Contextual Safeguarding: The Next Chapter

How do we respond to harm faced by young people beyond their front doors? Can practitioners keep young people safe at school, in their neighbourhoods or with their friends when social care systems are designed to work with families?

The Contextual Safeguarding approach has transformed how policy makers, social care leaders, practitioners and researchers understand harm that happens to young people in their communities and what is required to respond. Since 2015 it has been tested across the UK and internationally. This book shares stories from child sexual exploitation, child criminal exploitation and peer violence about what has been learnt on this journey.

For anyone interested in how we safeguard young people beyond their front doors, this book shows how much we have achieved and raises big questions about what more we need to do to ensure young people are safe – whatever the context.

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.

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.

Jenny Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Durham University. She is a Social and Cultural Human Geographer whose work crosscuts issues of child protection, peer-on-peer abuse, applied social research, education, ethnography and children’s rights.