It’s 2pm on a Friday at a south London police station and a 15-year-old girl is sitting across a table from two youth workers. Beneath the harsh white strip lights, she looks exhausted. Since being arrested for assault at 1.30am, she has barely slept and refused to eat anything but a few biscuits. She has been handcuffed and searched and interviewed by police officers and talked to by professionals. She is done with all the questions. She just wants to go home.
It looks like Amani El-Aziz and Kat Taylor have a tricky job on their hands. They don’t show it. Aziz, dressed in a grey tracksuit and Nikes, her hands dripping with rings and her hair gelled in curls, speaks calmly to the 15-year-old, her voice devoid of judgment. Later, she explains she got into youth work because in her circles, growing up, it was “very normal to be bored and pick a lock on a shop”. Having something else to focus on – in her case, dancing – kept her from “being on the streets”.
“We’re not here to talk about what happened,” Aziz, 37, tells the 15-year-old and her mother, who has just arrived at the station to pick up her daughter. Taylor, 40 – wearing a leopard-print jacket and with her “too official-looking” name badge tucked away – chips in. “We’re not police officers. We’re not solicitors. We’re not social workers,” she says. “We’re here to support you.” Then Taylor makes a joke. The girl gives a small laugh. They agree to meet again.
There may be a long road ahead, but this is the first step in a process that has the potential to change the girl’s life. In the months that follow, Taylor, a former teacher, will meet up with the girl and speak to her as often as she needs. They might talk about school, friends, family, hobbies, hopes, dreams – or what she is going through. Over time, if enough trust has built up, she may be able to get a picture of the girl’s story beyond what happened that night: whether she is in danger, being exploited, needs help – what’s really going on.
Five miles away, at the busy St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, 29-year-old Abdi, a youth worker for the charity Redthread, has a similar task. Like his colleagues, he often meets young people at the worst and most vulnerable times of their lives.
After a teenage boy has been stabbed, or a schoolgirl has been assaulted in an attack posted on Snapchat, or a child has had acid thrown in their face, or been raped, or overdosed on drugs given to them by a gang, he or one of his team will walk down from their office, cross the road to the major trauma ward, and sit by the young person’s bed. If they are clinically stable, aged 11-25 and being exploited, or at risk of violence, he or his team will work with them in hospital and post-discharge – typically for a few months, but sometimes for up to a year.
For those first meetings he might bring food from McDonald’s, sweets or apple juice to break the ice. He might wheel in an Xbox from the paediatric ward or hold someone’s hand as they have stitches removed. They are often reluctant to talk at first. “They might’ve gone from jolly, happy, living their life, to looking over their shoulder, anxious, scared, worried,” Abdi says. Unless they tell him to go away, he’ll keep coming back.
This is the world of targeted youth work. Embedded in police stations and hospitals across London and in some – but not all – parts of the UK, there is a spattering of outreach workers such as these three: the anti-youth-violence frontline.
London’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), which funds the programmes in the capital, gets about £31m of its roughly £40m-a-year budget from the mayor’s office, with the rest coming from the Home Office, the sole funder of the 19 other VRUs in England and Wales.
Deployed after a young person is arrested or hospitalised, the outreach workers’ mission is not to interrogate, gather intelligence or talk about what happened, but to build a genuine relationship with the young person – to guide, soothe and distract.
Unlike traditional youth workers, they provide personalised, intensive, one-to-one help. The ultimate goal is to help them move on from whatever horrible thing might have happened – helping break cycles of violence and changing the trajectory of their lives.
“We really champion that 360 turnaround,” says Aziz, the south-west London team leader for the under-18s custody programme, Engage.
First impressions matter, so she and her colleagues dress casually to differentiate themselves from authority figures: in tracksuits, T-shirts and trainers. After building up some rapport, the priority is to make sure the young person is safe.
Some are “victim offenders” – being exploited to commit crimes, such as running drugs or weapons, by county lines gangs. Others are victims of sexual exploitation, mistaken identity or are simply schoolchildren caught up in arguments that have escalated. Some have been arrested for low-level offences such as trespassing, criminal damage or shoplifting. Many, but not all, have difficult home lives affected by poverty, mental health problems, abuse or substance misuse.
Youth workers create a “genogram” – identifying the key people in a young person’s life and gaps in their support network. They might then help create a safety plan, which could mean helping them get moved to housing in another area, addressing relationships with high-risk people, or deciding on practical steps such as avoiding certain bus routes or a corner shop at night.
Later, they might help the young person with a college application, finding a job, getting mental health support, returning to school if they have been excluded – as many have – or finding ways to get back into passions or hobbies: playing the drums, writing music or swimming, for example.
It does not always work, and experts say these interventions can only ever be a small part of a robust violence prevention strategy. But research suggests that targeted, wraparound interventions at these key junctures in life can have a dramatic impact.
