This section explains how friendship and peer assessments should support collaborative safety planning, coordinated safeguarding, and understanding young people’s relationships, while warning against surveillance, criminalisation, and inappropriate information-sharing practices.
When we first introduced the term 'peer mapping' in Contextual Safeguarding, we saw it as way to think about young people’s friendships in safety planning, and this is still the case. Identifying and understanding friendships and peer relationships is a discreet piece of work that social workers do to learn more about a friendship or peer group. Its purpose is to inform any future action that may take place via an individual or context assessment. It should only be used for two purposes:
- With young people, to understand who is important in their lives, helping the social worker decide what to prioritise and focus on when drawing up safety plans.
- To draw together information already held on a social-care system about a young person, so that work with linked young people is coordinated.
At Level 1, this involves a welfare-based practitioner discussing with a young person: who the young person enjoys spending time with, where they spend time together, and which relationships are important to them. It may be helpful to create a visual representation of these relationships, like a genogram. This visual display records only the initials of the young person’s friends and is saved on the confidential case file of the young person receiving support.
Examples of how this discreet work by a welfare-based practitioner can help include:
- Two close friends being moved into an out-of-area placement together because maintaining that relationship is key to their emotional stability and separating them could increase the likelihood of them going missing (to be together).
- Supporting a young person in an out-of-area placement to stay connected with their friends by arranging for them to visit the young person and guiding these friends to do activities they enjoy together.
At Level 2, a similar process takes place, where a welfare practitioner holds conversations with young people about the importance of friendships to inform a safety plan. Some examples are:
- Supporting a group of friends living in a hostel to stay together, after an assessment showed how important their friendship was for their safety.
- Informing a safety plan around a group of friends who went missing together that included carefully and sensitively bringing their parents together to help them understand their children’s experiences, and connect parents to support.
It can often happen that a few young people in a friendship or peer group are all open to social workers. Practitioners may be working individually with young people, each with separate plans, without realising that they are friends or may be experiencing harm together. It can be helpful in this situation for the social workers to link up, to ensure that their safety plans for the young person they are working with will be supportive and not at odds with one another.
When these connections are missed, opportunities to develop safety plans for the young people in the group – and for the spaces they spend time in together – can also be missed. In some cases, identifying these relationships can lead to a Level 2 assessment and intervention (like a neighbourhood assessment or an assessment of the friendship/peer group). In this case, the Level 2 assessment may not include all young people in the group but instead focus on a couple or a small core group of young people within the group.
The problem with how peer mapping is used
We have seen peer mapping being used in ways that are at odds with how it was originally intended and that do not align with the values of Contextual Safeguarding. Rather than being used collaboratively with young people to support safety planning, peer mapping is often being used to gather information about large numbers of young people, often for crime-prevention purposes, without a clear safeguarding rationale or intended outcomes.
In some cases, information about young people’s relationships and social connections is being shared across agencies, including with the police, without sufficient consideration given to consent, privacy, proportionality, or thresholds.
This raises important ethical concerns. It violates the rights of young people and, by damaging relationships of trust between practitioners and young people, cuts them off from sources of safety and support. It contributes to the criminalisation of young people.
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‘Peer mapping’ is |
‘Peer mapping’ is not |
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A collaborative tool used with young people to support safety planning |
A tool for gathering intelligence on large groups of young people |
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A way to understand important friendships, relationships, and sources of support |
A process for indiscriminate information sharing between agencies |
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An approach that helps practitioners identify strengths, vulnerabilities, and opportunities for safety |
A crime prevention/disruption exercise without a clear safeguarding purpose |
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A method for building safety plans with and around friendship groups |
A justification for mapping all young people’s social connections |
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Grounded in trusted relationships, consent, |
An approach that risks damaging trust with young people and contributing to their criminalisation |