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This paper aims to provide reflective practice insights on the use of the participatory approaches of World Café and Forum Theatre as crime prevention education and research tools with young people and young adults through a social learning theory lens.

Four independent case-studies showcase World Café and Forum Theatre methodology. World Café events investigated new psychoactive substances (NPS) awareness with young hostel users and college pupils (N = 22) and race hate crime with school and college pupils (N = 57). Forum Theatre events explored loan shark crime with college and university students (N = 46) and domestic abuse crime with young hostel users and college and university students (N = 28). Anonymous survey data produced qualitative and descriptive statistical data.

Learning impacts from participatory crime prevention education and research events were evidenced. Participatory approaches were perceived positively, although large group discussion-based methodologies may not suit all young people or all criminological topics.

Participatory approaches of World Café and Forum Theatre are vehicles for social learning and crime prevention with young people and young adults; eliciting crime victimisation data; and generating personal solutions alongside wider policy and practice improvement suggestions. Whilst World Café elicited greater lived experience accounts providing peer-level social learning, Forum Theatre provided crucial visual role modelling for communicating safeguarding messages.

This paper aims to explore the tripart relationship between British police officers, Local Authority representatives and community members based on a Midlands neighbourhood case study. It focuses on experiences of the strengths and challenges with working towards a common purpose of community safety and resilience building.

Data was collected in 2019 prior to enforced COVID lockdown restrictions following Staffordshire University ethical approval. An inductive qualitative methods approach of semi-structured individual and group interviews was used with community members (N = 30) and professionals (N = 15), using a purposive and snowball sample. A steering group with academic, police and Local Authority representation co-designed the study and identified the first tier of participants.

Community members and professionals valued tripart working and perceived communication, visibility, longevity and trust as key to addressing localised community safety issues. Challenges were raised around communication modes and frequency, cultural barriers to accessing information and inadequate resources and responses to issues. Environmental crime was a high priority for community members, along with tackling drug-related crime and diverting youth disorder, which concurred with police concern. However, the anti-terrorism agenda was a pre-occupation for the Local Authority, and school concerns included modern slavery crime.

When state involvement and investment in neighbourhoods decline, community member activism enthusiasm for neighbourhood improvement reduces, contrasting with government expectations. Community members are committed partnership workers who require the state to visibly and demonstrably engage. Faith in state actors can be restored when professionals are consistently present, communicate and follow up on actions.

In this paper, readers are introduced to the stories of Sarah, Ashley, and Chanelle, who represent different racial categorizations, class backgrounds, entryways into sex work, and histories of sexual victimization. These three women were each convicted as sex offenders because of their involvement in the prostitution of women or girls. This paper demonstrates that these women did not view their actions as sex offenses because their perceptions of themselves, men, women, sexuality, and prostitution were profoundly influenced by interconnecting experiences in their life histories. Child sexual abuse, economic needs, and abusive interpersonal relationships all impacted how these women viewed themselves and their actions. This paper briefly reviews the historically divisive and ultimately detrimental debate between feminists who frame all prostitution as sexual violence and feminists who advocate for full legalization of sex work. Sarah, Ashley, and Chanelle’s stories illustrate the complexities that exist within the lives of women who become involved in prostitution due to a variety of circumstances and social inequalities. Sarah, Ashley, and Chanelle were not completely hapless victims disenfranchised by their pimps, nor were they fully agentive sexual entrepreneurs unfairly targeted by the state. These women made a series of decisions based on their needs for survival, their personal economic desires, and their beliefs about men, women, and sexuality. This paper provides ample room for the women’s voices, and documents their explanations for why and how they became involved in prostitution, as well as the prostitution of other women and girls.