Trauma-Responsive Practice in Care and Custody: From Understanding to Action Part Three

When we talk about trauma, care, and custody, we’re not talking about three separate worlds we’re often talking about one connected story.

Many children who enter care have already experienced instability, loss, or harm. Some of those same children later find themselves in custody, often carrying the same unhealed wounds that were never properly seen, heard, or understood.

That’s why trauma-responsive practice in these settings isn’t just important, it’s essential.

Trauma Lives in the System Too

A young person in custody once said to me, “I don’t trust anyone who gets paid to care about me.”

That sentence stays with me. It’s not defiance; it’s pain disguised as protection. It tells us something vital about how trauma shapes trust.

In both care and custody, systems can unintentionally mirror trauma, through sudden moves, lack of control, inconsistent adults, and environments that feel unsafe. When we don’t respond to those patterns, we risk reinforcing the very harm we’re trying to heal.

A trauma-responsive approach helps us break that cycle.

What Trauma-Responsive Looks Like in Practice

In Care:

• Seeing behaviour as communication, not confrontation.

• Giving children choice , even in small things, to rebuild a sense of control.

• Packing a child’s belongings with dignity, not bin liners.

• Building consistent, trusting relationships that don’t dissolve at the first challenge.

In Custody:

• Recognising that aggression often masks fear and unmet needs.

• Creating routines that feel predictable and safe.

• Encouraging staff to ask, “What’s happened to you?” rather than “What’s wrong with you?”

• Ensuring young people have consistent contact with their Personal Advisor or key worker.

Trauma-responsive practice is about being curious, not critical. It’s about noticing when a young person withdraws, lashes out, or shuts down and understanding those moments as echoes of past experiences, not moral failings.

It Starts with Us

We can’t expect young people to regulate if we aren’t regulated. We can’t ask for trust if we haven’t earned it.

Being trauma-responsive in care and custody isn’t about being soft, it’s about being steady. It’s about holding boundaries with compassion, consistency, and calm.

It also means looking inward, asking how our policies, tone, or systems might be retraumatising the very people we want to support. When we respond differently, we create environments that promote healing rather than harm.

From Awareness to Change

We’ve moved from being trauma-informed, understanding trauma, to being trauma-responsive, changing what we do because of it.

Now, the challenge is to make that responsiveness systemic:

• In how we train staff.

• In how we design environments.

• In how we write policy and plan transitions from care to custody and back into the community.

Because when we create systems that truly respond to trauma, we don’t just manage behaviour we begin to heal it.

And maybe then, a young person won’t have to protect themselves from the people meant to protect them.