The Problem With ‘Safeguarding’

Safeguarding, like its redeployed stablemates diversity and inclusion, has joined the ranks of words that means the opposite of what was intended. Scepticism around alleged ‘safeguarding’ has finally reached the mainstream media. Rod Liddle writes in this week’s Sunday Times about how a ‘safeguarding risk’ is actually a bureaucratic tool to beat people with who don’t share the elite-sanctified views concerning immigration, terrorists and Nigel Farage (good, good, bad).

If only this was all safeguarding culture had on its rap sheet. After working with children for five years, I have come to see safeguarding as one of the chief blocks in the safeguarding of children. Established within the 1989 Children’s Act, local authorities became obliged to actively ‘safeguard’ children in their care rather than merely respond to harms. From that moment a whole industry and corrosive, unhelpful mindset has mushroomed.

The latest statutory guidance (read the whole document if you dare) ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children 2023‘ and ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education 2025‘ explains safeguarding as:

• Providing help and support to meet the needs of children as soon as problems emerge
• Protecting children from maltreatment, whether that is within or outside the home, including online
• Preventing the impairment of children’s mental and physical health or development
• Ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care
• Promoting the upbringing of children with their birth parents, or otherwise their family network, through a kinship care arrangement, whenever possible and where this is in the best interests of the children
• Taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes in line with the outcomes set out in the Children’s Social Care National Framework

I recognise it’s a hard sell suggesting that safeguarding children is inhibiting of their safety, but there you are. It’s probably easier if I bullet point the issues with safeguarding to ease you into the paradigm shift that is necessary in order to recognise fully the problem.

1. Safeguarding is subjective

The above guidance goes on to state that:

Effective safeguarding means practitioners should understand and be sensitive to factors, including economic and social circumstances and ethnicity, which can impact children and families’ lives.

And

A child-centred approach is fundamental to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of every child. … Anyone working with children should see and speak to the child, listen to what they say, observe their behaviour, take their views seriously and work with them and their families and the people who know them well when deciding how to support their needs.

These two provisos alone undermine the entire safeguarding ideology. By having to take in the economic, social and ethnic elements of a child’s background as well as a child-centred approach, what is viewed as a safeguarding concern becomes entirely subjective. Long gone is the notion that there is straightforward illegal activity that needs to be acted upon. Overeating, undereating, austere religious practices, smoking of weed, dirt, shouting, emotional abuse, lack of basic hygiene, tech use, lack of basic routine in terms of eating, sleeping and exercise, sexual partners – all sorts of damaging and often illegal behaviour can be accommodated within the ‘safeguarding’ parameters so long as it is child-led or within the social and cultural norms of that family.

A simple example of this: I am sent by the council to support a teenage girl who has refused to attend school for two years. I think her remaining in her bedroom without education or friends should be addressed as being an “impairment to the children’s mental and physical health or development”. Yet mother and the daughter think she is safer at home, so home she shall remain, and my visits to encourage her outside are entirely resisted. There is no discussion at all about her illegal truancy. This child-centred approach might also have a part to play in the social worker who attended the wedding of a rape gang victim to her rapist. Under safeguarding guidance as things stand, the social worker could logically claim that, if the girl said she wanted to get married, she, as her social worker, was working within her safeguarding duty to “support the child’s needs”.

2. Safeguarding is process-driven, rather than outcome-oriented bureaucracy.

The purpose of safeguarding within companies, charities and local authorities is to demonstrate active safeguarding measures. This involves ensuring staff have been on the relevant safeguarding courses, making sure safeguarding information is properly distributed and an accurate paper trail produced. Exemplar safeguarding reports are shared, ensuring that the safeguarding concern is logged accurately and next steps shown to be taken. Next steps are overwhelmingly ‘reported to safeguarding lead’ and ‘shared with relevant caregivers’. Our department was recently praised by the police for having excellent safeguarding reports – that included the detailed reporting of various safeguarding incidences of one young man involved in street fights, drunk and disorderly behaviour and damage to property. The police asked for the records after they had finally arrested the young man for assault. That the thoroughgoing safeguarding reports had not safeguarded the young man, nor the person he eventually assaulted was of no concern to anyone involved – just a great sigh of relief that the paper trail was sound.

3. Safeguarding obscures criminal behaviour

Rather than viewing activity through the lens of whether the parental neglect or activities of the child or young person are illegal, those who work with children are encouraged to view challenging behaviours through an obscuring safeguarding lens. The relentless focus and employment of safeguarding officers, safeguarding leads and MASH (Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hubs) encourages people who work with children to downgrade criminal behaviour to a mere ‘safeguarding issue’ (see above). I work with a young person who is an active dealer in black market cigarettes, vapes and ID cards. Once I discovered this information ought I to a) call the police immediately to report illegal activity or b) log a report with my safeguarding lead? I have been encouraged to (b) because, quote: “The relevant authorities are aware of his activities.” The most egregious example of this is Axel Rudakubana, who took a knife into school 10 times but this was treated as a safeguarding rather than criminal issue.

You will all have seen various safeguarding notices on the backs of doors in visitor toilets of schools: ‘If you suspect a child is at risk of harm, contact the safeguarding lead.’ Goodness me – surely the suspected harm of a child is one of the worst things possible and as such should be an immediate police matter? Instead, like the ‘legal but harmful’ concept, the concept of safeguarding now presents a woolly space where obvious illegal activities such as truancy, underage sex and parental neglect are downgraded to a ‘safeguarding’ concern, allowing whole swathes of illegal activity to be essentially decriminalised. Equally, legal but politically unpalatable activities – researching the moon landings as one young man I know did – can be logged as a safeguarding incident.

Please someone make it stop.

Mary Gilleece is an education support worker and her name is a pseudonym.