What is safeguarding?
This is a question I ask myself more and more. So much so that I’ve decided to dedicate my next few posts to the topic. Why do we care more about some safeguarding risks than others? So while, for instance, we seem especially keen on installing defibrillators in the nation’s schools, we are less interested in safeguarding our young people from knife crime. And we apparently don’t even notice when a young boy starves to death or when other family tragedies unfold ‘behind closed doors’. On the other hand, we safeguard too much. Even the innocent pony-ride across the beach front can find itself tangled up in risk assessments. I will be focusing on the protection of children, but I also wonder what else we care about - what else do we think we should be safeguarding? We all get the importance of fire safety, for instance - and knowing which extinguisher to use. And many of us concede that while Health and Safety ‘gone mad’ is a problem, there are sensible precautions that are worth taking in life. But what about our sacred national monument, the Cenotaph? Why didn’t we do a better job of safeguarding that? It may be just a lump of stone but it too was vulnerable during those ‘pro-Palestine’ marches late last year - and it too was a matter of life and death. Quite literally. Can we safeguard the kids, if our families and communities - and nation - are in such a bad way?
Image: Chris Nyborg