60-second summary: Young people's safety and drug policy

The question

How does the imperative to “keep children and young people safe” shape and limit drug policy – and how can we better involve children and young people in making ‘safety’?

The study

We took a close look at how assumed connections between prohibition and safety manifest in drug policy, focusing on how an Australian government policy document (the NSW Strategic Plan for Children and Young People 2016–2019) uses the concept of ‘safety’ to make drug policy decisions affecting children and young people. We used a critical policy analysis method (Carol Bacchi's What's the Problem Represented to Be? approach) to examine how the document defines ‘safety’, who it positions children and young people to be, and how it characterises drugs as a threat which in turn makes particular responses of restriction and prohibition logical.

The findings

Safety started out anchored in well-recognised child protection principles — freedom from abuse, neglect and violence — but then expanded to encompass drugs, alcohol, and a wide range of community concerns. This made safety into an omnipresent concern, expanding what social problems could fall under the remit of ‘safety’.
We also found that children and young people were portrayed as developmentally incomplete and incapable of exercising sound judgement while also being inherently risky. Following this, the responsibility for ‘making safety’ was held by government institutions, while sidelining consideration of how young people themselves — as well as parents, carers, and communities — engage in safety-making.
Children and young people were consulted as part of the process for developing this strategic plan, although only one quote representing a young person’s perspective was selected to illustrate the proposal that drug availability produces ‘unsafety’ in the community. This demonstrated that some young peoples’ safety counted more than others, remaining silent on how safety might be made among those children and young people whose lives are already entangled with drugs or criminalised environments, and for whom prohibition may actively generate harm (nearly a third of 15–24 year olds in Australia reported using illicit drugs in the past year).

The takeaway

The assumption that ‘prohibition keeps young people safe’ is not only a feature of one Australian policy document, it’s also found in policies in the UK, Europe, Southeast Asia and beyond. ‘Safety’ is therefore actively shaping drug policy decisions with real consequences for real people. When ‘safety' is treated as a self-evident, unquestionable goal, it can authorise blunt, paternalistic policies that can perpetuate harms such as those related to unregulated drug supply, criminalisation, stigma, and barriers to accessing harm reduction services.

This research matters for policymakers because it shows that the language of children's safety is never neutral. It is infused with assumptions and logic that can obscure pathways to more effective, evidence-informed approaches that account for multiple kinds of risk and safety. Policies built on the assumption that drugs and young people are simply incompatible will struggle to reach those young people most at risk, particularly those already living in criminalised or drug-affected environments. Crucially, this research does not argue against protecting young people; rather, we implore policymakers, researchers, service workers, and other organisations that work with children and young people and drugs to engage with complexities around what ‘safety’ means and does in practice.

Policymakers developing new frameworks for youth drug policy have an opportunity to move beyond prohibition-as-protection toward approaches that are more relational, participatory, empowering, and ultimately committed to ensuring that those with more complex safety needs are not left behind. This should involve attention to the diverse ways children and young people (and those that care for them) already navigate and mitigate drug-related risk in their everyday lives (including through harm reduction approaches beyond prohibition). We also suggest that this should involve proactively assuming that children and young people ought to be co-creators of safety rather than passive subjects of protection.

Read the full article in the Journal of Applied Youth Studies

Posted on: 11 Aug 2026

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