Njilan is a research assistant for the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding (GCCS). She holds a BSc in Sociology, an MSt in Social Innovation, and has over 10 years’ professional experience working with young people and young adults in settings including prisons, youth justice, education and community organisations, both as a practitioner and researcher.
Her working paper 'Reimagining youth safety: Practitioner reflections on multi-agency police involvement with marginalised young people' was published by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. It draws on her 2023 Master’s dissertation at the University of Cambridge, which won the Jennifer Stephens Prize. The paper outlines the conflicting priorities and logics in partnerships with the police, identifying three central themes from interviews: punitive versus welfare-driven approaches, racial discrimination, and a victim-perpetrator overlap. It also highlights strategies youth practitioners use to address these conflicts.
Her insights resonate with critical literature on soft policing, surveillance and net-widening, and their harmful impact on Black and marginalised communities, opening up conversations about community-based alternatives to police involvement in multi-agency work.
Njilan is committed to creating spaces, organisations and communities that are safe and anti-oppressive for marginalised young people, through research, training and practice. She has developed and delivered staff training on anti-oppressive practice and trauma-informed approaches, and runs workshops on healthy relationships, consent, abolition and transformative justice.
She has also designed and written research reports for the community organisation Milk Honey Bees on the experiences of Black girls in school, focusing on perceptions, punishment, wellbeing, safety and harm.