Professionals working with young people and families are alert to abuse, violence, exploitation and online harms.

But do we have language and practice for when young people experience changes in belief?

When a young person loses faith and decides to leave a religious group, do we have a response if their decision puts them seriously at odds with family and community?

A few months ago, Sarah Robbins, Chair of Birmingham Humanists, CEO of The Springfield Project, and friend of Resonant Collaboration, drew our attention to this important topic.

At first, we thought we were exploring a relatively narrow concern: safeguarding young apostates, those who leave or renounce a faith, religion, or political loyalty. However, as we started conversations with experts by experience, researchers and national leads, it became clear to us that the picture is wider.

This is about a range of young people who face harm when their faith changes direction, and when that change collides with family, community or high-control religious expectations. We have been speaking with practitioners and colleagues, who have shared with us stories about young people leaving, losing and changing faith, including all those who…

…no longer believe but are terrified that saying so will mean rejection from families and losing their homes.

…are trying to leave high-control religious groups, where relationships, decisions and sources of information have been tightly managed.

…have left, and as a result, have experienced separation from family and community, a loss of structures and beliefs that had shaped their previous lives, and find themselves isolated and unmoored.

…are exploring their emerging LGBTQ+ identities, which may clash with religious teachings that understand them as sinful or disordered.

These are safety and welfare questions, and in practice, they can be minimised or overlooked as everyday family conflict or theological concerns, outside the safeguarding remit. This includes, and is not limited to, those young people who leave high-control religious organisations such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientology and other groups that survivors and researchers have described as regulating behaviour, belief, identity and relationships in intensive ways. We are also thinking about everyday situations where a young person’s beliefs change, and their family or community finds this hard to tolerate.

Why do these issues matter?

Research and lived experience point to examples of emotional abuse, coercive control (Mulvihill et al 2022), shunning and ostracism (Grendele, Bapir-Tardy & Flax 2024), and “honour-based” harm (Bhatia et al 2024) when young people question or step away from a faith tradition. Those trying to exit high-control religious contexts talk about social exclusion, loss of all family contact, homelessness and profound disruption to identity and belonging.

LGBTQ+ young people can find themselves at a particularly sharp intersection: some face family rejection, others are forced toward conversion practices (Jones et al 2021), which are religious or secular attempts to change or suppress their sexual orientation or gender identity. Sometimes there is no explicit conversion effort at all, but instead a drip-feed of pressure to deny or hide who they are.

Surprisingly, there is very little national guidance that names these experiences. We have a National Action Plan on abuse linked to faith or belief, and some faiths have procedures that touch on spiritual abuse. But there has been little sustained attention since 2012 to embed this in local safeguarding systems. A decade and a half of austerity has stripped out youth, community and support services that might otherwise hold this kind of relational work.

Safeguarding in cases where young people are leaving, losing or changing faith, particularly from high-control religions, is barely visible in statutory guidance documents. And, what’s more concerning, the transition at 18 often feels less like a step and more like a deep trench between child and adult services systems, just as potential harms around housing, mental health and isolation may intensify.

Schools, colleges and universities

Education settings sit in the middle of this. Schools, further education colleges and universities are where many young people first voice their doubts about faith or think and share feelings about their LGBTQ+ identity with trusted teachers, youth workers or peers.

At the same time, staff in education describe a perfect storm of safeguarding demands and curriculum pressures: Ofsted, Prevent, British Values, mental health roles, online harms, typically squeezed into PSHE and RE.

We know that the most genuine conversations about emerging feelings about change and identity might happen in corridor chats, drama rehearsals, after English lessons, or other ‘soft’ spaces, rather than during planned lessons. However, fears about being labelled racist, Islamophobic, anti-faith or anti-parent can make it feel safer not to touch these questions at all. The project we are developing aims to recognise and work with these complexities in the real lives of young people, families and education settings.

Resonant Collaboration builds on our Creating Conducive Conditions (CCCs) framework for relational youth safeguarding: the idea that good practice depends upon the conditions around practitioners and managers – including relational system leadership, reflective supervision, organisational culture and multi-agency relationships. All of this is needed to support resonance with young people’s lived experience.

