The Hidden Shadows within Practice: How Professional Dangerousness Silences Young People

Nikki Butler, 3 September 2025

Are you ready to bring the shadows within your practice into the light?

The decisions we make as practitioners and leaders influence safety, wellbeing, and the young person’s life trajectory.

Working with young people who are exhibiting harmful or concerning behaviours (such as self-harm, suicidal ideation, offending, substance use or aggression), can be highly challenging for practitioners, support workers and services. Yet, some of the greatest risks do not come from the young people themselves, but from the shadows within professional assessment, interventions, practice and service responses.

A concept that is rarely talked about or understood, is ‘Professional Dangerousness’, which is about the unintended harm that occurs when practitioners, often with the best intentions, respond to behaviours in ways that increases risk rather than reduces it. Professional dangerousness thrives in the shadows, where unconscious bias and defence mechanisms quietly shape how we interpret behaviours, assess risk, and decide whose voice is heard. It often results in colluding with adults, rather than keeping focus on the needs and safety of the young person.

Understanding the shadows hidden within practice is essential for effective responses to youth behaviours and mental health concerns. By recognising how Professional Dangerousness operates, practitioners can bring the shadows into the light, reframe their responses to youth behaviours, and ensure practice is guided by insight, curiosity, and the needs of young people, rather than by assumptions, cognitive bias or self-protective actions.

Unconscious Bias: The Hidden Lens on Young People’s Behaviours

Unconscious bias is a powerful driver of Professional Dangerousness. It shapes how we interpret behaviour and the stories we tell ourselves about young people. Bias can make certain behaviours appear “problematic,” “defiant,” or “offending,” while overlooking the underlying protective functions of those same behaviours.

Examples of bias in assessment and interventions with young people:

• Interpreting aggression or withdrawal as defiance, rather than a protective response to trauma.
• Viewing non-compliance with orders or instructions as deliberate resistance, rather than mistrust or fear.
• Assuming risk is higher with certain demographics, cultural backgrounds, or family structures, while ignoring the contextual realities of the young person’s life.

For instance, in the situation where a teenage girl repeatedly ‘runs away’ from home or care placements, the practitioner might unconsciously label this as “reckless behaviour,” rather than recognising it as a survival strategy to escape unsafe or unstable environments. The lens through which we view behaviour can either magnify risk or obscure it, often unintentionally.

Bias operates in the shadows – it influences interpretation, decision-making, and interventions before we are even conscious of it. Without awareness, bias can distort practice, silence young people’s voices, and increase the likelihood of harmful outcomes.

Defence Mechanisms: Self-protection whilst Increasing Risk

Practitioners often work in high-pressure environments with competing demands, complex cases, and emotionally intense interactions; this can lead to overwhelm.

Defence mechanisms are instinctive strategies to manage stress, strong emotions and discomfort. However, when they remain unexamined, they can increase Professional Dangerousness risk.

Common defence mechanisms include:

• Minimisation: downplaying behaviours or risk indicators to feel more in control, e.g., dismissing repeated absences from school as “typical teenage behaviour.”
• Rationalisation: justifying decisions or lack of follow-up based on workload or organisational pressures.
• Denial: refusing to acknowledge the seriousness of risky behaviours because it is emotionally uncomfortable.
• Normalisation: treating harmful behaviours as “expected” in certain communities or settings.

Consider a young person who is engaged in minor offending…

The practitioner may normalise the behaviour as a response to peer influence, while minimising signs of escalating risk, or rationalising limited intervention due to other priority cases.

The result…

The young person’s protective needs and underlying issues remain unseen, and risk continues to be unaddressed.

Defence mechanisms reduce personal discomfort; however, they can leave young people with increased vulnerability. Combined with unconscious bias, they create patterns of professional behaviour which increases risk for the young person, often unnoticed until harm occurs.

The Shadow Side of Practice: Misunderstanding Youth Behaviours

Professional Dangerousness emerges where unconscious bias and defence mechanisms intersect.

