Contextual Safeguarding

What is Contextual Safeguarding?

Contextual Safeguarding is an approach to understanding, and responding to, young people’s experiences of significant harm beyond their families. It recognises that the different relationships that young people form in their neighbourhoods, schools and online can feature violence and abuse. Parents and carers have little influence over these contexts, and young people’s experiences of extra-familial abuse can undermine parent-child relationships. Therefore children’s social care practitioners need to engage with individuals and sectors who do have influence over/within extra- familial contexts, and recognise that assessment of, and intervention with, these spaces are a critical part of safeguarding practices. Contextual Safeguarding, therefore, expands the objectives of child protection systems in recognition that young people are vulnerable to abuse in a range of social contexts.

What is contextual safeguarding? from Contextual Safeguarding on Vimeo.

Helpful Toolkit

The Contextual Safeguarding Audit Toolkit is an online interactive platform that supports practitioners to recognise how social environments and extra-familial relationships are relevant to safeguarding adolescents and the extent to which local responses are already contextual in nature. The toolkit guides practitioners through the audit process.

The toolkit guides practitioners to audit their response to peer-on-peer abuse.