional literacy.
An opportunity to connect with others: It was especially important for us to continue providing this support to young people who sustained trauma, felt excluded, had disorganised attachment and felt very vulnerable at this time. Group sessions allow beneficiaries to understand their unmet needs, fears and hopes and enable them to self-regulate more effectively in response to these thoughts and feelings.
The pandemic also meant that adults were facing the challenge of managing their own personal pressures during the COVID-19 crisis, whilst being even more concerned with the welfare of the vulnerable young people they support. We developed a suite of digital webinars aimed at equipping them with the tools and knowledge to improve their personal resilience & well-being while supporting the wellbeing of the young people they work with. We have supported over 1,000 young people and professionals since the pandemic began through these digital programmes.
Using digital has expanded our reach hugely, especially to those professionals and carers in young people’s lives who have needed our support. Demand for trauma-informed training and wellbeing support for staff struggling to work under covid restrictions increased 6-fold. We found we were able to train much larger numbers of adults online in our approach that centres on the experiences of the child, not their behaviour. We mainly moved to support young people online out of necessity. At a time when young people were unable to access other forms of support, our webinars made wellbeing support available to them at a crucial time.
However, digital delivery is not without its own challenges.
The digital exclusion of our target demographic was one major challenge we experienced. Many of the young people we typically work with were unable to access our online webinars because they didn’t have internet access, struggled with connectivity or did not have the hardware required to access the sessions. The young people we work with in prisons were unable to benefit from the webinars at all despite many of them spending up to 23 hours a day in their cells. Other young people struggled with space as they often shared their rooms with siblings and other family members. This made it difficult for them to fully engage with the programme.
Another development we noticed quite early on during the delivery of our digital webinars was that we were engaging with a different participant profile. Where the majority of participants referred to our face to face programmes are referred to our programmes because of their disruptive behaviour, we found that the vast majority of young people who joined our online programmes were of a different participant profile entirely. They were more likely to struggle with anxiety and low self-esteem, and sometimes be neuro-diverse. Our digital programmes allowed us to better support this participant group as whenever they felt overwhelmed, the digital programmes gave them the option of muting or turning off the camera while still continuing to engage with the programme. For the most part participants began to feel more comfortable with the group and more confident in themselves over the five-week programme, joining as the programme progressed with their cameras on.
Having said that, we believe that moving forward, digital content will support our face to face work with young people rather than replace it completely as we believe that young people, and the therapists who work with them, get more out of support that utilises more direct human contact. Research in this area also supports the idea that online therapy may not be as effective in treating more complex issues. In-person support (such as the work Khulisa does) allows the therapist to pick up on facial expressions, vocal signals and body language - things that are significantly harder to pick up online.
We increased our wellbeing allowances, maintained commitments for staff supervision and ensured all staff could continue to work safely and flexibly to meet childcare and other commitments.
At the beginning of the pandemic half of our team was furloughed and the organisation rotated some staff in and out to mitigate against burn-out. Roles and responsibilities were reconfigured, staff were doing new things everyday, learning about the inner workings of parts of the organisation they’d never experienced before. We also implemented wellbeing days, and trialled digital detox Tuesdays, to address online meeting fatigue.
We were back to a full team working part and full time by September 2020, and we have redefined roles that enable Khulisa to pursue our new strategic objectives more effectively and are closer as a team than ever before.
Having barred charities from delivering critical interventions in March 2020, prisons have largely remained offline. Even when we resumed safe and socially-distanced delivery in the community, we have remained unable to do the same in prisons. This is concerning for many reasons, not least because young people are spending longer than ever in their cells and have been described as being at risk of suffering from irreparable psychological harm if the current situation continues.
As we said before, given these concerns, our team of highly-qualified therapists, quickly developed “survival packs” filled with in-cell activities aimed at supporting prisoners to look after their wellbeing. We have so far supported 120 beneficiaries across three prisons with these toolkits and are working on other tools aimed at continuing to support prisoners in any way we can. One of these activities is a series of in-cell radio shows aimed at helping prisoners look after their social and emotional well-being.
We recognise however, that this is not a substitute for the intensive support many prisoners will need after this prolonged period of lockdown. In addition to concerns around mental health, we know from a recent HMI Prisons report that young people in the secure estate have shared concerns that the lack of opportunities to mix with their peers could prevent them from developing the coping skills that would help them to manage conflict when they moved to an adult prison or were released into the community. Unless something is done immediately to ensure young people are able to spend more time out of the cells, while having access to the support they need and engaging with purposeful activities, the impact of the pandemic on prisoners’ wellbeing and general life outcomes may well prove irreversible.
Young people have shown an incredible level of resilience throughout the pandemic, they have drawn upon coping mechanisms they hadn’t realised were ‘coping mechanisms’ and inspired us all with their constant ability to adapt and respond to change. They have shown kindness, compassion and patience in testing times.
We would remind them to be kind to themselves. Social media has played a huge part in their social development and identity, particularly more so as it has been one of the main ways of communication throughout the pandemic. Our experience has been that this can impact confidence and self-esteem. We would want to encourage young people to think kindly about themselves and to hold onto what they bring and what makes them unique, rather than punishing or scolding themselves for what they may not have / look like / do / achieve in comparison to others.
The combination of overwhelming stress over a prolonged period of time and lack of access to adult caregivers who can help them manage this stress, will, and has, exacerbated the potential for toxic stress. This is true especially among those within the youth justice estate, many of whom have been living in circumstances akin to solitary confinement for nearly a year. The effect of this, plus changes in established rituals and routines, means that vulnerable young people are prone to revert to unhealthy behaviours and are at risk of retraumatisation. This is the case especially where the experience of being under ‘lockdown’ simulates earlier childhood trauma. This is of particular concern as the long-term impact can be far-reaching mentally and physically, as well as putting these young people at greater risk of exploitation and criminalisation.
We must put in place the infrastructure and support systems required to mitigate the effects of this experience on the wellbeing of young people within the custodial estate immediately.
Find out more about: Khulisa
This blog is one of a series, produced as part of The Youth Justice System’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic research project, delivered in partnership between the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies (MCYS) at the Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and the Alliance for Youth Justice (AYJ). The project aims to understand the unprecedented implications that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on each stage of the youth justice system.
Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of the UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response to COVID-19, findings and recommendations from the 18-month project will be shared widely with practitioners and decision-makers to shape future policy and practice.
For more blogs and project updates: COVID-19 and Youth Justice project page