In these shadows, protective behaviours are misinterpreted as defiance or even “criminal”, young people’s voices are silenced or overlooked, and interventions may unintentionally escalate risk or reinforce harmful patterns. For example, a practitioner may interpret a young person’s refusal to engage in a program as defiance (bias), while simultaneously rationalising a delayed response due to workload (defence). The outcome may be missed opportunities to address underlying trauma, disengagement, or escalation in harmful behaviours.

Such shadow dynamics often shape responses to youth offending, reinforcing cycles of disadvantage and distrust. What is intended as “risk management” can, paradoxically, increase harm when behaviours are misread, a young person is mislabeled, or interventions are misguided.

Further examples include:

• Continual absenteeism: A 15-year-old girl repeatedly does not show up to class. The practitioner minimises the behaviour, assuming it’s “typical for a young person her age.” Underlying issues of instability, trauma, and unsafe environments remain unaddressed.
• Mislabeled aggression: A young boy expresses frustration with aggressive outbursts in school. The teacher interprets this as “behavioural problems” without exploring underlying trauma or protective motivations. The child is disciplined rather than supported.
• Being unheard: A young person involved in minor offending is seen by multiple agencies. However, practitioners rely heavily on parental or stakeholder narratives (bias) and normalise their own assumptions about the young person’s motivations. The young person’s perspective is silenced, limiting opportunities for effective intervention.

These examples demonstrate how shadows (bias and defence mechanisms) intersect to create patterns of professional responses that can unintentionally cause further harm.

Reflective Practice: Bringing Shadows into the Light

The shadows cannot be fully eliminated – they are part of being human – but they can be illuminated.

Reflective practice is a tool that allows practitioners to notice hidden patterns within their practice and ways in which they respond to complex situations.

Key strategies include:

1. Slowing down and questioning assumptions: What am I assuming about this young person’s behaviour? What else might be true?

2. Centering the young person’s voice: Is the young person’s perspective missing? What does the young person think about this?

3. Identifying defence mechanisms: Am I minimising, rationalising, denying, or normalising behaviours?

4. Supervision and peer reflection: Am I engaging others to expose blind spots and challenge certainty?

Reflection illuminates shadows, interrupts dangerous patterns, and allows practitioners to respond to behaviour with understanding rather than judgment.

Professional Responsibility

Bias and defence mechanisms are human, yet their impact in professional practice can carry significant consequences. Practitioners have a responsibility to notice when these shadows influence responses to youth behaviours, particularly when offending, harmful or challenging behaviours are present.

Bringing shadows into view requires curiosity, honesty, and courage. It ensures that interventions are guided by the needs of the young person, not by assumptions, fear, or self-protective habits of the practitioner or service.

Conclusion

Professional dangerousness does not stem from ill intent, it emerges in the shadows, where unconscious bias and defence mechanisms subtly shape responses to young people’s behaviours.

Misreading a young person’s protective behaviours, silencing their voices, or normalising risk can perpetuate harm, as a result of flawed assessment and ineffective interventions.

Reflective practice shines a light on these shadows. By slowing down, questioning assumptions, centering young people’s perspectives, and seeking supervisory and peer input, practitioners can reduce Professional Dangerousness risk and ensure interventions are supportive rather than harmful.

Final reflection: Where in your practice might shadows be quietly shaping responses to the behaviours, concerns and challenges faced by young people? How can you bring them to the light to protect and support the young people you work with?

Call to action

Professional Dangerousness is real! It exists within all areas of practice, across individual, intra-agency and inter-agency contexts.

Is your service ready to gain in-depth understanding of Professional Dangerousness – how it operates, manifests in practice and the antidotes to prevent harm caused by flawed assessment and defensive patterns of practice?

I offer a full-day training on Professional Dangerousness and can also tailor sessions to meet your needs. I have over 25 years’ experience in researching, studying, educating and implementing strategies to prevent Professional Dangerousness risk.