St Giles’ Junior Smart responds to the Youth Endowment Fund’s guidance on children’s services and violence prevention.
The Youth Endowment Fund’s newly published guidance on children’s services and violence prevention marks an important step forward in how we respond to children affected by violence, exploitation and extra-familial harm.
Its central message is simple, but significant: serious violence and exploitation must be understood as safeguarding issues.
For too long, children affected by violence have often entered systems through the routes of enforcement, criminal justice, school discipline, community safety or youth offending. Those systems all have a role to play, but when they become the dominant lens, the child can start to disappear behind the behaviour.
A young person involved in violence may also be a young person who has been groomed, threatened, coerced, traumatised, exploited or repeatedly failed by the adults and systems around them. Some children may cause harm. Some may be harmed. Many are living with both realities at the same time.
This guidance does not excuse harm, but it does ask systems to look more carefully at what sits behind it. If we only ask what a child has done, we miss too much. We must also ask what has happened to them, who is influencing them, who is profiting from them, who is frightening them, and who is actually protecting them.
The first lens often becomes the pathway. That is why this guidance is so important.
Strengthening accountability and closing the gaps
Too often, young people affected by exploitation are discussed across several meetings, panels and processes without one clear safeguarding route, one accountable lead or one coherent plan. A child may be known to children’s services, police, education, youth justice, health, community safety and voluntary sector workers, yet still no one holds the full picture.
That is not just a coordination problem. It is a protection problem.
When risk is recorded but not owned, children remain unsafe. When concerns are discussed but not connected, the system can look busy while the child continues to live with danger.
One of the strongest elements of the guidance is its focus on one pathway, one plan and one lead professional. This is not about creating cleaner paperwork. It is about making sure children affected by violence and exploitation are properly held within safeguarding, with clear responsibility, shared understanding and actions that are followed through.
The guidance also rightly asks local areas to review the role of MACE and similar panels. These panels can be valuable, particularly when they identify themes, locations, peer groups and exploitation networks. However, they should not become a substitute for statutory safeguarding. A child should not sit outside child protection simply because the harm is happening beyond the family home.
This is a crucial point. Extra-familial harm can meet safeguarding thresholds even when parents are doing everything they can to protect their child. In cases of county lines, exploitation and serious youth violence, many parents are not the source of the risk. They are frightened, overwhelmed and often trying to protect their child from threats they cannot see, access or control.
Our response should strengthen them as protective partners, not quietly position them as the reason the harm exists.
Serious violence must be recognised as harm
The guidance identifies extra-familial harm, including serious violence, as a core strategic priority for children’s services. This reflects what organisations such as St Giles have long understood: many children involved in violence are also experiencing grooming, coercion, exploitation, trauma and fear.
We have to move beyond seeing behaviour in isolation. The question is not simply whether a young person presents a risk. The question is what that behaviour is telling us about the risks around them.
The reality is that missing the context means – sooner or later – missing the child.
Specialist expertise is essential
Responding to exploitation and serious violence requires more than general awareness. Practitioners need to understand grooming, coercion, debt, peer pressure, online influence, school exclusion, missing episodes, weapon carrying, trauma, neurodivergence, racial bias and the way risk can shift quickly across places and relationships.
At St Giles, this is the space we know well. Our practitioners work with children in the real contexts where harm happens, including schools, communities, homes, hospitals, custody settings and the spaces between formal services.
Our use of lived experience is not about telling stories for impact. At its best, it is about credibility, trust, professional skill and the ability to recognise what may be hidden beneath behaviour. It helps us engage young people who may have learned not to trust adults, services or systems that have too often misunderstood them.
Effective mentoring requires more than good intentions
The guidance recognises mentoring as a valuable intervention, especially for children at risk of violence and children in care. Importantly, it also makes clear that quality matters.
A mentor is not simply a positive adult who turns up now and again. Effective mentoring depends on consistency, safeguarding, supervision, boundaries, careful matching, child voice and a clear understanding of what change is being worked towards. We have to appreciate what mentors do, St Giles’ workers will turn up at hospital, multi-agency meetings, courts, police stations as well as providing safe spaces for young people to talk and share their fears.
Done well, mentoring can be lifechanging. Done poorly, it risks becoming another relationship that starts with promise, ends too soon and leaves a young person feeling let down.
We cannot ignore race, adultification and disproportionality.
The guidance rightly challenges local areas to examine how race, adultification and bias shape safeguarding responses.
Are Black and racially minoritised children more likely to enter systems through policing rather than protection? Is their distress being read as defiance? Is their vulnerability being missed because they are seen as older, tougher or more responsible than they are? Does information-sharing improve safety, or does it simply increase surveillance?
These questions are not peripheral. They go to the heart of whether safeguarding is fair, effective and genuinely child-centred.
Safeguarding cannot be child-centred if some children are more easily criminalised than protected.
Care-experienced children need stronger protection
The guidance also highlights the heightened risks faced by children in care, including exploitation, placement instability and unnecessary criminalisation.
Too many children in care experience repeated moves, disrupted relationships and a lack of trusted adults who stay. Some are placed out of area in the hope that distance will create safety, while the digital, emotional and relational pull of exploitation remains active. Others experience police involvement for behaviour that might have been managed very differently in a family home.
That should concern all of us. If the care system becomes another route into criminalisation, we have to ask whether we are protecting children or processing them.
Children in care need stability, properly trained carers, trusted adults, clear safeguarding plans and responses that understand trauma rather than escalate it unnecessarily.
Turning guidance into practice
The publication of this guidance is significant because it reflects a growing consensus across the sector: trusted relationships, specialist exploitation expertise, lived experience, family engagement and whole-person support are not optional additions to safeguarding responses. They are central to keeping children safe.
But guidance only changes lives when it changes practice.
Local areas now need to map their systems honestly, review where children are being discussed but not held, strengthen specialist extra-familial harm expertise, involve youth workers and trusted adults properly in safeguarding planning, improve access to therapeutic support, and listen more carefully to children and families.
There is also a clear opportunity for organisations like St Giles. The guidance reflects much of what our frontline practice has shown for years: children affected by violence need adults who can build trust, understand context, work across systems and stay connected when things become difficult.
But this is not a moment simply to say, “we already do this.” It is a moment to evidence it, strengthen it and work with partners to help turn national guidance into safe, practical and measurable local delivery.
If local areas embrace the spirit of this guidance, not just its processes, we have an opportunity to build systems that recognise children affected by violence and exploitation as children first.
Not as risks to be passed around.
Not as problems to be managed elsewhere.
Not as cases discussed across multiple rooms without one clear plan.
But as children who need protection, accountability, care and adults who refuse to give up on them.
Junior Smart
Founder and Business Development Manager, St Giles