I’ve just finished multiple days of abseil guiding with groups of teenage girls and a private tour group of middle-aged women. On paper, the work was about ropes, cliffs, harnesses, helmets, safety systems and helping people walk backwards off the edge of something their brain was very clearly telling them wasn’t a great idea. But in practice, it became a week about exploring fear, choice, language, dignity, humour, gender, and what happens when people are given permission to

“A young person does not owe us their engagement.” This feels like a simple sentence, but I think it challenges how youth services approach the work with our most vulnerable young people in out-of-home-care. We often describe young people as “hard to reach”, “not ready”, “resistant”, or “not engaging”. Those words describe what we see on the surface, but it misses the full picture and let services off the hook. A young person might not be refusing help; they might be refusing