Reimagining prevention: centring care in youth support
Green square with stylised light blue writing & graphics that says Hope on Centring care in youth support.
by Hope Chilokoa-Mullen
Earlier this year, the release of the Netflix series Adolescence - a four-part drama about a 13-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a girl at his school - prompted renewed debate around how to tackle gender-based violence in boys and young men. The series, which has become Netflix’s second most-watched English-language TV show worldwide, depicts several parts of the young boy Jamie’s case, including his violent arrest and the ensuing police investigation at his school. The show links Jamie’s actions to influences from the ‘manosphere’ - a misogynistic online subculture - and in response, public discussion largely focused on the roles that parents and schools play in preventing the online ‘radicalisation’ of young people. Many, including Prime Minister Keir Starmer, have called for the series to be shown in schools across the UK as a form of preventative education.
Education is regularly cited as a key, if not the primary, solution to addressing misogyny and gendered violence in young people. Yet in practice, the educational support that exists in schools and other youth settings is both inadequate and largely ineffective. In my own experience as a youth worker, the overwhelming feedback from young people has been that existing interventions are infrequent, superficial, and rarely lead to meaningful change in their peers' attitudes or behaviours. This concern is reflected in wider research - a 2023 EVAWG study found that 80% of girls surveyed felt schools were not doing enough to address harassment or to support comprehensive sex and relationships education. But when it comes to seeking ways of preventing harm amongst young people, our collective imagination too often narrows to a handful of extra lessons on consent or sexism. For preventative education to be truly effective, it must be embedded and contextualised in a wider system of learning and support.
State schools across the UK are required to teach students about topics like consent and relationships as part of the Personal Social and Health Education (PSHE). However, the quality and effectiveness of this teaching can vary significantly between schools. Organisations like Beyond Equality and Bold Voices provide workshops in some schools and youth settings to encourage conversations around masculinity and gender inequality. Yet these initiatives are often time-limited and reliant on funding from already stretched school budgets, or increasingly scarce grants from independent charitable foundations.
While teaching important messages, when provided as stand-alone interventions, these workshops can individualise what is a wider systemic issue. Isolating ‘relationships’, ‘consent’ or ‘gender-inequality’ as an issue to be addressed by individual attitude change detaches them from the wider social, political and economic causes of gender-based harm. If we understand that the causes of GBV are complex and intersectional, then so too must be our approach to preventative education. Racist, ableist, and capitalist cultures and norms all contribute to the normalisation of GBV. Be it the hypersexualisation of Black women or the capitalist conflation of masculinity with competition and dominance, individual instances of violence or harassment cannot be separated from the wider systems of inequality that produce and perpetuate them. Gender-based violence is not just an interpersonal issue; it is a product of enduring inequality and structural harm. Instead of offering a stand-alone subject, a transformative approach to preventative education would need to embed these teachings into the wider curriculum. What is sorely missing from existing attempts at preventative education is a holistic understanding of what it means to support young people’s skill and knowledge development. Screening a TV series or holding an assembly, however ‘educational’, is not a replacement for the sustained support of young people’s social and emotional development and understanding.
Furthermore, we must be attuned to the contradictions in providing any form of ‘preventative’ education in a fundamentally oppressive education setting. School policies like those enforcing restrictions on skirt lengths or hairstyles reinforce the gendered (and often racialised) policing of bodies and appearance that feed into wider cultures of sexism and discrimination. Similarly, the devaluing of ‘useless’ humanities subjects minimises the importance of young people’s emotional, social and cultural development, in favour of their employability or usefulness to the capitalist economy. Spaces of education can nurture curiosity and encourage young people to think critically about the world around them and their place in it. Yet our current education system seems to instead focus on conformity and discipline, while reproducing capitalist ideals of success or value. In this context, the school environment itself undermines the values of care and understanding needed to tackle GBV, instead presenting clear contradictions between the values taught to young people and those that are modelled by the very system they are educated in.
While preventative education has an important role to play in shifting culture and attitudes, it needs to be viewed as part of a wider system of support and safety practices. Despite a growing movement to decarceralise institutional ‘safeguarding’ policies (see Maslaha’s radical safeguarding guide), in school settings, the existing cultures and structures of safeguarding often do more to isolate and exclude young people than they do to keep them safe. Increasingly, safeguarding responsibilities are carried out in collaboration with the police. There are nearly 1000 police officers stationed in schools across the UK as part of ‘safer schools partnerships’, where local police work with schools, supposedly to "promote a safe learning environment and prevent crime". And even when police are not directly physically present, they hold influence through groups like multi-agency safeguarding hubs, which have been involved in the profiling of young people and collaboration with police surveillance databases like the Gangs Matrix. While these partnerships are often framed as efforts to ensure student safety, the ongoing presence and influence of police can seriously undermine the development of honest and trusting relationships between students and teachers. This is especially true for racialised young people and others who are disproportionately targeted by policing. For these students, the looming threat of surveillance and criminalisation undermines any attempts to offer safety or support within their educational environment. And we need only look at the case of Child Q to see that, beyond the risk of arrest or surveillance, the police present an additional threat of sexual assault through strip search. The fact that a 15-year-old Black girl was forced by police to strip naked in her school (one of over 3000 strip searches of children between 2018 and 2023) is clear evidence that having police in schools contradicts any efforts to prevent GBV or sexual assault against young people.
