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Contextual Safeguarding

What is Contextual Safeguarding?

Contextual Safeguarding is an approach to understanding, and responding to children’s experiences of significant harm beyond their family and home.

This approach recognises the different relationships children have in their schools, peer groups, online and in their community. Parents and carers may have little influence over these contexts and children’s exposure to extra-familial abuse can impact negatively a parent-child relationship.

Professionals must understand the risks to children through exploitation and wider extra-familial harm within their local communities. Across North Yorkshire, professionals come together under our MACE and Contextual Safeguarding Arrangements to share information about children at risk of exploitation, as well as potential perpetrators and locations that could pose a risk to children and young people. Within these monthly meetings that take place across the 7 district areas of North Yorkshire, professionals formulate multi-agency action plans to identify, detect and disrupt the risks to children and young people in the community. For more information about our MACE and Contextual Safeguarding Level 2 meetings, please visit https://www.safeguardingchildren.co.uk/professionals/procedures-practice-guidance-and-one-minute-guides/multi-agency-child-exploitation-mace-and-contextual-safeguarding-level-2/.

The below clip from the Contextual Safeguarding Network explains the approach in more detail:

Why is this approach important?

When it comes to Child Exploitation more often the risk is posed outside of the family home. Contextual Safeguarding enhances traditional child protection systems to recognise children are vulnerable to extra-familial abuse. Taking into account a child’s neighbourhood, school, peer groups, online space, as well as home, ensures when assessing the risk of child exploitation, it is more accurate and holistic of how a child experiences risk to provide appropriate intervention by recognising these spaces.

Dr Carlene Firmin, Principal Research Fellow at The Contextual Safeguarding Network explains the need to understand the risk public and online spaces can pose risk to children within child protection systems:

How does Contextual Safeguarding work?

The principles of Contextual Safeguarding are outlined in the animated clip below:

Young People’s Relationship Framework

Young People’s Relationship Framework:
When professionals are tasked with creating safety in contexts, what do young people say they need from these professional relationships? How can we (professionals) be guided by how young people know the world, and fundamentally re-shift power imbalances to privilege young people’s expertise and decision-making? How can practitioners and systems move towards more equitable relationships to help create safety for young people facing harm in their communities?
Between 2019 and 2021, the Contextual Safeguarding research Programme spoke with children and young people about the ‘concept’ of Contextual Safeguarding. These conversations with young people aimed to understand the implications of a Contextual Safeguarding approach for different groups of children and young people, in different settings, and to inform the system development in each of these sites. The Young People’s Relationship Framework is a result of these conversations, drawing on the voices of 66 young people through interviews and focus groups. The infographic outlines this framework, and what young people said they wanted from relationships with professionals that are tasked with helping them.
young person relationship framework

How is Contextual Safeguarding being applied in North Yorkshire?

Dr Carlene Firmin provided a Contextual Safeguarding Keynote at North Yorkshire Children & Families Service Day in February 2020. The Keynote was recorded and the slides of Carlene’s presentation are available to download within the resource section at the foot of this page:

Where to go for further information and support?

The Contextual Safeguarding Network carry out research, offers practice development and strategic engagement across the UK. They have a whole host of policy and practice resources created through the work they develop. Visit the Contextual Safeguarding Network here.

NYSCP Podcasts

NYSCP has produced a podcast series on Engaging with Children and Families affected by Child Exploitation.

In each episode, we sit down with a frontline professional in North Yorkshire to discuss the challenges and approaches they use to support children and families affected by child exploitation.