Care experience, mental health and online spaces
Dr Autumn Roesch-Marsh describes her experience of working on her eNurture-funded project and what she has learned.
What a year and half it has been for all of us. Like many academics with small children, I look back and wonder how I managed to accomplish anything given the long stretches with no childcare and the losses and other pressures my family faced during the pandemic. Despite the challenges, working on this eNurture-funded project was a joy and I have learned so much.
I am a qualified social worker who has always worked with children in the care system. When I moved into academia I knew I wanted to develop projects that might help to improve the care system and the lives of care experienced people. Just before the eNurture project began I was working with Dr Ruth Emond on the themes of care experience and friendship. Reading this literature began to open my eyes to the importance of the online world in supporting friendships and peer networks for all young people. When I saw the eNurture call back in 2019 it seemed a wonderful opportunity to answer some questions that had I had been developing about care experience, mental health, relationships and the online world. A review of the literature confirmed that very little work had been done on these themes, convincing me to apply for the funding.
“The funding and support of the network has been transformational, allowing me to develop a whole new strand to my research, teaching and activism.”
Talking to young people and practitioners opened my eyes to the vital role online spaces play in the lives of those with care experience. Yes, online environments can be a source of risk and danger for young people and we often talk about this in social work. However, this project has helped me to develop a much more balanced perspective about the risks and benefits posed by the online world. Listening to the experiences of young people has helped me understanding how damaging punitive and risk averse practice around online access can be and to recognise the ways that being online can support mental health.
As with other young people their age, social media, gaming and texting apps allow care experienced young people to make friends and maintain relationships. Conducting this study I learned that for many care experienced young people these online connections may be even more important than for other young people. This has to do with the way that coming into care can disrupt and, in some cases, limit opportunities to maintain and develop social networks as young people are moved between schools, communities and placements. The online world allows young people to maintain connections or forge new connections across geographical distances. It allows them to connect to others who share similar experiences and interests, reducing feelings of isolation and loneliness. Working on this study has also opened my ideas to the wide range of activist and peer support activities run for care experienced people by care experienced people online (see for example the Care Collective).
When the pandemic hit and society closed down, online connections became even more important for all of us. Working on this research through the pandemic meant that some of the work we hoped to do was not possible. Digital exclusion, poverty and service pressures faced by our voluntary sector partners meant we were not able to involve care experienced young people in the final stages of our project in the way we would have liked (e.g. we hoped they would co-deliver our pilot training course ‘Caring in a digital world’). As I learned more from practitioners and young people about digital exclusion I began to realise that this issue needed far more attention from social work, prompting me to undertake some collaborative work on these issues with the Centre for Excellence for Looked After Children. We produced several research reports on the topic of digital exclusion and digital rights.
“Without the eNuture project my eyes would not have been opened to these important issues which I am now writing about and teaching about regularly.”
As Betton and Woollard (2019:13) write in their helpful book Teen Mental Health in an Online World, ‘engagement with social media can be both passive and active; life-affirming or depleting; enjoyable or destructive; and anywhere in between.’ Care experienced young people are like most young people, they want to be connected online, to make friends and have opportunities to grow and learn and live a fulfilling, connected life. Working on the eNurture project has made me a passionate advocate for care experienced young people’s digital rights and digital inclusion. All professionals and carers working with young people have a responsibility to help care experienced young people to make the most of the digital world and learn the skills they will need to thrive in the digital future.
The work to ensure this continues. Building on the success of this project I am working with Who Cares? Scotland to support the development of a new strand of their work around digital rights, funded by Nominet. I am also working with AFA Scotland to further develop our pilot training course, ‘Caring in a digital world’, to ensure it can be rolled out to a wider range of carers and its impact evaluated.
You can read more about the findings of our study here
You can watch the film we made with young people here
Dr Autumn Roesch-Marsh
University of Edinburgh