This section outlines the importance of friends and peers in adolescence.
Relationships with other young people are a vital part of adolescent development. They help young people express themselves, build social confidence and develop a sense of belonging beyond their family. Friendships, romantic relationships and peer connections are overwhelmingly positive and protective but they can also be contexts in which harm occurs.
A young person’s friendship group may be both a source of support and a source of risk. Friends can be a route into exploitation through pressure, recruitment or connections to others already involved. Some young people may both experience and cause harm within their peer groups. At the same time, friends often provide crucial support, enabling disclosure of harm, encouraging help-seeking and recognising when something is wrong.
This means we cannot view friendship and peer relationships in a one-dimensional way. Alongside understanding risks, we must also recognise and build on strengths. This is central to Contextual Safeguarding: understanding young people’s needs within the relationships and environments where harm happens, rather than locating blame solely in individual behaviour. The same relationships that support healthy development can also create vulnerability, and effective responses must hold both realities in mind.
Below are the key considerations when thinking about relationships between young people in adolescence.
Adolescence often comes with more risk-taking - especially around friends and peers. For example, young people are more likely to have car accidents when they’re with other young people than when they’re alone. Friends and peers can increase the pull towards thrill-seeking. This is only a problem if harmful risk-taking has become normal within a group of young people. In this case, we need to carefully understand the context of it, and work with the group and wider context to support safe risk-taking.
Adolescents are more motivated by what’s happening now than what might happen in the future. Adults often talk about long-term consequences (for example, "you won’t even know these friends in ten years"), but that usually doesn’t carry much weight for young people. For young people, friends, romantic relationships and peer connections matter because of what they offer right now – belonging, identity, and acceptance. If we ignore this and focus only on the future, our interventions are likely to fail to create effective, collaborative safety for young people.
Friendships and romantic relationships in adolescence can be intense and change quickly. One day a friend feels like family; the next, things can feel overwhelming or even 'over'. This reflects developing adolescent emotional regulation. The strong need to belong can sometimes lead young people to stay in unhealthy or harmful relationships just to avoid losing connection. In environments where relationships shift often, these challenges can be even greater, making some young people more vulnerable to staying in relationships that cause harm. We need to think about what young people need to support them to have positive and safe relationships.
Relationships in adolescence help bridge the gap between family dependence and independence. They offer a space to try things out – identity, values and ways of being. Through these relationships, young people experiment with self-expression and figure out where they fit. This supports growing autonomy, while still providing connection and support. At the same time, young people still need adults for care and guidance, but what this means shifts from day to day. We need to be careful of not being overbearing/ controlling on the one hand and, on the other, of expecting more independence/ autonomy of young people than they are able to give. This requires sensitivity and skill and can only be done through building trusted relationships.