What Happens the Day She Turns 18?
Head of Partnerships and Development
Solution-focused practice starts from a simple but often overlooked idea: a young woman is the expert in her own life. As our Young Women and Girls Practitioner puts it, it's about helping her imagine a world where she isn't defined by what's happened to her. It's one where she's encouraged to recognise her own resilience and skills, rather than being seen only through the lens of risk. It's important to highlight that young women and girls often tell us that they don't want to have to be this resilient, or this 'strong' - but their circumstances have allowed them no other way.
For a young woman carrying layers of trauma and harm, there is usually a good reason behind how she responds to a situation, even when it isn't the response professionals expect or feel comfortable with. Solution-focused practice asks us to slow down, understand that reasoning, and centre what she says she needs, not what a service assumes is best for her.
That principle is tested nowhere more sharply than at the point a young woman turns 18.
Three things seem to happen in that gap, and they compound each other: a plan timed to a birthday rather than a risk level, two systems that stop speaking the same language the moment she crosses it, and a service left holding a risk that seems to no longer have anywhere else to sit.
The Birthday Trigger
Plans are built around a young woman turning 18, not around the level of risk she's actually facing. Dez Holmes named this problem back in 2018 as "Transitional Safeguarding" (Holmes and Smale, 2018), and research since has only sharpened the picture. A young person aged seventeen years and 364 days can be treated as a vulnerable child in need of protection, while the very next day, turning 18, she can be seen as a fully capable adult and in some cases a perpetrator rather than a victim (Alliance for Youth Justice, 2025).
Nothing about her circumstances has changed overnight. Only the category she's placed in has. Exploiters are often acutely aware of exactly this moment: that the drop in oversight at 18 makes a young woman easier to reach, not harder (Alliance for Youth Justice, 2025). A transition plan timed to an age rather than a risk level all but guarantees that some young women reach the handover at the worst possible moment, just as the risks around her are intensifying rather than resolving.
Mismatched Systems
Children and adult safeguarding sit within two different frameworks, each built with its own language and thresholds, designed for different purposes, not for the one young person who has to move between them. Adult safeguarding duties only apply where someone has been formally assessed as having care and support needs under the Care Act 2014, a materially higher and narrower bar than the broad protective remit children's services can draw on (Alliance for Youth Justice, 2025; Care Act 2014). A case that reads as urgent on one side of 18 can arrive on the other side sounding routine, not because anything has changed, but because the words used to describe it have.
Picture a 17-year old young woman identified as experiencing criminal exploitation. She has endured multiple instances of significant harm and navigates ongoing risk in the community. She’s built relationships sturdy enough, and been brave enough, to share enough about the reality of her life for the professional network around her to galvanise and begin to work effectively for her. As she approaches her 18th birthday, discussions begin about how to transition her from children’s services, to adult. Handover sessions are agreed, but capacity across all teams is stretched, and these never take place. The familiar faces in her network begin to disappear and the level of care she’s able to access reduces dramatically.
From here, unless she happens to meet the Care Act's threshold for care and support needs, she may not qualify for an adult safeguarding response at all (Care Act 2014). Nothing about her situation has changed. Only the language used to describe it and the frameworks used to respond to it. Add to this the complexity that comes with experiences of criminal exploitation and the idea that either side of a birthday, a young woman or girl who may have already survived unimaginable harm is now viewed as having ‘made a choice’ that ‘caused’ this.
Holding it all together
When the systems on either side of that birthday don't join up, someone still has to hold the risk in the meantime. In conversations I've had with housing associations and local authority housing teams this year, this is consistently the picture we've been given back: housing is often left trying to hold together any network that remains.
Firmin and King's (2026) national study of multi-agency exploitation panels found housing to be the least consistently engaged core partner of all agencies reviewed, with only around a quarter of panels reliably receiving information from housing services at all. And for young people moved out of the area to ‘protect’ them from county lines exploitation, turning 18 can mean falling through the gap between different local authorities' leaving-care teams, losing access to housing at exactly the point it matters most (Alliance for Youth Justice, 2025).
Back to that same young woman: at 18, she's moved into supported accommodation. It's the key-worker in the provision who notices the unfamiliar car outside most evenings, the sudden appearance of expensive new clothes, the missed curfews that follow a pattern rather than random lateness. This leads to the housing team being the ones left deciding what to do with this information, often without access to resources and training, without a clear route to flag it as exploitation rather than a tenancy issue, and without the multi-agency network that used to surround her.
We have been putting effort into working more closely with housing partners in an attempt to understand this gap and think about what it looks like when that is carefully considered. Where housing teams have taken up our training, experienced housing officers are stepping into that safeguarding role deliberately, recognising risk, and knowing what to do with it, rather than absorbing it by default because no one else is there.
What solution-focused practice asks of us
Identifying the gap can be the easiest part. The harder question, is what closes it? What changes structurally once a young woman's needs and her own account of her situation is treated as central to a transition plan?
There is already evidence of what this can look like. Kingston and Richmond's Vulnerable Adolescents Supported into Adulthood panel reviews cases of young adults still at risk of exploitation and coordinates a genuine safety plan around them, rather than letting the case simply close (Alliance for Youth Justice, 2025) or a young person fall through a systemic gap
Wiltshire Council has used the Care Act's own prevention duty to fund a support offer for young adults who don't meet the formal care-and-support threshold at all (Alliance for Youth Justice, 2025; Care Act 2014). Neither approach waits for a national mandate. Both start from the same place solution-focused practice does: what is this young woman telling us she wants to see happen, and how can this be informed by what has worked well for her before?
For the young woman, that means one consistent point of contact who carries her stated wishes across the handover, not just her “file”; a plan built around her actual experiences and the level of risk she’s navigating, rather than just her age; and always knowing who is responsible for her creating safety for, with and alongside her right now. For the services around her, it means a shared transition protocol with room to prioritise what she says she needs, training that equips professionals, including housing, to hold the complexity or her circumstances, and a handover treated as a genuine collaborative overlap rather than a cut-off point.
None of this is about any one team getting it wrong. It's what happens when two systems, each coherent on their own terms, meet at a border neither was built around. Closing that gap deliberately - and holding meaningfully any tension that it presents - is what solution-focused practice looks like here, not a philosophy applied after the fact, but the structure a transition plan is built around from the start.
References
Alliance for Youth Justice (2025) From exploited to exploiter? Preventing the unjust criminalisation of victims of child criminal exploitation in the transition to adulthood. London: Alliance for Youth Justice. Available at: Alliance for Youth Justice.
Care Act 2014. London: HMSO. Available at: legislation.gov.uk.
Firmin, C. and King, H. (2026) Prioritising Protection: The role of children's services and wider safeguarding partnerships in protecting young people impacted by extra-familial harm. Durham: Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding, Durham University, for the Youth Endowment Fund. Available at: Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding.
Holmes, D. and Smale, E. (2018) Mind the Gap: Transitional Safeguarding – Adolescence to Adulthood. Dartington: Research in Practice. Available at: Research in Practice.
