Having defined your goals, the next task is to agree what you’ll do to meet them. Designing responses for friendship groups can require you to think creatively, because this type of safeguarding is relatively new. Whatever you do should have a clear link to the problems you've identified and the goals you've set. Ask yourself: does the response target the harm we’ve identified? What do we hope the response will achieve? How will the response impact young people?
The outcomes framework for extra-familial contexts guides you to choose goals and plan responses in three areas:
A key part of assessing friendships and peer relationships is understanding how the young people grouped together in the assessment perceive their relationships and how they relate to each other. There might be a lot of protective factors and support within the group that you want to build on. A need you might identify is for these young people to have access to safe spaces to be together as a group, where they can do things that they enjoy together. This might involve running activities for friends in order to meet their social and recreational needs and enable them to spend time together safely.
Sometimes an assessment can surface both positive but also negative or even harmful elements within these relationships, such as harmful norms and attitudes shared within the group that may be impacting young people in the group and beyond. In this case, the primary context of harm you identify might be the group itself. This does not mean that the group itself should be broken up – if young people are friends and want to be together, disrupting these friendships will probably be ineffective and increase young people’s vulnerability. However, your intervention can be focused on addressing these harmful norms and attitudes together with the group.
This could involve training people to spot signs of exploitation and abuse so they can report it... but it doesn't end there. We also need to engage guardians to take ownership for creating safety in their communities and to support them to develop appropriate trusting relationships that will reduce harm and promote safety. This crucial part of a friendship and peer assessment can be missed when the assessment only focuses on disrupting risk. The short video ('What is a community guardian?') in the related resources (below) explains what a community guardian is.
What other factors affect the safety of the young people? These may relate to the local neighbourhood context, the policies in place to safeguard them, the support of their parents, or systemic and structural factors. For example, there might be a lack of safe places in the neighbourhood where young people can spend time together, and/ or lack of activities and fun things for them to do.
Resources to help you
To help you design new responses, we have developed a catalogue of short case studies (see the response and interventions catalogue in the carousel below). You can filter the catalogue according to what you want the focus of your response to be.
What about ‘harmful’ relationships?
Sometimes relationships that are or seem harmful also give young people a sense that they matter when things are difficult for them. Working with young people in this situation requires care and understanding to find ways of supporting friendships while also looking for ways to enhance safety within the relationships that young people have chosen.
If you are working with a young person one to one, explore with them who in their life is caring and why, and discuss with them what kindness and support looks like. Rather than focusing on the 'harmful' friend/s or telling them to stop seeing them, your focus can be about encouraging and supporting relationships that are caring, supportive and kind by, for example, providing young people with wider options for friendships based around a particular hobby or interest. The focus is less on removing harmful friendship and building opportunities for safe friendships and for young people to spend time and have fun together.
You may also decide to do further work with the ‘harmful’ friend either at individually or at as a group; this would depend on the level of harm and need uncovered in your initial assessment.
