Changing contexts of harm

This chapter shares examples of how social care services have successfully engaged with peer, school and (to a lesser extent) community settings associated with extra-familial risks and harms to improve young people’s well-being and safety. It highlights how structural factors, such as poverty, racism and sexism, appear to undermine the efficacy of interventions and organisational responses if their effects remain unaddressed, and outlines recommendations made in the literature for approaches found to be beneficial. The chapter ends by noting the limitations of individualised social care responses that focus on changing the behaviour of young people and fail to address the wider social structures of systems that create, or sustain, risks beyond the family home. It also highlights that while the evidence base for contextual practice interventions is well established, the integration of such an approach into wider system design is relatively underdeveloped.