Analysis from the London VRU found that, through the Engage programme, nearly 90% of young people arrested for violent offences who engaged with a youth worker (309 out of 348) were prevented from reoffending over the next 12 months. Meanwhile, research from Redthread, which provides youth workers in hospitals, found that 78% of young people were at lower risk of harm after engaging with their teams.
Both programmes have now been expanded across the capital, with the VRU investing £8.3m since 2020 to embed youth workers in all 12 of the Met’s basic command units and in 12 key hospitals. Lib Peck, director of the London VRU, said: “That support from a trusted adult at the right time can be instrumental in changing their life trajectory.”
Based in Westminster, at one of four major trauma centres in London, Abdi sees the desperate need for help every day. The borough has the highest rate of knife crime in the capital, and between July and September alone, Abdi’s team at St Mary’s received 96 referrals for 11- to 25-year-olds at risk of violence or exploitation. Of those, 49 had been stabbed, two had been victims of acid attacks and seven had been shot.
It is not always obvious if a young person is at risk. At first glance, a schoolboy admitted to hospital after being in a car crash might not cause alarm – yet dig a bit deeper and you may find he was being driven by an adult, far from his home, in a stolen car, in the middle of the night. Sometimes the medics are too busy to get to the bottom of things. So each morning, about 9.30am, Abdi will scroll through the hospital systems – and walk around the wards – to check the trauma admissions for himself.
Today, an unseasonably sunny day in October, is fairly typical. Abdi, who leads the youth work team, opens his emails to two referrals from doctors overnight – one involving a child thought to have been sexually exploited, and another who has been beaten up. Three young people are already on the wards, where they are being treated for stab wounds, and will each be visited by a youth worker today.
One teenager has been admitted to hospital after being stabbed repeatedly. He had been discharged, but was recently readmitted with an infection. Asked about his youth worker, the softly spoken teenager says: “It can be frustrating in here, like torture. But she was nice. Welcoming. She said, ‘Anything you need, just tell me.’ You get loads of other people coming in but they don’t really take time.” The youth worker has recently helped him apply for housing away from his current neighbourhood, so hopefully he will be safer.
As well as seeing patients, the team meet recently discharged young people in the community, speak to surgeons and safeguarding nurses and liaise with other agencies. They also attend a weekly gangs meeting led by the Westminster Integrated Gangs and Exploitation Unit. This week’s agenda includes a warning about an increase in acid attacks and a rise in the number of children drinking “lean” – a mixture containing cough syrup that can put them in a zombie-like state.
Some days can be harder than others. Recently, a young person who had worked closely with the youth workers died after suffering complications from a stab wound. “That was really, really hard for the team,” says Kirsty, Abdi’s manager. There are safety considerations too. Recently, a group of teenagers came to the hospital, saying they wanted to “finish the job”.
In the team’s office at St Mary’s, a noticeboard entitled the “wall of shame” features notes quoting doctors and other professionals who have made ill-informed comments. They are counteracted by a “wall of fame”, with positive feedback.
Maryam Alfa-Wali, a consultant trauma surgeon at St Mary’s, says that when young people are admitted with injuries suggesting they are in danger – which happens almost every day – her first call is to Abdi’s team. Many of the young patients can be shy or decline psychological help. “But they know how to talk to them,” she says. “They help them see there are other ways to live your life.”
Back in the custody suite, Aziz and Taylor are scrolling through the latest intelligence briefing from the Metropolitan police. It has been a busy month. Six under-18s came into the station yesterday alone, for offences including vehicle theft and criminal damage. Sometimes, it might be 10.
At any one time, Taylor – one of two full-time outreach workers covering four south-west London boroughs – is actively working with 25 to 30 young people.
It would help to have a bigger team. But the harsh reality is that this is one of the best resourced programmes in the country – in an area with ample community centres and free activities for young people. In other areas, in other cities, there are very few youth clubs, let alone targeted youth workers in custody units and hospitals.
“Provision is really patchy,” says Dr Keir Irwin-Rogers, a senior criminology lecturer at the Open University. He describes having youth workers available in hospitals and police stations as a “no-brainer”. “There really isn’t a downside, except that it costs a bit of money to set up. But it quickly pays for itself.”
The future of the work is insecure. Funding for VRUs is in three-year cycles, with the current one coming to an end in March 2025. As it stands, the new Labour government has promised a £100m plan called Young Futures, which it says will help deliver an election pledge to halve knife crime in 10 years.
It says the programme will build on existing work and has pledged to have youth workers in police stations, hospitals and pupil referral units.
But it is yet to provide details or make any commitments about future funding for VRUs, sparking fears they could be scrapped.
For Aziz, the need for ongoing investment is clear. She cites the case of a recent school leaver who worked with Engage after he was arrested, joined a mixed martial arts programme for at-risk young people, and now mentors other children. “The proof is in the pudding. It is so, so important,” she says. “Sometimes the only ones backing these young people is us.”
