Safeguarding is everybody's business but ...
Why paper protections are no substitute for safeguarding by people
It’s a mantra you can hardly fail to have come across. And it’s true. Safeguarding is everybody’s business. Or at least it should be. But too often it’s anything but. It’s an activity carried out by officialdom. It’s a procedure that you have to follow. It’s a box that must be ticked. It’s mandatory training. Something to be endured and then forgotten about. Procedures and checks are a necessity, but they can also become a prop, an excuse for inaction, that is in itself dangerous.
Mostly because it can short circuit real safeguarding - by which I mean relationships between people, most of which happens in communities. A strong safeguarding culture, one that looks out for those deemed vulnerable, is built on the informal goings on and the everyday world of our lived lives, not in the pages of statutory guidance; or on the laptops of auditors keeping our public institutions in line. While professional safe-guarders are a vital last line of defence, they are no replacement for us.
When I worked in children’s social care, while I was under no illusions about some of the awful cases that we were dealing with, I was also keen to put things in perspective. The damage done by exaggerating the extent of abuse and fostering mistrust in each other, it seemed to me, was out of all proportion to the peril brought about by its actual incidence. Despite what some in the industry would irresponsibly claim, abuse wasn’t (and isn’t) widespread. Indeed, the abuse we hear the most about - as I have written about on these pages before - is the rarest of all. And it’s not as if the state is lacking in the authority to intervene when it needs to.
Local authorities’ duties and powers with regards what we would now describe as ‘vulnerable’ children are set out in the Children Act 1989. Section 17 of the Act says that local authorities have a duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children who are ‘in need’. Section 47 requires local authorities to intervene where they suspect that a child is suffering or likely to suffer significant harm. Section 20 sets out their duty to provide accommodation for those children who need it. And Section 31 allows the courts - where a child is suffering, or thought likely to suffer, ‘significant harm’ - to require a child to be taken into care or supervision.
The Act includes other tools for protecting children including Emergency Protection Orders and police protection powers; and exclusion requirements to, where appropriate, remove the perpetrator rather than the child. The Children Act 2004 placed a greater emphasis on the responsibilities of other ‘safeguarding partners’ (i.e., not just the local authority and the police) in protecting the young; and the Children and Social Work Act 2017 abolished Local Safeguarding Children Boards in favour of new, if no less top down, arrangements.
There are other pieces of legislation on housing, education, domestic abuse and the criminal justice system, which impact on the protection of children too. Working together to safeguard children, the UK’s safeguarding bible, runs to 168 pages detailing multi-agency working, the assessment process, ‘Early Help’ support, the child protection system, the responsibilities of twenty plus public bodies and sectors, and even the process for ensuring when things go wrong and there are serious incidents or even deaths, that they are learned from.
Despite this seemingly exhaustive system of legal protections, guidance and regulations, new categories or ‘themes’ of abuse only seem to proliferate. The other bible, for those of us in the capital, is the London Safeguarding Children Procedures. Formerly known as the London Child Protection Procedures, and until recently a hefty volume kept religiously on the shelves of children’s services offices (if not always observed) across the city. It now has a rather sprawling presence that can presumably only be contained online. Not least because that from which young Londoners are to be protected is increasingly long. Arranged alphabetically, this includes everything from animal abuse, begging and circumcision, to self harm, surrogacy and trafficking.
But for all the documentation and the bureaucratisation of the children’s safeguarding infrastructure, the voluminous accounts of the innumerable risks children might face, and the procedures that must necessarily be followed, the fundamental question remains. Are our children any safer as a consequence? Could it be that a shift from narrowly focused child protection and preventing ‘significant harm’, to a wider concern with myriad threats to a greater number of children, puts the most vulnerable at greater risk of harm? While the dangers children face have undoubtedly changed and the state has a role to play in minimising them, by institutionalising our anxieties about the risks they face - I worry we’ve forgotten safeguarding is our business too.
Image: Sumita Roy Dutta