Contextual Safeguarding

What is Contextual Safeguarding?

Contextual Safeguarding is an approach to recognising and responding to children and young people’s experience of significant harm outside the home. This includes in the places and spaces they spend their time and within their peer groups; at school, when spending time in their neighbourhoods and other public places as well as online. In Contextual Safeguarding practice, we call all these social environments ‘contexts’.

Parents and carers typically have little influence over contexts such as parks, fast food outlets, amusement arcades or malls. Also, as individuals move from early childhood and into adolescence, they typically spend greater amounts of time socialising independently of their families.

During this time, peer relationships become increasingly influential, setting social norms and informing young people’s experiences, behaviours, choices and social status.  As such, young people’s experiences of risk outside the home can actually undermine parent-child relationships, especially if they involve coercion, grooming, or recruitment.  This is because exploiters and criminal recruiters are very sophisticated in the methods they use to groom children and young people who often don’t even realise they are being exploited into harmful situations.

Therefore, we need different ways of working to address extra familial harm and contexts of harm. Contextual Safeguarding offers opportunities to do so.

What are contexts of concern?

Contexts of concern are locations or groups of people who we are worried about; either because they are causing or enabling harm to occur, or present risks to children and young people.

Examples of contexts can include anywhere children and young people spend time, such as parks, leisure complexes, fast food outlets, shopping malls, schools and colleges as well as locations like stair wells, car parks and disused properties, housing estates and public transport hubs including railway stations, bus stops and taxis.

Identifying context of concern does not mean that they are inherently bad or risky locations because risk itself can be contextual. For example, a park might be a safe and enjoyable location for most people, however it can be an area of concern for some children and young people if they are being groomed or have experienced an assault in the location. Contextual Safeguarding provides practitioners with tools to safeguard not only those who have been affected by extra familial harm, but also to help create safety and wellbeing for everyone using that location or space.

Why do we need to consider using a Contextual Safeguarding approach?

Contextual Safeguarding provides practitioners with opportunities to work more holistically to address extra familial risk by considering all aspects of a child or young person’s life and their lived experience.

Contextual Safeguarding seeks to change contexts where harm has occurred, rather than moving children and young people or families away from them.  This is achieved by assessing all the different contexts that young people spend their time, including who they are with and determining the impact these different contexts can have on their safety or risk.  Contextual interventions target harm where it occurs to create safety and wellbeing.

This may sound common-sensical, however the current child protection system, legislative and policy framework which underpin safeguarding work were all fundamentally designed to protect children from risks posed by their families or situations where parents or guardians have reduced capacity to safeguard those in their care.

Unlike traditional approaches to safeguarding which focus on intervening with individual children and their family; Contextual Safeguarding considers all the places and spaces that children and young people spend their time and seeks to create safety in those contexts. In doing so, working contextually extends ‘capacity to safeguard’ beyond families and social workers to include other individuals, professional and even businesses and members of the community who manage or have an influence over the contexts where young people may encounter risk.

What are some examples of Contextual Interventions?

There are a range of interventions that can help to reduce risk and increase safety; some of which are designed to protect children and young people and others that aim to improve the environment where they spend their time.  Examples include:

• Visiting parks and recreation areas to better understand the physical geography and identify areas where the location can be improved such as replacing broken play equipment or benches, cutting vegetation and improving lighting.

 

• Increased guardianship presence in parks and open spaces – this can be police and PCSOs, Community or Neighbourhood Wardens, or other authority figures and even just increased foot-fall in the area.

 

• Cutting down overgrown shrubbery especially if it is obscuring CCTV or is creating natural ‘hiding spots’ or areas where harm can occur.

 

• Visiting local businesses including fast food outlets, off-licences, convenience stores and corner shops as well as supermarkets, Pharmacies and other providers of community services to raise awareness of contextual issues and ask them to report any concerns.

 

• Multi-agency engagement visits to stations, bus-stops and on buses/trains alongside transport providers to talk to children and young people, other commuters and transport staff about their experiences using public transport and understand lived experience.

 

• Engage with people working in the night-time economy, such as hotel staff, taxi drivers and bar staff, to recognise the signs of extra familial harm and know how to report any worries they have.

 

• Context mapping and conversational safety mapping – finding out more about the places and spaces that young people feel safe or unsafe and making collaborative plans to increase safety in those places.

 

• Bystander/Upstander work with children, young people, schools and community members to tackle harmful or abusive norms and behaviours.

 

• Work with Education settings to ensure they adopt ‘whole school approaches’ to safeguarding children including effective and needs based relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) alongside robust safeguarding and behaviour policies.

 

• Pop up youth centres or funded youth provision including detached social / youth work as well as universal access to diversionary activities.

 

• Work with town centre managers to ensure empty properties are safe and well secured or utilised for pro-social activities.
• Work with locality community safety and criminal justice colleagues and local businesses to hold bike/property marking schemes

Where can I get more information about Contextual Safeguarding?

You can learn more about contextual safeguarding, including different forms of extra familial harm by completing the West Sussex Contextual Safeguarding eLearning course or by visiting the national Contextual Safeguarding programme website. If you are a practitioner working in West Sussex you can also get support from our Contextual Safeguarding Champions Network. Email cschampions@westsussex.gov.uk and we will direct your query to your sector champion.