Why Safeguarding Children Doesn’t Always Work

The UK has implemented countless policies and laws over the years aimed at safeguarding children and addressing sexual crimes. But let’s face it, these measures have varying degrees of success. While legislative changes and policy updates are essential, societal factors often hinder their effectiveness.

Safeguarding Children – a Definition

Safeguarding is all about protecting people’s health, wellbeing and human rights and most importantly, enabling them to live free from harm, abuse and neglect. Everybody in society has a responsibility to protect children and vulnerable adults from harm.

Those most in need of protection include:

• Children
• Young people
• Adults at risk

Why Doesn’t Safeguarding Children Always Work?

With my professional and educational backgrounds, I’ve seen firsthand the myriad of reasons why policies and laws don’t always work. These include:

• A lack of training for professionals when new legislation is introduced,
• Inadequate funding for proper training,
• Insufficient time and support to implement new strategies,
• A tendency to treat training as a ‘tick-box’ exercise with little consideration for how it will actually impact practice, and
• Professionals aren’t always challenged to move beyond outdated research and practices.

These issues aren’t confined to health and social care; they’re present in education, the judicial system, and just about any governmental or private department.

The Role of Human Nature in Safeguarding Children

Human nature plays a role here, too. We’re creatures of habit, resistant to change unless necessary. And when it comes to crimes as heinous as sexual offences, it’s easier to believe these are problems that belong to ‘other’ communities and not our own. It’s less painful to see these issues as happening to others rather than opening our eyes to what’s happening on our own doorsteps.

I do realise and acknowledge that there are many, many amazing people in a range of roles in both professional and voluntary organisations who do keep up to date with safeguarding practices and training, etc.

However, at the end of the day, in my opinion, we’re still failing as a society. Otherwise, if we weren’t, we wouldn’t continue to see the issues that we continue to see regarding grooming and sexual violence. The information in this section, whilst valid, is also over-simplified, and to go into a true discussion of the efficacy of current safeguarding practices would require an entire book in its own right. In my opinion, too many amazing individuals simply aren’t supported by the services that they work for and are endlessly battling factors beyond their control, examples of which include underfunding, over-stretching of resources, and staff shortages.