Building and Maintain Relationships with Young People Online: Wisdom in Intimate Spaces

Typically, pre-pandemic, many social-professionals avoided engaging in online relationship-based work with young people due to safeguarding concerns. With the rapid shift to working online with young people during the pandemic, many professionals (for example, inclusion officers, social workers and youth workers) moved towards greater levels of synchronous online work with young people. This rapid shift appears to have provoked predominantly risk-averse sets of policies that promote stringent safeguarding procedures while limiting the space for professional judgement. Therefore, this paper will consider the role of professional wisdom in the use of online contact with young people post-pandemic by learning from pre- and mid-pandemic practices. This paper will present the findings of a systematic literature review of 90 articles from the past ten years that explore dominant practices in the developing and maintaining of relationships with young people while in online synchronous formats – including video and conference calling, and instant messaging. These professional encounters cross boundaries that many face-to-face encounters would not have to consider: the worker may be in the more intimate space of the home, the young person may also be accessing at home in family spaces or in their bedrooms where backgrounds and dress codes may be less formal or present implicit self-disclosures, the perceived informality of online contact, and expectations around contact out of normal working hours. These may soften the boundaries of the relationship, which could provide improvements for the service user, but also present a range of risks. Therefore, this paper will consider questions of normative practices that developed through the pandemic relating to relationship-based online work with young people. It will seek to present gaps in the literature and areas for future research in the realm of professional ethics, safeguarding, and online relationship building. Recognising that there can be unique safeguarding concerns in our work with young people online, the paper is fundamentally asking “where is the space for professional wisdom within online relationship-based work?”. It will also seek young people’s voices in the midst of this discussion, recognising that young people often inhabit different online spaces to adults and professionals.