Learning Together: Involving children and youth in sexual abuse research

Aims

The ‘Learning Together’ project is being delivered by the Safer Young Lives Research Centre and the University of Central Lancashire. It seeks to support researchers to safely and ethically involve children and young people in sexual abuse research and explore what the support needs of researchers are to help them to do this.

For the purposes of this project the term ‘research’ is broadly defined, and includes evaluation and other similar learning initiatives.

Recognising the existence of a range of ethical guidelines and toolkits that already helpfully guide thinking on this, the Learning Together project will focus on the practical challenges of safely and ethically engaging children and young people in sexual abuse research, facilitating conversations and creating outputs to support enhanced practice and capacity in this field. This project is funded by Porticus.

Activities

In the first phase of this project, we undertook an online survey to understand the key challenges faced by researchers when involving (or seeking to involve) children in sexual abuse research.

You can read more about the survey in the survey information sheet [PDF] and a summary of key findings from the survey can be found in the outputs section below. This informed the areas and activities the project has focused on. We have been facilitating small group discussions on ‘thorny issues’ including approaches to ethics and researcher welfare, delivering training on trauma-informed approaches to research and supporting a youth-led project about what safe and ethical research means to them. We will be sharing outputs from these and real-life research scenarios and resources, over summer/autumn 2024.

We’ve also written an open access discuss piece on rethinking ethical approaches to involving children and young people in abuse-focused research that you can find here: ‘Do no harm’? Rethinking risk and harm narratives in abuse-focused research with children - ScienceDirect

Throughout the project, we’ll also be producing a series of short blogs and case studies. You can find these under the outputs section below which will continue to be updated.

Outputs

The project will run until late 2025 and through its different elements and conversations with researchers and young people, a suite of practice tools and other outputs will be developed that speak to the real life challenges researchers working in this field face, and aid the implementation of ethical principles and trauma-informed approaches in this work.

Learning Together survey results [PDF]

Blogs and case studies