New safeguarding framework created by university professors ensuring child safety

Sussex and Durham university professors have completed research into how the social care sector can keep young people safe beyond their family home.

Carlene Firmin, Professor of Sociology at Durham University and Michelle Lefevre, Professor of Social Work at Sussex University, collaborated for four years and discovered the social care sector could be doing more to ensure children are safe outside of their homes.

The research team conducted a review of interventions and service models across ten countries, which they say are embedded in legislative and practice frameworks.

Produced through the Economic and Social Research Council, the professors work explores the extra-familial risks young people face including criminal and sexual exploitation such as that encountered with county line gangs, weapon-enabled violence, sexual harassment and abuse in schools.

Currently, these extra familial harms are causing challenges for conventional safeguarding systems in the UK, which have primarily been designed to address concerns relating to parenting capacity at home.

As a result, there have been various high-profile failures by statutory agencies to support and protect young people in recent years.

The number of children who experience sexual abuse remains unknown, but research conducted by the NSPCC, a UK children’s charity, suggests one in 20 children in the UK have been subjected to it.

According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS), in 2019, there was an estimated 27,000 children that were sold into crime gangs.

NSPCC also uncovered that in 2021 one in ten children in the UK have experienced neglect at home, after working with 2,275 children between the ages of 11-17.

These statistics encouraged the professors from Sussex and Durham to create a new pioneering framework for more effective practice models and systems to be used in the UK care sector.

Professor Michelle Lefevre of the University of Sussex said: ‘Within our research, we saw how shortfalls were perpetuated across safeguarding, welfare and criminal justice systems, despite the care and commitment of individual practitioners or services.

‘It became clear that we need to break the patterns of risk, vulnerability and responsibility that underline conceptions of young people if we are to transform interventions and services so they meet what young people need and say they want.

‘It’s why, within Safeguarding Young People Beyond the Family Home, we have proposed a pioneering and far more effective framework for system and practice change that will address these shortfalls and provide better support for young people exposed to extra-familial risks. This framework is relationship-based, interagency, contextual, youth-centred and targeted at the specific dynamics of harms beyond the home.’ 

The book both professors have written is titled Safeguarding Young People Beyond the Family Home: Responding to Extra-Familial Risks and Harms and was published October 13.

Photo by Alexander Grey