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Contextual Safeguarding was developed by Professor Carlene Firmin in 2015 as a safeguarding response to harm faced by children and young people outside the home or family setting. It aims to address gaps in child protection and social care systems in the UK that focus on parenting without considering the influence how the contexts (for example, locations, peer groups) impact on safety or risk. It is mainly used to address extra-familial harm faced by adolescents such as child criminal exploitation, child sexual exploitation, peer-on-peer abuse, and youth violence. The purpose of a Contextual Safeguarding approach is not designed to replace existing support young people might receive if they are experiencing harm outside the home, but targets the contexts where young people are experiencing harm to make them safer.

Background
The idea for Contextual Safeguarding was developed during Firmin’s PhD project, where she explored the role of contexts in decisions being made about young people facing extra-familial harm. Noticing a stark absence of statutory safeguarding responses and welfare support for these children, she put forward a new framework for how children’s services could create safer contexts. Its theoretical underpinnings are grounded in Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social theory l. In 2017 it was piloted in during a 3 year project aiming to embed Contextual Safeguarding as an approach to extra-familial harm in Hackney via the local authority in partnership with Firmin and her research team at the University of Bedfordshire. Since then, it has been piloted in local authorities across England and Wales with support from researchers at University of Bedfordshire and later at Durham University, where Firmin was awarded a professorship in 2021. Since its inception it has been included in various UK safeguarding policies and practice documents as a way to respond to extra-familial harm.

Key concepts
Contextual Safeguarding require children’s services and partners to respond to extra-familial harm through intervening into the contexts where harm is happening, rather than focussing on changing behaviour of individual young people or their parents or carers. The approach must be underpinned a number of key concepts to be considered in line with the Contextual Safeguarding.

Four domains
The four domains must be met in order for an approach to be considered Contextual Safeguarding :


 * Domain 1: Target – an approach to extra-familial harm that targets the contexts where harm is happening, such as a park, bus stop, school, peer group etc. This contrasts with responses that target the behaviour of individuals as a way of creating safety..


 * Domain 2: Legal – drawing extra-familial contexts into traditional child protection and broader child welfare and safeguarding processes (which have traditionally focused on families).It includes rejecting responses to extra-familial harm that use punishment or coercion (such as responding via community safety and policing).


 * Domain 3: Partnerships – working alongside individuals, organisations, and sectors who have reach and influence into extra-familial contexts. This includes ‘non-traditional’ partners i.e. those who do not usually work with children’s social care in safeguarding, but can  understand and provide safeguarding support in certain contexts via community guardianship. This has  included, for example, sex worker s, transport staff and fast food restaurants.
 * Domain 4: Outcomes: measuring the impact that such responses have on the contexts where young people have been harmed (rather than solely measuring impact on the behaviour of identified young people).

Levels 1 and 2
Contextual Safeguarding can be implemented at two levels. Firstly, level one involves safeguarding practitioners working with individual young people and their parent/carers to understand and reduce the harm they may be facing in extra-familial contexts. Level 2 refers to when Local Authorities seek to understand and reduce harm in the extra-familial context itself, rather than with or on behalf of a certain individual or family. For example, level one work might include working to make a park safer for a particular young person at risk of harm there, whereas level two might include referring the park itself into a safeguarding system because multiple young people are assessed as being at risk in the park.

Five values
As Contextual Safeguarding has developed and been embedded across local authorities in the United Kingdom, researchers have also developed 5 values underpinning the approach. The five below values must be met for an approach to be considered Contextual Safeguarding.


 * 1) Collaborative: genuine, collective working together between professionals, young people, their families, and communities
 * 2) Ecological: considers the links between the contexts where young people experience harm and how these contexts are shaped by inequalities such as poverty, racism, or misogyny
 * 3) Rights based: rooted in the human rights of young people, their families, and communities
 * 4) Strengths based: builds on the strengths of individual young people and communities to achieve change for the better
 * 5) Evidence informed: grounded in the reality of young people’s actual lives, informed by evidence garnered from working alongside young people and communities

Research and evidence
The research teams both at University of Bedfordshire and Durham University have conducted a number of projects into Contextual Safeguarding, listed below:


 * The Innovate Project
 * The Next Chapter
 * Contextual Safeguarding Across Borders


 * Scale Up Project
 * Beyond Referrals
 * Securing Safety
 * Contextual Safeguarding: Measuring Research and Impact
 * The Peace Project
 * The Oldham Youth Project
 * Safer London Peers Project