On 2 October 2006, Junior Smart walked out of prison and started work at St Giles. His vision was to establish a project supporting young people impacted by violence and exploitation. A small pot of funding enabled him to establish the SOS Project at St Giles. The rest is history and, in this long read piece, he explains how the work developed and why we are not yet at the finish line.
Twenty years is a long time.
Long enough for fashions to disappear and somehow become fashionable again. Long enough for governments, strategies, acronyms and terminology to change more times than I could possibly count. Long enough for entire social media platforms to arrive, take over and, in some cases, disappear again.
And apparently long enough for me to have considerably less hair.
But when I look back over twenty years of our work supporting children and young people, what strikes me most is not simply how much the work has changed. It is how much the world around the young people we work with has changed too.
When SOS (the original project) began, violence involving young people was devastating communities across London. Some of those early years saw terrible numbers of teenagers losing their lives. In 2007 alone, contemporary reporting recorded 27 teenage murders in London (source: The Guardian) These were not just statistics appearing in newspapers. Behind every number was a child who did not come home and a family whose life would never be the same again.
We should recognise that progress has been made since then. There have been periods of significant reduction in teenage homicide and some forms of serious violence, achieved through the efforts of communities, practitioners, charities, statutory agencies and, importantly, young people themselves. But I do not think anybody who has spent time with a family that has buried their child could ever look at falling numbers and think the work is finished.
For me, there has always been something profoundly wrong about a parent having to bury their own child. I have met too many families who have lived through that reality, and no percentage reduction can describe what that loss does to a family.
So yes, we should recognise progress. We should also remember what those numbers actually represent.
A completely different world
Think about what being a teenager looked like when SOS started in 2006.
There were mobile phones. There was the internet. Wi-Fi existed, but certainly not as the permanent, everywhere connection we now take for granted. There was no TikTok, no Instagram and no Snapchat. The first iPhone had not even been released.
Young people were not carrying the entire internet around in their pockets.
Today, the boundary between the street and the online world has almost disappeared.
An argument can begin on a phone and end in violence on a street. A threat can reach a young person while they are sitting safely, or supposedly safely, in their bedroom. A humiliating video can be filmed, uploaded, shared and watched hundreds or thousands of times before a parent or professional even knows that anything has happened.
Young people can be groomed, recruited, threatened and controlled by people who never need to wait outside a school gate or stand on an estate.
Twenty years ago, if something happened on the street, there was at least a chance it stayed on the street.
Today, the street can follow you home.
That has changed the pressure young people live under. It has changed the speed at which situations escalate, who gets to witness them and how difficult it can be for a young person to walk away without feeling that everybody is watching.
Our practice has had to catch up with that world, and it is still catching up.
We see young people differently now
The language has changed enormously too.
Over the years we have talked about gangs, serious youth violence, county lines, child criminal exploitation, contextual safeguarding, extra-familial harm, grooming, coercion and exploitation.
Sometimes it can feel as though the sector develops a new phrase every few years and everybody has to learn a new set of initials.
But underneath all of that terminology, something important has happened.
Twenty years ago, a young person involved in a gang, selling drugs or carrying a weapon was much more likely to be seen primarily through the lens of offending. The starting question was often about what that young person was doing.
We are much better now at looking behind the behaviour and asking what might be happening to that child.
We understand grooming better. We recognise coercion and exploitation in ways that we simply did not twenty years ago. We understand that a young person can cause harm while also being harmed themselves. Someone can appear confident, streetwise, aggressive or even frightening while at the same time being frightened, controlled or under enormous pressure.
That does not mean we always get it right. We don’t.
There are still children who are criminalised when we should be seeing vulnerability. There are still children whose exploitation is recognised far too late. There are still disparities in whose behaviour we interpret as distress and whose behaviour we interpret simply as dangerous.
But we are not where we were twenty years ago.
Before “lived experience” became a sector
One of the biggest changes I have watched has been the growth in recognition of lived experience.
Today, there are conferences, strategies, jobs and whole programmes built around terms such as lived experience, credible messengers, peer approaches and co-production.
In 2006, we did not really have that language.
We just knew that it worked.
We knew there was something powerful about sitting a young person opposite somebody who genuinely understood the world they were navigating. Not somebody who had read about it. Somebody who knew.
So we employed people who had experienced prison, violence and the streets. We did not bring them in to parade their past or endlessly retell the worst things they had ever done or experienced. We brought them in because their understanding could help them build relationships where other approaches had struggled.
But this is the bit I am especially proud of.
People did not stay as “someone with lived experience”.
They developed.
They became highly skilled practitioners. They became trainers, managers and leaders. They learned safeguarding, case management, professional boundaries, risk assessment and how to work effectively alongside statutory services. They brought experience into the profession, but they also built professional expertise on top of it.
Some went from being people systems had once written off to people helping those same systems understand how to work better.
That, for me, is what lived experience should be about.
Your worst experience should not become your permanent job title.
What SOS became
When I started SOS, I could never have imagined what it would become.
I could not have imagined the number of young people we would reach, the prisons we would work in, the schools we would enter, the families we would support or the thousands of professionals we would train.
I could not have imagined some of the places this work would take us.
And I certainly could not have imagined all the people who would become part of it.
I have never come across anything quite like what is offered at St Giles.
That is not me saying we have always got everything right. We haven’t. Twenty years gives you plenty of time to make mistakes, learn things the hard way and realise that something you were absolutely certain about ten years ago perhaps was not quite as simple as you thought.
