When young women shape conversations on risk

By Abi Billinghurst 

Founder and CEO

Risk is in the day-to-day language of our work at Abianda. We operate in it as default. Young women’s lives are often shaped by it. Safeguarding systems are built around it. Professional meetings, assessments, interventions and decision-making are saturated with it.

Our work requires us to sit constantly with uncertainty, ambiguity, consequence and harm - trying to navigate complex realities where there are rarely neat or risk-free answers. So we spend a lot of time thinking about risk. Talking about risk. Challenging ideas about risk. And some of the richest conversations we have at Abianda are the ones where we really start to unpack what we actually mean by the word itself.

What does risk mean? Who defines it? Who gets labelled as “risky”? Which risks are tolerated, normalised or even celebrated, and which become pathologised or criminalised?

In our work, the language of risk is everywhere. Young women are described as “high risk”, “at risk”, “risk taking” and (my personal favourite) “putting herself at risk”. Professionals assess risk, monitor risk, score risk and create plans to mitigate risk. Entire safeguarding systems are built around it. 

We know all of this, and I’m certainly not the first person to say these things - a lot of brilliant practitioners and academics have explored these issues extensively.

But I often think we don’t spend enough time really interrogating the concept itself, particularly with young women.

Risk assessments are so often completed about young women, rather than with them. Which means we can end up with pages of professional analysis, but very little understanding of how the young woman herself experiences or understands the perceived risks in her life.

This seems important, because what professionals might define as “risk” may also be serving a purpose for a young woman. For example: a relationship may feel unsafe to professionals, but protective to her. A particular space may feel dangerous to adults, but is connected to identity, belonging or survival. What looks chaotic or irrational from the outside may make complete sense within the context in which she is navigating her life. Abianda’s solution focused practice means that we start from the assumption that she ‘must have good reason for doing what she is doing’.

I think this is where safeguarding conversations can sometimes go wrong. We move very quickly into professional analysis and intervention without first getting aligned on the basic conceptual map, particularly in understanding whether a young woman’s analysis of risk is the same as ours in the first place.

Are we aligned across basic assumptions? What do we actually mean by “risk”? Does she understand it in the same way we do? If not, where does our thinking diverge? What can we learn from her that would support realistic and achievable mitigations?

Does she experience some forms of risk as exciting, important, necessary or even empowering? Does avoiding risk altogether feel realistic? Does she feel she has choice or agency? What consequences feel manageable to her, and which do not?

These conversations are often far more complex than systems seem to comfortably allow for. But if we are serious about working in partnership with young women to increase safety, then I think we have to be willing to have them. Which might sometimes mean being less reactive and more reflective in high-risk situations. Which is scary when we hold accountability and duty of care - and fear that something awful will happen to her.

Every month I hold Business Breakfasts with our Systems Change Experts, including our Young Women’s Advisory Group. These sessions create space for young women to engage with the infrastructure of the organisation itself. We explore leadership, governance, finance, decision-making, accountability, systems and strategy. Recently, we spent time exploring our organisational risk policy (“how exciting”, I hear you say…).

Risk appetite, thresholds, analysis, scoring. Risk mitigation. Risk registers! The list goes on! We explored: how organisations balance innovation alongside responsibility; how you make decisions when outcomes are uncertain; how institutions determine which risks are worth taking and which are not.

Knowing this group of young women, it didn’t surprise me that the conversations were incredibly nuanced and wide-ranging. They immediately challenged binary understandings of risk as something inherently “bad”. They talked about risk as possibility, opportunity, expansion and growth. The idea that people often have to take risks in order to change their circumstances or create opportunities for themselves.

But they also spoke with huge insight about how inequality shapes a person’s relationship with risk and that some people can afford “failure”.

Some people have financial safety nets, social capital, professional networks and structural privilege that soften the consequences if things go wrong. Other people live much closer to the edge of consequence, where a poor outcome can fundamentally destabilise your life.

That conversation made me reflect on Abianda itself.

I set up Abianda with virtually no formal risk analysis whatsoever. I had a strong instinct, a felt sense of purpose and vision, and I just put one foot in front of the other and did. The activity, then the organisation, evolved first; the infrastructure came later. Policies, governance systems, risk management frameworks and risk registers all developed over time as Abianda grew. We are still developing these!

In truth, I was probably impulsive and instinct-driven. Sound familiar?

But I was also taking risks from within relative safety. I had forms of social collateral and privilege that made the consequences of failure less severe. If things had gone wrong (they most definitely did!), the fallout would not have been catastrophic, or experienced equally across all contexts or identities. I could shake off the failure and try again.

I think we can often fail to acknowledge how deeply privilege shapes who is celebrated as a “risk taker” and who is condemned as “risky”.

This is partly why I love these conversations so much. Because once we really start unpacking risk, it opens up much bigger questions about power, inequality, gender, intersectionality, safeguarding, leadership, systems and decision-making. It challenges simplistic narratives about young women’s lives, but also simplistic narratives about organisations, innovation and success.

And perhaps most importantly, it creates space for young women’s own analysis and expertise to shape the conversation, not simply for them to be positioned as the subject of it.