Last year, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced the government would be ordering a review into the UK’s counter-extremism strategy, with a view to potentially including misogyny within the scope of programmes like Prevent. Similar to carceral feminist calls for misogyny to be classified as a hate crime, this rush to diagnose misogyny as an extremist ‘criminal’ ideology obscures the pervasiveness and normalisation of gendered violence and misogyny in many elements of everyday life, from casualised harassment to the lack of justice or accountability for the majority of GBV victims. By treating misogyny as a problem that can be solved by identifying and disciplining ‘bad’ individuals, the responsibility is placed solely on the young person, rather than on the broader culture that enables and sustains it. This leads to punishment without addressing systemic conditions that produce and reinforce systems of misogyny and abuse. While this may create the appearance of taking action, it leaves the underlying structures unchanged and intact, and as a result does little to prevent future instances of abuse or contribute meaningfully to long-term change.
The Prevent duty forces public sector workers to report to the police anyone considered at risk of being drawn into ‘extremism’, and already largely targets young people, with under 18s accounting for almost 60% of all referrals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Muslim children are hugely overrepresented in Prevent referrals, as well as neurodivergent young people whose behaviours and communication are often misinterpreted. And while Prevent reinforces racist and ableist stereotypes, it simultaneously breaks down relationships of trust between students and teachers, whose role as caregiver and educator is replaced by a responsibility to spy and criminalise. By increasingly mandating teachers do the work of policing and surveillance, we undermine their ability to build the trusting relationships required to provide meaningful preventative support. Training teachers to view students as potential ‘extremists’ or security threats undermines their ability to respond with empathy when faced with a concern over a young person’s views or actions. When teachers are positioned as carceral agents, they are encouraged to approach harm - or even the possibility of harm - with the intention to punish or criminalise, rather than with a view to better understanding and supporting the young person. This approach erodes the foundation of trust, shifting conversations away from problem-solving and towards intelligence gathering. When young people begin to see their teachers as informants rather than caregivers, it creates a feeling of unsafety that limits any opportunity for them to be open or share difficult or complex thoughts. In February this year, Prevent Watch presented a case to the United Nations arguing that the Prevent strategy renders schools unsafe, particularly for those students it disproportionately targets, posing serious risks to their well-being and eroding their right to safety in education. If students do not feel safe in school, efforts to build relationships and engage in meaningful, challenging conversations are unlikely to succeed.
Since 2011, funding for youth work has been cut by over 70%, leaving many young people without access to any meaningful support services outside of the formal education system. The limited funding that remains is increasingly tied to policing and the criminal legal system, often through initiatives financed by the Home Office or regional police forces. As a result, youth services are frequently categorised under 'criminal justice' rather than 'social care', leading to approaches that prioritise surveillance and suspicion over trust and support. For example, in 2023, Merseyside Police announced a funding partnership for a programme with local youth organisation Vibe, as part of Operation Target - their operation to tackle ‘serious and violent crime’. The programme combined ‘youth worker interventions’ with ‘high-visibility police patrols’ to tackle violence in ‘hotspot’ locations. Though advertised as investment in community safety, programmes like these that maintain and promote close ties with police - particularly where this includes sharing of data or ‘safeguarding’ concerns - shift the purpose of youth work from care and relationship building towards monitoring and criminalisation.
For young people already traumatised by violent police interactions, or those with insecure immigration status who are wary of exposure to public authorities, services so heavily linked to the police become unsafe and inaccessible. Community-based services can be a crucial support system for marginalised young people, particularly when schools fail to meet their needs. Yet these same young people are also among those most frequently targeted or harmed by police or other state services. This makes it doubly important that youth work remains independent of these institutions. If we aim to create truly safe spaces of support, those spaces must not be connected to the very systems that have caused harm. This is important not just for preventing future harm, but also for supporting young people who have already experienced GBV or other forms of abuse. Survivors, especially those who are racialised, are routinely criminalised or targeted by police or the Home Office when reporting harm against them. This only reinforces the need for youth spaces that are genuinely independent, care-centred and safe.
If we can recognise the importance of education and support work with young people in the prevention of gender-based violence, then we must create open and safe spaces for this work to flourish. Our understanding of what an anti-oppressive curriculum would look like must be expansive, but it must also be surrounded by a culture of youth support that centres openness and compassion. This can only happen when completely separated from institutions of policing and punishment. If we want young people to care for and respect each other, we cannot equip them with the skills to do so in systems that do not replicate this care or respect. Be it policing in schools or punitive education policies, the current approach to young people’s development is lacking in these principles of nurture. So while people and politicians are often quick to talk about our current crisis of ‘youth violence’ and misogyny, it feels we should be talking more about the crisis of care and support across the youth sector. Without one, we cannot begin to tackle the other.
Hope is an organiser, researcher and youth worker based in London. She is active in grassroots abolitionist movements on policing, borders and education, as part of groups including No More Exclusions.