'We Are Protected': Examining Youth Perceptions of Safety within a Faith-Based Positive Youth Development Program in El Salvador

Perceptions of program safety for youth might include such features as physical safety, psychological safety, and social-relational safety. A holistic sense of safety, or one that inclusively encompasses and integrates features of, and relations with, the ecology in which youth develop, could be engendered through programmatic designs that attend to the dynamic relations among physical, psychological, and social-relational safety. Having a better understanding of the phenomenology of safety among program participants, and how such perceptions function in youth programs would enable positive youth development (PYD) program practitioners to better align their conceptions -- that is, their "objective" definitions -- of program safety with the phenomenological experiences of youth and, in so doing, better promote PYD and thriving outcomes. The present study was informed by preliminary quantitative findings emerging from the broader Compassion International (CI) Study of PYD (Lerner et al., 2019; Tirrell et al., 2021; Tirrell, Gansert, et al., 2019; Tirrell, Geldhof, et al., 2019). As described in this article, youth who engaged in CI-supported programs in El Salvador reported feeling safe at the CI programs, but also reported feeling generally unsafe, and worrying about their safety, in the broader contexts of their lives.