So what are we planning to do?

We hope to bring together existing research on apostasy, high-control religion, religious harm and abuse, conversion practices and youth safeguarding, and connect it with Contextual Safeguarding and Transitional Safeguarding.

We are collating helpful support resources and organisations and drafting practice principles and reflective questions that we hope can grow and travel between services, settings and sectors.

By convening conversations with practitioners, local safeguarding children partnerships, faith and community leaders, teachers, youth workers and people with lived experience of leaving, losing or changing faith, we aim to surface real and sometimes tough questions, like:

What counts as “reasonable” parental concern and what tips into abuse or coercive control?
How do we work with families whose fear of losing their children drives them towards tighter control?
Where can young people go when they cannot talk to their parents at all?

A learning event in Birmingham in the summer

We have decided to start our work with Birmingham. The city’s religious and cultural diversity, its history of debates around faith and education, and the strength of the voluntary, faith, community and youth sectors make it an ideal place to think this through.

We are working with our partners at Birmingham City Council, local safeguarding and faith networks, education and youth organisations, and survivor-informed groups such as Faith to Faithless.

In the summer, date to be confirmed very soon, we will host a learning event in Birmingham focused on creating safety and promoting welfare with young people leaving, losing or changing faith.

And in true Resonant Collaboration style, this won’t be just another safeguarding training...

We aim to create a space where people can:

hear from researchers, practitioners, and those with lived experience,
grow our collective knowledge about this topic
reflect on practice in education, faith and community settings,
explore how Transitional Safeguarding and Contextual Safeguarding help us see this topic clearly, and
begin to sketch out what more resonant and collaborative responses could look like locally.

We would love to hear from you…

Over the coming weeks, we will share more details about the event, the questions we’re working with, and how to get involved.

For now, we are keen to hear from people who recognise these dynamics in their own work, in education settings, youth work, social care, health, faith and community organisations, and survivor networks.

If you read this article and think, yes, we are seeing this, but we don’t quite know what to do…

Let's collaborate

Glossary

The act of giving up religious beliefs and leaving a religion
The fact of not believing in any god or gods, or the belief that no god or gods exist
A process in which someone changes to a new religion or belief
Practice of directing members to sever all contact with family members or friends who criticise the faith (esp Scientology)
Expulsion of someone from a congregation if they are deemed to be sinful or to have left the faith. The remaining members are required to shun the disfellowshipped member unless they return to the group and adhere to required behaviours. (esp. Jehovah’s Witness)
A particular religion, or belief in God
Strong belief in God or a particular religion
The belief in and worship of a god or gods, or any such system of belief and worship
The way individuals and groups define themselves in relation to their beliefs, practices, and affiliations within a specific religious framework.
Process of conversion to Islam as expressed by Muslims
Rejection and removal of all forms of association or communication with a person who has left the faith. (esp. Jehovahs Witness)
a way of thinking about the world (esp. non-religious worldviews)

References

Bhatia, A., Lokot, M., Kenny, L., Mathpati, M. and Cislaghi, B. (2024) ‘Honor, violence, and children: A systematic scoping review of global evidence’, Child Abuse & Neglect, 151, p. 106642. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.106642

Grendele, W.A., Bapir-Tardy, S. & Flax, M. (2024). Experiencing Religious Shunning: Insights into the Journey From Being a Member to Leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses Community.Pastoral Psychol 73, 43–61 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-023-01074-y

Jones, T., Power, J., Hill, A.O., Despott, N., Carman, M., Jones, T.W., Anderson, J. and Bourne, A. (2021) ‘Religious conversion practices and LGBTQA+ youth’, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 19(1), pp. 1155–1164. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-021-00615-5

Mulvihill, N., Aghtaie, N., Matolcsi, A., & Hester, M. (2022). UK victim-survivor experiences of intimate partner spiritual abuse and religious coercive control and implications for practice. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 23(5), 773-790. https://doi.org/10.1177/17488958221112057