Nick Frost - Safeguarding Children and Young People

A Guide for Professionals Working Together

At SAGE we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using responsibly sourced papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measured by the PREPS grading system. We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability.

I have valued the help provided by many people during the writing of this book. Thanks are due to:

Professor Nigel Parton for the initial idea and for being a supportive sounding board.

Dr Peter Mills who helped with the work on Jimmy Savile. Dr Tracey Race for her work on children, young people and parents engagement with the child protection system, which I have drawn on extensively. Allison Waddell for useful, meticulous and very helpful comments on the text. Anonymous reviewers for all their constructive suggestions. All the staff and members of the three safeguarding boards that I have known well, and whose practice is both inspirational and innovative. The great staff team at Sage who have been helpful and informative throughout. And, last but not least, Dawn for being supportive of the project throughout.

This book is aimed at the entire range of practitioners who work in the field of safeguarding children and young people, or students who are preparing to do so. These potentially include those working in health, social care, education, the police and the voluntary sector. The book is written from my experience and from the recognition that this work is both complex and demanding: the analysis sits quite squarely on the side of practitioners who undertake this very difficult and complex task. The book draws on the authors experience as a social worker, a researcher, a lecturer and, most significantly, over a decade of experience as the Chair of three different Local Safeguarding Children Boards (LSCBs). It is hoped that the book is equally relevant to all those who buy in to the phrase that safeguarding is everyones business and whose role is thus covered, in England, by the official guidance Working Together to Safeguard Children (HMG, 2018).

There are three key underlying arguments made in this book. One is that our understanding of child abuse is socially constructed that is, that it varies across time and space and the social response to child abuse varies considerably in different societal and political contexts. Second, it is proposed that professional practice can only be fully understood in a wider social, political and policy context. A focus on this context alone is sometimes unhelpful in guiding professional practice: and to focus on skills and knowledge, without the wider context, is in danger of failing to recognise the complex and challenging social environment in which practitioners deploy their skills. We need to place practice in the wider social context. The final key argument is that child protection practice often is situated on the border between the State (the public arena) and the household (the private arena) this boundary between public and private is always difficult to negotiate in liberal democratic states and is a key reason why child protection is always complex, sometimes controversial, and often makes the news headlines. We have also learnt that abuse and maltreatment occur within localities and across national boundaries, presenting yet more complex challenges for practitioners.

The book aims to introduce the main elements of safeguarding children and young people and provides a guide for further reading at the end of each chapter for readers if you require more breadth and depth on a specific topic. The book is structured as follows: