Evidence Scope: Developing a more effective response to risks in adolescence

Looking at the serious and negative risks that face some adolescents in the UK today, focusing on neglect, running away, sexual exploitation and offending.

Considered together, common themes can be drawn out to inform a distinctive adolescent-centred approach to protection, prevention and the promotion of adolescent resilience.

The scopes central argument is that:

> The risks adolescents face are distinct. They differ from those facing younger children and older groups, as do the impacts of those risks, creating a distinctive set of inter-connected needs.

> Adolescence itself offers a distinctive array of strengths and opportunities that emerge as a result of social and physiological developmental processes. These are often not fully understood or taken into account in policy and practice.

> Rather than recognise these unique risks, strengths and opportunities, the current child protection system instead applies traditional definitions of risk and approaches to protection that do not necessarily fit with young people’s lived experience or research. This means practice is even more challenging, scarce resources are not allocated to best effect, and young people are not central either to service design or policy discourse.

> Excellent practice and effective services are evident at local level, although much of it seems to have arisen almost in spite of the current system. However, resource constraints, coupled with the sector’s increasing knowledge and determination to improve the system for adolescents facing risk, can and do act as a powerful catalyst for innovation.

> The evidence we draw on in this scope, both research knowledge and practice knowledge, can and should encourage us now to re-design the system in a way that ‘works with the grain’ of adolescent development, takes a more nuanced approach to risk identification, has relationships at its heart, and is focused on building resilience.

Evidence scopes author: Dr Elly Hanson and Dez Holmes