Creating conducive conditions for resonance and collaboration.
Re-thinking relational practice in youth safeguarding systems
By Colin Michel and Luke Billingham
This article draws on our experiences of and conversations about relational practice and youth safeguarding in our roles as a safeguarding consultant (Colin) and as a youth worker and researcher (Luke). First posted in August 2024, we have updated the article based on emerging findings from research, ongoing conversations with one another, and with professionals at workshops we have had the pleasure to co-facilitate during the last year.
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Summary
We define a youth safeguarding system as a purposeful, multiagency, multidisciplinary collaboration undertaken at multiple levels, including direct practice, operational management, strategic leadership, and policymaking, and in partnership with young people, their families, and communities.
For us, the uniting aim of a youth safeguarding system is to create safety with young people exposed to harm from abuse, racism, poverty, violence, and exploitation, to prevent further harm, and to nurture young people’s awareness, agency, and wellbeing.
We suggest this definition has four implications:
Positioning the nurture of young people’s awareness, agency, and wellbeing at the core, without placing undue responsibility on young people for preventing or reducing harms and abuse.
Recognising the influence of networks of non-professional relationships in young people’s lives as crucial for youth safeguarding.
Extending the purpose and vitality of youth safeguarding beyond the scope of any one organisation, sector, or discipline, underlining the significance of the quality of collaboration.
Reinforcing the interrelatedness of each part of the system. The evolving nature of youth safeguarding requires curiosity and flexibility from policymakers, leaders, managers, and practitioners, rather than rigid forms of management and procedural compliance.
There remains professional uncertainty about what constitutes relational practice in youth safeguarding, despite research consensus that trusted relationships with young people and among professionals are a crucial foundation for positive outcomes.
Resonance is a reciprocal relationship between a person and the world where both person and world are affected and changed. It is the antithesis of alienation. Because both terms describe how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the world around us, they can help define relational practice in youth safeguarding (Rosa 2019).
We apply resonance to relational practice in youth safeguarding to reflect on:
Forging professional relationships with young people that are characterised by mutual influence, genuineness, and an element of uncontrollability (Rosa 2018).
Sustaining professional curiosity about how young people relate to themselves, their multi-faceted identities and lived experiences, and to other people, places, online spaces, services, and society.
Building collaborative relationships between the professionals, agencies, and sectors involved in our youth safeguarding systems.
Professional capacities for attunement and analysis are core to relational practice with young people. These capacities enable practitioners to form and sustain relationships and to nurture young people’s awareness, agency, and wellbeing.
Forces that can constrain or block resonance in youth safeguarding systems include:
Psychic, physical, and emotional drain. Practitioners are expected to make sense of and respond to a young person’s reality with minimal practical guidance, while working within inflexible, excessive, and/or conflicting procedures, with large workloads and considerable pressures.
Pressure on managers to narrow the focus of youth safeguarding work on risks, caseloads, procedural compliance, and measurement. This can come at the expense of resonance between professionals and may limit their potential to contribute to positive outcomes with young people.
Leaders experience resource constraints, managerialism, risk aversion, silo-working, media scrutiny, and reactive politics. In combination, these can contribute to alienation and the dehumanisation of young people, colleagues, and partners.
Practitioners, managers, leaders, and policymakers can gain knowledge, build capacities, and develop confidence via reflective supervision and learning opportunities.
Professionals can foster resonant space (Rosa 2019) for connectedness, shared purpose, and narrative, and collective accountability between agencies, sectors, and disciplines in youth safeguarding systems.
We put forward a framework to show how we can create conditions together that are conducive to resonance and collaboration. Our hope is that this framework supports practitioners, managers, leaders, and policymakers to explore constraints and enablers for relational practice in youth safeguarding.
