Responding effectively to violence affecting young people can feel overwhelming. Politicians, practitioners and service leaders alike are often left feeling impotent and frustrated; with only well-worn words of comfort for grieving families and numbed communities.
We know enough about the sources of violence – intergenerational and structural harms – to know there are no quick or easy fixes, despite the understandable calls for action, enforcement and answers. It is not surprising that it can be difficult to decipher the right choices and provide leadership which will build safety for our young people in the short and long-term.
Against this backdrop, in which community leaders can feel disempowered and lacking in agency – just like the young people they want to help – a new approach is being tested across London's local authority children's services.
Drawing together what evidence tells us is most effective in supporting change in young people who are at greatest risk of involvement in violence, the Your Choice programme uses cognitive behavioural tools and techniques, deployed by specially trained youth practitioners who are skilled at relationship building and who are supported in their work through clinical supervision.
The programme has shown sufficient promise in its pilot trial for the Youth Endowment Fund to invest in a full randomised control trial over the next 18 months across the capital. This will test the potential effectiveness of Your Choice to reduce those young people at risk of violence.
The Your Choice programme, developed and supported by the London Improvement and Innovation Alliance and London's Violence Reduction Unit, takes as its starting point the systems and structures we work with in local councils (our services and our statutory responsibilities) and the networks in which the children we are seeking to support are embedded – their families, peers, schools and community groups.
From an understanding of the experience of children who are most vulnerable to violence, what is available and important to them and where they already interface with our services, the Your Choice programme seeks to build upon young people's individual goals, strengthening the positive networks around them and enhance ties to their communities.
The children and young people local authorities want to engage are frequently described as "hard to reach". Sometimes this is because they are trapped in exploitative relationships, directed by organised criminals, but even these young people will experience moments when with the right skills we can reach them and make a connection.
For many other young people who are being exploited, it is about councils failing to make an offer with which they want to engage. Your Choice starts with what matters for each young person and builds a plan, with their coach (who might be their social worker, youth justice worker or other youth practitioner) to enable them to pursue their goals. Often these goals are surprisingly humble and challenge stereotypes about young people and their aspirations: such as improving reading through library visits, managing a relationship without getting angry, getting fit, or just learning how to say thank you.
Through skilled support, utilising CBT techniques, young people accessing the Your Choice programme in London are achieving their goals, and in doing so experiencing a new sense of agency and control over their lives. For some this means new peer groups and new networks, for others this means being safer within their existing peer groups, stronger in their own identity and ability to manage their own emotions and behaviour.
Your Choice is not intended as an inoculation against violence. We know violence is deep-seated in our communities; some children's experience of violence in their homes and in the wider environment will mean they are much more at risk than others and their outcomes are likely to be poorer. We also know that unless we tackle the access to social goods and the attendant racism and structural inequality which mars many childhoods, individual successes will quickly be overshadowed by further waves of violence.
In the face of the forces which can appear to be stacked against progress in this critical area of practice for councils and their partners, it is important to have effective tools for the here and now, which provide a space for longer-term public health violence reduction strategies to be deployed. Your Choice is built on the evidence base of what we know works to help vulnerable young people and it is providing practitioners with a renewed sense that they can make a difference, even in the most challenging of circumstances. In an environment in which those who are working for change can feel helpless, it represents a purposeful and promising development providing much-needed hope for young people and their supporters.
Dr Karla Goodman is Director of Practice at the London Innovation and Improvement Alliance where she has designed and led the implementation of the Your Choice programme with the Mayor of London's Violence Reduction Unit. The Youth Endowment Fund has supported development and implementation of the programme and its evaluation.
