Strengths-based practice and extra-familial risks and harms.
Is strengths-based practice a friend or foe in youth safeguarding?
By Rachel Ringham and Colin Michel
In the changing landscape of youth safeguarding, strengths-based practice has emerged as a useful and even life-changing approach. The core idea of strengths-based practice emphasises people's inherent strengths, resources, and capabilities rather than their deficits. This resonates deeply with our collective aims to nurture the agency and wellbeing of young people, families and communities. We seek to recognise and cultivate the capacity for growth and flourishing.
With thanks to our Resonant Collaborator, Hannah Millar, who kindly reviewed this piece.
An abstract illustration full of flowing shapes, vibrant leaves, trees, and heart motifs in bold blues, greens, oranges, and yellows, symbolizing growth, connection, and flourishing relationships.
Yet, as professionals working daily to safeguard young people from the insidious complexities of extra-familial risks and harms (EFRHs), we have to ask ourselves: how does this philosophy truly fare when confronted with the immediate and brutal realities of serious violence and exploitation?
Does the focus on individual capacity inadvertently obscure the urgent need for protection, or worse, shift responsibility from perpetrator to victim?
In this blog, we delve into the nuanced and sometimes challenging terrain of applying strengths-based practice in the context of EFRHs, exploring the potential pitfalls and inviting a more critical, empathetic approach.
The weight of responsibility: when strengths prove ineffective.
At Resonant Collaboration, our commitment to improving youth safeguarding drives us to champion relational approaches and amplify youth voices. We understand the power of creating conducive conditions for positive, supportive relationships, settings and services. However, professional passion clashes with the crushing reality of EFRHs, where urgent safety concerns are paramount.
One of the most significant issues is the potential for strengths-based practice to be used inappropriately, particularly in situations where urgent protective measures are needed. Youth safeguarding involves professional responses to EFRHs and perpetrators outside the home, which demand an immediate focus on safety, welfare and protection.
Practice that is largely future-oriented and focused on building a young person’s resilience might, tragically, overlook the urgency of the immediate harm or abuse. This could inadvertently cause delays to critical help and minimise the pressing need for protective measures, creating a perilous gap between knowing and doing.
EFRHs can inflict profound and lasting psycho-social harm: trauma, shame, fear, and numbness are common emotional experiences for victims. A strengths-based approach, by design, might unintentionally minimise or overlook these critical emotional and psycho-social factors, focusing instead on an individual's inherent strengths. This can create a profound disconnect, where well-intentioned goals clash with the raw, lived experiences of the young person. People who are being harmed or abused may not immediately recognise their own strengths; they may feel entirely disempowered by the trauma they've endured. Placing the focus on what an individual can do or what personal resources they have in this kind of context can lead to invalidation of their experiences and emotions. This can over-emphasise recovery before the much-needed understanding of trauma and the complex emotions that result from harm and abuse.
Core complexities: blame, burden, and blind spots
Applying strengths-based methods at the wrong moment can lead to unintended consequences. There is a real danger of subtly shifting the focus of responsibility from the perpetrator to the young person who is being harmed. While strengths-based practice aims to nurture young people's agency and wellbeing, if it is applied at the wrong time, we can risk placing an excessive burden on them. There is a serious problem when the timescale for recovery is driven by services, and not by the young person. When strengths-based practice is applied in this way, it can result in blaming the young person for harmful circumstances entirely outside of their control.
While strengths-based practice strives to foster youth empowerment, an undeniable power imbalance exists between a professional and the young person seeking help. This dynamic can subtly influence how strengths are perceived and made use of. In contexts where young people have experienced significant trauma and a devastating loss of autonomy, practitioners must be acutely aware of the subtle ways in which power is enacted within the helping relationship. We must ensure our attempts to empower do not inadvertently disempower, re-traumatise or mirror the dynamics of exploitation.
In cases of EFRHs, the very idea of personal empowerment can be problematic. Empowerment in this context assumes the young person has control over a harmful situation and that they should have prevented the harm they are facing. This overlooks the insidious manipulation and control exerted by perpetrators, and the complex, often unseen, power dynamics at play. We know that young people experiencing EFRHs are often caught in webs of coercion and exploitation, where their agency is systematically eroded.
EFRHs occur within broader contexts and are shaped by structural and societal issues such as poverty, inequality, and systemic discrimination. There are times when strengths-based practice, with its otherwise positive focus on personal empowerment, can inadvertently downplay the critical importance of larger structural factors in perpetuating harm. By focusing primarily on the strengths and agency of the individual, there's a tangible risk of neglecting the urgent need for broader systemic interventions that can mitigate the occurrence of EFRHs. A truly comprehensive strengths-based approach must therefore recognise and address the societal, political, and economic conditions that can cause harm. This approach would encompass support for all young people who have experienced trauma and structural inequalities, and who then go on to harm others. This approach would shift due responsibility for nurturing safety and wellbeing onto services and institutions.
Toward empathetic and relational practice in response to EFRHs
Strengths-based practice undoubtedly offers numerous benefits when working with young people, not least in nurturing their capacities for self-awareness and agency. But when it comes to EFRHs, we must think critically to avoid misapplication in high-risk situations, such as criminal exploitation. The dangers of victim-blaming, harmful power dynamics, and the underemphasis of trauma and systemic factors should not be discounted. We must move beyond the binary of "good" or "bad" approaches and instead examine how and when specific practice approaches are most effective.
To get better results for young people, we need a nuanced and empathetic approach to strengths-based practice. This means fostering conducive conditions where professionals feel safe to hold honest conversations about ethical dilemmas. It means examining the limits of each approach, and then committing to policy and practice that promotes safety, validates trauma, and addresses structural inequalities. Only then can we ensure that strengths-based practice serves as a friend and protective force in the lives of young people facing EFRHs.
Working together to respond to EFRHs is crucial. But it is also complicated. It takes great care and effective collaboration to overcome the challenges.
In the next article, we will highlight the immense pressure on dedicated professionals and the complex, interconnected partnership systems we navigate…
