Agenda Hosts Roundtable with the Commission on Young Lives

On Tuesday 19th July, we held a joint roundtable with Anne Longfield and the Commission on Young Lives (COYL) on girls affected by criminal exploitation and violence.

Through this event, we gathered experts in the charity sector, policing and education to learn from their experience working with girls and young women at risk and understand what we can do to support these girls to succeed.

Both Agenda and the COYL have a shared concern about the most at-risk young people and marginalisation of girls’ experiences within that and have identified key areas of gendered risk for girls and young women.

Our Girls Speak project highlights that girls and young women facing the greatest forms of inequality are continually overlooked in research, policy and practice. Over the past two years, we have produced two briefing papers for the project on issues young women with lived experience of adversity raised as priorities:

• Struggling Alone, which explores girls and young women’s mental health; and
• Girls at Risk of Exclusion, which addresses the ways in which girls and young women (in particular Black girls) are impacted by exclusions in schools.

Set to be published later this year, the project’s final report will focus on the ways in which girls and young women are repeatedly failed by youth policies, strategies and services. We look forward to continuing our work in this area as well as the opportunity to platform the voices and experiences of girls and young women.