Louisa Street

Biography

Louisa worked as a youth worker for over 10 years, supporting young people around issues including mental health, sexual health and relationships, and drugs and alcohol. In 2019 she joined the Headstart Digital Resilience project in Cornwall, exploring issues around young people’s online lives. Louisa ran focus groups with young people to explore the issues that mattered most to them, co-developed a tool for professionals to assess young people’s behaviour and risk online, developed and delivered training to the children’s workforce in how to respond to these issues. This project led to Louisa co-authoring the monograph ‘Online Resilience and Wellbeing in Young People’ with Professor Andy Phippen.

The Digital Resilience project enabled Louisa to combine two strands of her work with young people – the harm reduction approach she used in drugs education with the response to online risk. This led to further work with Professor Phippen, exploring the similarities between the legal approach to drugs and online harms. 

In 2022, Louisa returned to education, undertaking the LLM in Law and Society at Keele, and embarking on her PhD studies in 2023.

Research and scholarship

Louisa embarked on her PhD in September 2023 and is exploring young people’s views on the law and policy around sexting. This will be done in partnership with Savana (www.savana.org.uk). Louisa’s thesis will add to the growing scholarship investigating young people’s views on laws which affect them, in line with Article 12 of the UNCRC, giving children and young people a right to be heard on issues which affect them.

Further information

Louisa is the recipient of an ESRC funded CASE studentship.

Publications

Phippen, A. & Street, L. (2021). Online Resilience and Wellbeing in Young People. Palgrave Studies in Cyberpsychology: Springer International Publishing AG.

Phippen, A. & Street, L. (2023). Addressing online harms in policy - failing to learn from the war on drugs. Entertainment Law Review: 34(2), 36-43.