Having Our Say (2010)
Keywords: Young People
Project Background
Funding Partner: National Working Group
Project Manager: Jane Martin
Facilitators: Kyna Gourley
In August 2009 The National Working Group for Sexually Exploited Children and Young People approached us to develop a project supported by their members, for young people to develop new skills, and in a safe space reflect on and articulate their views, experiences and identity. The project was also an opportunity to develop peer support and make links between different projects nationally. It has created a young person led body of work (photographs and writing) which represents some of the participants’ key issues to a wider audience.
From January to September 2010 28 young people (aged 12 to 25) from eight projects across England worked with PhotoVoice, the NWG project coordinator, and Kyna Gourley freelance photographer and facilitator in creating the photographs you can see in the gallery below, and in the linked publication. The work was shown to an invited audience for the first time in October 2010 and is being exhibited across England during 2011.
Project photo gallery
Further project info
Participants came from projects run by Barnardos, ACE and SECOS projects, Walsall Street Teams, Safe and Sound Derby, Blackburn ENGAGE, NSPCC Streetmatters, London The Men’s Room Manchester, The Children’s Society, Hand in Hand Keighley, and Manchester Safe in the City.
Defining, explaining and talking about sexual exploitation is hard. It’s professional language, and it’s used to describe a subject that’s difficult for anyone, young or old to talk about. Yet it is important to acknowledge it’s the issue which linked all the young people who took part in this project. Those who took part were attending the projects either because someone was worried they were at risk of sexual exploitation, or they had been directly affected by it. Some definitions.
While young people who took part in this project understood that sexual exploitation was the issue which linked the projects involved, it wasn’t always the one issue which defined them or their photography.
In the project gallery, artistic work sits alongside familiar motifs of normal young lives: going out and having fun with friends; the importance of family; following fashion; signs of poetry and beauty and future ambitions. Other pictures tell of some of the complex issues that many participants negotiate with resilience in their everyday lives. The diversity of images perhaps reflects the fact that sexual exploitation, or the risk of it, rarely stands by itself as an issue in young people’s lives. It is both the cause and result of a multitude of other difficult situations that young people are forced to deal with.
The most common theme that arose during discussions and in photographs was difficulties young people faced finding safe and stable places to live and call home. Over half of all participants were living in temporary, unstable and at times inappropriate housing during the course of this project. Other worries reflected in images include difficulties negotiating family ties, love and relationships, taking risks and staying safe and managing the emotions that all these issues throw up.
It is a tribute to the commitment and strength of all those who took part that all but one completed the project at the same time as negotiating these issues, starting new college courses, dealing with difficult housing moves or care proceedings, helping police prosecutions, finishing exams, and supporting their families and friends.
Opportunities for these young people to communicate their experiences to a wider audience, and to challenge the assumptions made about them remain relatively rare. They often continue to be spoken for by professionals, stereotyped or simply ignored. The photos here are those that participants chose to represent themselves and they remind us that young lives are vibrant, diverse, complicated and sometimes unfairly hard. These images also resist traditional views of young people as victims, risky, or difficult to engage and instead share their talents, commitment and concerns to a wider world.