When Young People Hurt Each Other: Peer-on-Peer Harm in Residential Care

Peer-on-peer harm in residential care homes is common enough to be a central feature of the practice landscape, and rare enough in the professional literature to be consistently underestimated by those who do not work in it. Young people in residential care bring with them histories that, by definition, include experiences of being harmed, neglected, exploited, or failed. The group living context means that those histories are in proximity with each other, day and night, in spaces where adult-to-child ratios are modest and where the ordinary pressures of adolescent development are compounded by extraordinary personal circumstance. Physical violence between young people, sexual harm, persistent bullying, psychological coercion, exploitation of each other's vulnerabilities — all of these occur in residential settings and all of them represent real harm to real children, regardless of whether they also occur in other environments. The reluctance to foreground this reality is understandable: residential care has enough negative press, and no home wants to be identified as a place where young people hurt each other. But the professional silence around it is costly. A sector that cannot honestly examine the prevalence and nature of peer harm cannot develop the practice responses that young people need.

What distinguishes peer-on-peer harm in residential care from the analogous problem in other settings is the particular nature of both parties. In a school context, a young person who perpetrates harm against a peer may have a history distinct from that of the young person harmed; the overlap in vulnerability and trauma background is real but partial. In a residential home, both the young person who has been harmed and the young person who has caused the harm are, almost certainly, children whose capacity to manage distress, to regulate impulse, and to understand the impact of their actions on others has been shaped by their own experience of harm. This does not create a moral equivalence — a young person who has been hurt has been hurt regardless of the history of the person who hurt them, and their safety and experience of the home is what matters to them. But it profoundly affects what a competent practice response looks like. A home that responds to peer harm solely through the lens of perpetrator and victim, without holding the relational complexity, is likely to make decisions — separation, criminalisation, emergency moves — that compound the harm to both parties rather than resolving it. The young person who has caused harm is a child who needs understanding, not only accountability. These things are not mutually exclusive, but holding them together in a residential environment under pressure requires genuine skill and a clear organisational framework for thinking through it before any incident occurs.

The gravitation toward involving the police when harm occurs between young people in a residential home is one of the most consequential and least examined tendencies in the sector. There are circumstances where police involvement is appropriate and necessary: where the harm is serious, where there is an ongoing safety risk, where a young person themselves requests it. But in many cases, police are called not because criminal investigation is the right response to the harm, but because calling the police is the default safeguarding reflex of a workforce that has not been given the frameworks or the organisational confidence to respond differently. The result is young people being criminalised — interviewed under caution, referred to the youth justice system, acquiring records — for behaviour that, in any comparable domestic setting, would never have generated a police response. Two siblings who fight; a teenager whose behaviour at home becomes briefly violent in the context of a family crisis: these situations are managed within families, however imperfectly, without recourse to the criminal justice system. Residential homes are routinely expected to respond differently, and when they call the police for incidents that a family would not, they are — however unintentionally — applying a different standard of citizenship to the young people in their care. A home with a genuine therapeutic framework for managing peer conflict, with clear internal structures for accountability and repair, and with the confidence to use them, is substantially less likely to reach for the phone as a first response. Building that framework is the work, and it has to happen before the incidents that test it.

The practice demands of managing peer-on-peer harm well are significant, and it is worth being honest about that rather than presenting aspirational principles and leaving homes to fill in the space. Good practice begins before any incident occurs, in the quality of the team's understanding of each young person in the home and the particular risks that the specific group composition creates. A home that has young people with histories of exploitation living alongside a young person known to have displayed sexually harmful behaviour, without a specific risk management plan for that combination, has not done the work. Group composition decisions sit primarily with commissioning authorities rather than with homes — this is an area where systemic accountability is frequently misallocated — but homes are not passive recipients. They have both the right and the responsibility to raise concerns about placements that create foreseeable risks to existing residents. Once harm has occurred, the immediate priorities are safety and acknowledgement: ensuring the young person who has been harmed is safe, that their experience is validated and taken seriously, and that they are not left to manage it alone. Beyond the immediate period, the question of whether the two young people can continue to live safely in the same building, or whether one of them needs to move, requires careful multi-agency thinking rather than reactive case management driven by whoever presents as most urgent.

A residential home cannot manage peer-on-peer harm well without the right organisational conditions, and naming those conditions is not an abstract exercise — it is the difference between a home that can hold this work and one that cannot. A stable, experienced staff team that knows the young people well enough to recognise escalating dynamics before they produce harm; a management culture that treats internal accountability and repair as primary responses rather than triggers for immediate external escalation; clear written guidance on when and why external agencies are involved, developed in advance of incidents rather than in the moment of them; robust supervision in which staff can process the emotional weight of working in environments where peer harm is a reality; and a relationship with commissioning authorities that allows the home to be honest when group composition is creating risk. Without these, the best-intentioned practice frameworks will not hold under pressure. The young people in residential care who are most vulnerable to harm from peers are also those whose histories make them hardest to protect within a group living environment — and protecting them requires a sector that can sit with the discomfort of dual vulnerability. The child who hurts is almost always a child who has been hurt. Both facts are true simultaneously, and both require a response. Homes that can hold that tension, rather than resolving it prematurely into simpler categories, are homes that come closest to providing what these young people actually need.