Making safeguarding personal

This week our 0-25 Together Service organised their safeguarding conference "More than Protection" focusing on children and young adults with disabilities. The messages we all went away with were really inspiring! Dez Holmes from RiP/RiPFA spoke passionately about transitional safeguarding not just referring to our standard definition of transition at 18 or 19 years of age but recognising that transitions happen throughout life and it's personal to the individual. So we then considered the approach to safeguarding in the adults arena in terms of making safeguarding personal; risk enablement, choice and control and rights based practice where if the individual has the capacity to make their own decisions they must be involved in the solutions to keeping them safe and building their resilience. The complexity of keeping someone safe is still fully acknowledged but it's also about recognising their choices even if and especially if they are a teenager or young adult and have highly complex needs.

For the last few years different areas of safeguarding have been challenging the children's and adult's workforce, young people and families. CSE, gangs and an increase in violent crime including domestic violence and abuse, modern slavery and trafficking are challenging us to look at our models of safeguarding: rescue versus reform and recovery, risk enablement versus risk aversion.