ABSTRACT
A conversation with Andi Brierley who is currently the child looked after specialist within the Leeds Youth Justice Service. However, at the moment, he has been seconded to work in a secure children’s home in response to Covid-19. In essence, what we are really saying is the children are swamped with adversity and lack attachments to supportive relationships to buffer the experience. In fact, many of the relationships are the root cause of harm or contribute to the child’s experience of relational poverty. Urie Bronfenbrenner, an American psychologist, designed a way of understanding the interactions between children and their environments and how this relates to their development, known as ecological systems theory. He argued that children find themselves in various systems, namely, the microsystem, the mesosystem, the exosystem, the macrosystem, and the chronosystem. Child criminal exploitation in my view is much broader an issue and requires a separate lens.
