After the uproar, advocacy services must come first

So too have the calls this month for a more comprehensive inquiry into the scale of child abuse in north Wales that took place 30 years ago.

Right now, advocacy services for children and young people should be at the front of our minds. Wales has had more than its share of similar scandals concerning the abuse of children in public care. It was the Waterhouse Inquiry report in 2000 that argued for the strengthening of the voices of the young and, to that end, a Children’s Commissioner for Wales was established – the first in the UK.

Advocacy – a strange word more usually associated with legal representation – grew out of this safeguarding agenda. Equally, it may, and should, be attached to the agenda of rights and entitlements.

In Wales, the momentum behind the development of advocacy led the Welsh government in 2009 to form a National Independent Advocacy Board. This was composed of individuals with professional knowledge of advocacy and young people with expertise through their experience of advocacy.

I have chaired the board for the past three years. Its role has been to understand and scrutinise the provision of both universal and more specialist advocacy services and to advise the Welsh government on appropriate courses of action.

Now the board is to be replaced by an expert group to take the advocacy agenda forward. As it does so, it is important to remember what this is all about. Advocacy is neither about information nor counselling. It is about enabling and supporting young people to speak up and speak out.

Someone on your side

In Wales, there is a 24/7 national advocacy and advice helpline accessible to all young people by phone, text or instant messaging. Its strapline is “someone on your side” (the idea of a young person on the board) if you want to stop, start or change something in your life. After considerable deliberation, it was branded as “meic”, the shortened version of the Welsh word for microphone and equally well understood in English. It is an apposite label, for the intention is to amplify the voice of the caller.

Statutory responsibilities on local authorities and health services to provide advocacy remain limited to specific groups of young people. But the concept of advocacy needs to be stretched to incorporate the possibilities for lay advocacy, peer advocacy and advocacy undertaken by other professionals. 

This has been represented, in Wales, through the promotion of an advocacy “jigsaw”, in which specialist, independent provision for children in care and in need is just one of the pieces. Throughout the UK there needs to be a rounded, concerted commitment to ensure that children and young people can be confident that there are clear ways to express their concerns, anxieties, needs, wants and aspirations. They also have to be assured that they will be listened to and taken seriously.

Advocacy is of course just part of the wider set of policy measures directed at, with and for young people. But it lies at the heart of aspirations that are so clearly framed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: participation, protection and provision. The north Wales and the Savile revelations aside, advocacy is central to the lives of all our young people.

Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan