NSUN has today published a new guide to reimagining safety and safeguarding alongside young people with experience of mental ill-health, trauma and distress.
The guide is the result of a collaborative project by NSUN and Act Build Change in partnership with Revoke, a grassroots organisation advocating for the rights and welfare of displaced young people, and Voice Collective,, a project that supports young people who hear voices, see visions, or have other sensory experiences or beliefs. The work was funded by The Blagrave Trust.
NSUN and Act Build Change held workshops on reimagining safeguarding with staff and young people from Revoke and Voice Collective, and have presented the insights from these workshops in this guide.
This work developed from observations from practitioners that young people with experience of mental ill-health, trauma and distress are being failed and disempowered by safeguarding systems meant to keep them safe. For example, risk-averse organisations can fail to sit with expressions of distress, which means that people can worry about not being able to talk about their feelings through fear of being dismissed, pathologised, detained, coerced, or criminalised, or directed into systems that have previously caused them harm, such as the mental health system.
Revoke and Voice Collective have created transparent, trusting relationships which help young people who have experienced trauma, including institutional harm within the immigration and mental health systems to make their own decisions, support each other, and challenge the status quo.
This guide shares and celebrates methods of fostering cultures of safety and care that foreground lived experience, young people’s agency and anti-oppressive practice. The guide also names tensions and challenges that can arise in this work, and shares approaches to help navigate them.