Vicky Ledgerwood, Gender-Based Violence Prevention Coordinator, details the ways St. Paul’s Youth Forum have been creating safe and supportive spaces for young people, and working to prevent harm before it begins.
In youth work, safeguarding starts long before harm happens. It lives in the relationships we build, the conversations we have, and the trust that grows when young people know we are in their corner for the long haul.
At St. Paul’s Youth Forum (SPYF), based in Glasgow’s East End, we’ve been creating safe and supportive spaces since the late 1990s, originally established in response to violence and territorialism in the community. Today, we continue to work upstream to prevent harm before it begins. Whether through one-to-one check-ins, group discussions, shared meals, or creative projects, our work helps young people feel seen, valued, and capable of leading change in their lives and communities.
One way we do this is through the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) programme, delivered in partnership with Smithycroft Secondary School. MVP is, first and foremost, a leadership programme. It encourages young people to think critically about gender norms, peer pressure, and harmful behaviours, and it equips them with tools to intervene safely when something doesn’t feel right. After completing two core sessions exploring gender stereotypes and relationships, participants move into deeper conversations on knife crime, pornography, image-based abuse, and misogyny. These topics are difficult, but in youth work settings where trust is already established, they become spaces for genuine reflection and peer-led change.
This work is amplified through our international collaboration in the Before They Hate (B4H8) Erasmus+ project, which brings together youth organisations in Iceland, Serbia, Denmark, and Spain to prevent hate, extremism, and discrimination. As part of this, young people from SPYF co-produced the short film Geltu, tackling transphobia, and contributed to a practical handbook for youth workers across Europe. Closer to home, our gender-based violence prevention youth group created Don’t Drop the Ball on Relationships, a youth-led resource designed to spark conversations about GBV, consent, and emotional wellbeing.
Our approach was recently highlighted in a peer-reviewed article in Children & Society (Lamb et al., 2023), recognising how youth participation and activism sit at the heart of meaningful prevention work. And it’s not just academics noticing the impact. Our young ambassador Scott McLaughlan reflected on BBC Radio Scotland’s The Sunday Show:
“The alienation a lot of young people feel can be kind of subsided if you engage in youth work. It can help a lot of young people.”
After more than 30 years in the field, I know prevention doesn’t always come with neat outcomes or tidy statistics. But it shows in the quiet conversations, the confidence that builds over time, and the adults who come back years later to say, “You made a difference.”
That’s youth work. That’s prevention. And yes, that’s safeguarding too.
Head to page 27 of the Link Magazine to view the SPYF case studies.
By Vicky Ledgerwood, Gender-Based Violence Prevention Coordinator, St. Paul’s Youth Forum
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