But there is something unique about what has been built here.
The combination of lived experience and professional practice. The willingness to go into prisons, hospitals, schools, estates, homes and communities. The ability to engage people who had sometimes been described as challenging, resistant or impossible to work with.
I have never particularly liked the phrase “hard to reach”.
Often the people we work with are not hard to reach at all. They have simply become very careful about who they allow to reach them.
We understood that early.
We learned that engagement did not start by demanding that somebody trust you. It started by giving them a reason to.
And over twenty years, our teams have done that again and again.
The people who made it work
Whatever we have achieved, it has never been because of one person.
It has been the practitioner who stayed on the phone longer than they needed to.
The worker who went back after being told to go away.
The person who walked into a prison, hospital or estate and could see beyond the behaviour in front of them.
It has been managers holding teams together, colleagues doing all the things behind the scenes that nobody sees, and people across St Giles who gave this work the space and support to grow.
Most importantly, it has been the young people, adults and families who trusted us enough to let us into their lives.
Some of that work has produced measurable outcomes. Some of it has been captured in reports and statistics.
Some of the most important moments never will be.
The phone call somebody answered.
The conversation that changed someone’s mind.
The young person who decided not to retaliate.
The person leaving prison who, for the first time, thought that perhaps their life could look different.
You cannot always put those moments neatly into a spreadsheet, but anyone who has done this work knows how much they count.
I look at the number of people we have reached over twenty years and I am incredibly proud. But I am even prouder of how we reached them.
Twenty years teaches you a few things
Over two decades, I have watched programmes come and go. I have watched language change. I have watched funding priorities change. I have watched things we had been doing for years suddenly acquire a new name and become the latest innovation.
You learn to smile about some of it.
But you also learn what lasts.
Relationships last.
People remember who showed up. They remember who listened to them properly. They remember who answered the phone when things went wrong and who came back when they had pushed everyone else away.
They remember the person who saw something in them at a time when everybody else seemed to see a problem.
Twenty years has also taught me that change is rarely one dramatic moment.
We used to talk a lot about the “teachable moment” or the “reachable moment”. There can absolutely be moments when somebody is more open to help. But grooming does not usually happen in a moment. Exploitation does not happen in a moment. People’s lives do not unravel in a moment.
Why would we expect them to rebuild them in one?
Good intervention takes time. It takes consistency. It takes patience and sometimes several attempts before somebody is ready to let you in.
That has probably been one of the greatest strengths. We understood relationships because many of us had once been the people somebody was trying to build a relationship with.
We should celebrate
I do not want the twentieth anniversary to become only a conversation about everything that is still wrong.
There is plenty to celebrate.
The sector understands exploitation far better than it did when we started. Safeguarding is now much more central to the conversation around young people involved in violence. We have become better at seeing the child behind behaviour that previously might only have attracted punishment.
Lived experience has moved from the margins into the mainstream.
People who would once have struggled to get through the door of some organisations are now sitting around tables helping shape services and policy.
And serious violence has, at different points over these twenty years, fallen considerably from some of the terrible levels we witnessed in those early days.
Those things did not happen by accident.
Thousands of people across this country have spent years doing difficult work, often away from the headlines, to make them happen.
We have been part of that.
We should be proud of it.
But we are not finished
For all the progress, children are still dying.
Families are still burying sons and daughters.
Young people are still being groomed, controlled and exploited. There are still children whose vulnerability is recognised only when the situation has become impossible to ignore.
So twenty years cannot simply be about looking backwards and congratulating ourselves.
It is an opportunity to ask what the next twenty need to look like.
How do we recognise harm earlier?
How do we respond to an online world that is changing faster than many of our systems?
How do we make sure lived experience is accompanied by genuine progression, investment and leadership?
How do we get better at seeing the whole child rather than the part that happens to fall within our professional responsibility?
And how do we make sure that when a young person pushes us away, our first response is not always to walk away?
Those are questions worth carrying forward.
Twenty years later
On 2 October 2006, I walked out of prison.
The following day, the journey began.
I did not have a twenty-year plan. I am fairly certain I did not have a two-year plan.
I just knew that the experiences I had lived through could perhaps be used to stop somebody else making some of the same mistakes.
What happened after that has been beyond anything I could have imagined.
I have been incredibly fortunate to work alongside some extraordinary people. I have watched colleagues grow into exceptional practitioners and leaders. I have watched people take some of the hardest experiences of their lives and turn them into something capable of helping somebody else.
I have watched an idea become a project, a project become a service, and that service reach more people than I could ever have imagined when we started.
That makes me enormously proud.
Proud of the projects.
Proud of St Giles.
But above everything else, proud of the people.
Everyone who wore the badge. Everyone who carried the work when it was difficult. Everyone who challenged us to get better. Everyone who believed in what we were trying to do. And every person who trusted us enough to allow us to walk alongside them for part of their journey.
Twenty years is a long time, and the world looks very different from the one which started as SOS.
The technology changed. The language changed. The way we understand violence and exploitation changed. Our practice changed too.
But one thing never did.
The belief that people can change, and that nobody should be defined forever by the worst thing they have done, the worst thing that has happened to them, or the story somebody else has already written about them.
Twenty years later, I believe that just as strongly as I did when we started.
And as long as there are young people and families who need somebody to believe it with them, there is still work to do.