Youth Matters? Social Work Responses to the Trauma Experienced by Young People Displaced in Contemporary Community Context

This paper outlines the importance of the recognition of the new contexts of youth displacement due to socio political change in the international social work community. It recognises youth displacement as a generic concept with a significant potential cause of trauma on any community experiencing socio political change that impacts on young people. This paper argues that social work requires a framework that is reflexive to the variety of causes of youth displacement and trauma in con-temporary community contexts, which include family and community conflict, fos-ter or adoption breakdown, refugeeism and migrancy and economic crisis. In partic-ular, it promotes the skills of social work in creating safe places as practice holding places a holding space (Gauci, IFSW 2017) which potentially creates the framework for therapeutic encounter to support young people in distress. In doing so, it upholds the profession‘s understanding about ―the knowledge of vulnerable groups that soci-ety, and systems, exclude‖ (IFSW Opening Address, Iceland 2017).