Conversations from the Training Room

“Would you tell a young person you think they’re being abused?”

I was delivering Safeguarding Training a while ago and was asked this question. I was really surprised to be asked this question but grateful that I had been because although the answer seemed obvious to me, this question gave a fantastic insight into the mindset of staff who are struggling to engage with their service users (in this instance, homeless young people living in a hostel). There was a strong feeling from a couple of participants that they wouldn't want to, for a number of reasons.

Before I share my thoughts on this, let me first tell you that I had already covered the “6 Principles of Safeguarding” from the Care Act 2014 within the session. The first of these principles is “Empowerment” and when we explore this during training, I always talk about giving information to the person we are safeguarding, discussing with them that we feel the need to make a referral and if we can, engaging them in that process. This means explaining why we think there is a need to make the referral, what this might mean and what it might lead to. An important part of this process is also asking for consent to make the referral. This is always tricky- what if they say no?- but it's good practice nonetheless.

I’m aiming to involve the service user in this process and get them to tell me what they’d like to happen. What would they like the outcome to be? Up until this point, participants in my session were with me. Nothing too controversial covered so far. We covered the rest of the principles, including “Partnership” which is ostensibly, about working collaboratively with other agencies in order to keep people safe but for me, also about working in partnership with the service user we are safeguarding. I think it's helpful to think about this process as a partnership and consider the level of information you have access to as the ‘professional’ and the lack of information, or updates, the person themselves have access to because they are a ‘service user’.  

I even stress that part of “Prevention” is about the quality of information we are sharing with our service users, and the quality of conversations we have with service users to help ensure they recognise abuse when it is occurring, to themselves or to others. We know a key feature in most types of exploitation (financial, or child criminal exploitation, sexual exploitation, or even radicalisation), is that the exploiter, the perpetrator, facilitates a relationship first and foremost which means that young people rarely see the abuse as abuse, at least initially. 

Again, nothing to disagree with thus far. Yet this question “Would you tell a young person you think they’re being abused?” popped up, and the follow-up, was even more surprising. Several participants suggested that they wouldn’t explicitly tell the young person because they were afraid of upsetting the young person (one participant said “I wouldn't want to traumatise them”) and another felt that having an explicit conversation would damage the relationship, and therefore engagement between the staff member and the young person would reduce. 

This was fascinating to me. Because yes, of course, those fears are founded. They are accurate. They are correct. A young person could be traumatised by having abuse revealed to them. A young person may well never engage with staff again after having such a difficult conversation. And at the same time, none of those staff members were saying that they wouldn't make the referral, they were just saying they wouldn't feel comfortable talking to the young person about it. So what’s the problem?

The problem with this is, that without saying it directly, young people are being left in potentially abusive situations, without any good quality information or support to navigate this. Staff are failing in their first duty of care to protect people from harm.

What they are also saying is that the safeguarding process has become, for them, at least, a process of identifying abuse and handing it over to someone else (statutory services). As if their only duty was to spot abuse and make the referral. 

This reveals to us a massive gap in service provision and in our duty of care to vulnerable people. I don’t believe for a moment that this group of staff are alone in this way of thinking.

I was very fortunate to have this question arise in my training session. I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to explore this with all participants present. I was able to talk about how traumatic it would be for a young person to be left in an abusive situation. How much harm could be caused by leaving it to other people (social workers etc) to pick it up, if they pick it up.

We spoke about the young people living in our services, which gives us an opportunity to see them, speak to them and support them on a daily basis rather than leaving it for some social worker they’ve never met to finally have time to pick up their case and start investigating. I reiterated our duty of care and how we must bring the principles of safeguarding to life when handling situations of abuse.

Finally, I asked participants to think about how we might build engaged relationships based on honesty and trust, to consider that this might help engagement rather than being a barrier.

The group of participants made quite a significant swing in their thinking that day, ending the day confidently telling me they would want to have the conversation, no matter how hard, but it has stayed with me because I wonder how many other teams feel similarly.  

If you manage staff teams who safeguard service users of any age, this would be a great question to ask of them. Do any of your staff team feel the same way? Better to find out now and have some non-judgemental conversation about it, whilst you have the chance to re-educate your team than you don’t know how they feel about this topic and end up having vulnerable people being left in abusive situations.   

Please feel free to share your thoughts, views and questions on this and let me know if this highlights any additional training needs for your team, I’d be happy to work with them!