The release of YEF’s new Podcast – Safe

On Adolescence 

Over the weekend, without taking a break, I watched all four episodes of Adolescence, Stephen Graham’s Netflix mini-series about the arrest of a 13-year-old schoolboy for murdering one of his classmates and its impact on his life, family and community.  

I was gripped, partially because it is a rare thing for British television drama to tackle with such poignancy, clarity and delicacy the tragic trends of how teenagers are experiencing in our modern world. Rarer still is TV’s willingness and ability to deal with the complexities of violence affecting children and young people in a way that prioritises empathy and a sense of shared social responsibility. 

There are many practical takeaways from the show, whose episodes are each shot in one sweeping take, making it difficult to turn away.

One of them is to realise the very real and sometimes undetectable harms that the digital world can bring to teenagers’ lives. Another is to depict the growing crisis of male isolation and rage being fuelled by the influence of toxic role models and algorithms that promote their content to impressionable boys. Another is how absent our adult understanding of these phenomena can be, even across the frontline institutions which come most directly into contact with them. 

YEF’s Sectors 

As I tumbled deeper down into the show’s rabbit hole, I realised that it directly explores the lived ecosystem of sectors that our work at the Youth Endowment Fund focuses on: from education to youth justice to children’s services to health to policing, and more.  

It shows how violence affecting teenagers is more complicated than an issue of their personal responsibility or the care of their parents.

Preventing violence can only take place when we properly consider the myriad forces playing out in any young person’s life as they navigate between spending time and forming relationships in different contexts. 

Launch of the Safe Podcast  

It therefore feels resonant that this week also marks the launch of the new YEF podcast.  

Safe is a series of conversations about violence affecting children and young people with experts who are working hard to stop it. Each episode starts with a simple question — when you were young, what did being safe mean to you? — before exploring how guests’ life and career journeys have led them to try and create sustainable solutions to violence. 

Episode One: Carlene Firmin on Contextual Safeguarding 

The first episode is a conversation with Professor Carlene Firmin, in which we explore her personal journey, from growing up and overcoming challenges as a young person in London, working in the charity sector, problems in how services respond to risks outside of the home, and entering academia, where she has developed her groundbreaking concept of ‘contextual safeguarding’.  

It was privilege to have been in dialogue with someone who has so effectively combined intellectual curiosity and philosophical thinking with actionable, concrete changemaking to innovate on how we can improve the safety of young people.  

From unpacking the theory of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, to the do’s and don’ts of friendship mapping, to understanding how fast-food shop workers can play the role of being a community guardian, the episode’s conversation is the first of two pilots being launched this spring, with plans to produce six more episodes across the rest of the year. 

Like, comment and subscribe! 

You can watch or listen to Safe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you find your podcasts. If you enjoy it, please like, comment and share to help us give it a boost amongst our audiences and beyond, and subscribe or save wherever you listen to your podcasts to keep up to date with forthcoming releases.