Beyond Risk in Adolescent Safeguarding: Creating Conditions for Young People to Flourish

From sexual violence within friendship groups to being groomed in community contexts for transporting drugs, extra-familial risks and harms continue to challenge traditional safeguarding approaches in the UK. These issues inhibit young people’s safety and well-being and reduce their opportunities to develop as they grow.

Offering a bold and hopeful alternative, this book draws on a major multi-disciplinary research project involving practitioners, parents and young people. It asks how we can move beyond thinking about safeguarding young people from risks and towards creating the systems and conditions in which all young people feel safe and are enabled to flourish.

Through critical perspectives spanning diverse cultural and geographical contexts, and using reflective questions to prompt deeper thinking, the book reimagines adolescent safeguarding, showing how institutions can shift from risk-centred responses to delivering what all young people need to live full lives and to be safe in the process.

Carlene Firmin is Professor of Social Work at Durham University. She previously worked as a Principal Research Fellow at the University of Bedfordshire, where she developed the Contextual Safeguarding programme. In 2011 Carlene became the youngest black woman to receive an MBE for her seminal work on gang-affected young women in the UK.

Michelle Lefevre is Professor of Social Work at the University of Sussex. She previously trained and practised as a social worker and arts psychotherapist, particularly in the context of safeguarding.