Safeguarding help for charities
Sam Marks
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
The voluntary sector can help to safeguard young people, but needs support and funding, says Sam Marks.
The safeguarding risks for young people have never been more varied. In the past few years, threats from child sexual exploitation (CSE), online grooming, radicalisation by ideological extremists and female genital mutilation (FGM) have emerged and evolved.
The government has begun to recognise the need for a system-wide response to these issues, but a key part of the jigsaw has so far been missing - the role youth work organisations, specifically those in the voluntary sector, can play in the wider safeguarding agenda has not been fully realised.
This is a huge opportunity missed, as was illustrated by the CSE scandal in Rotherham, where concerns about the safety of young people were first raised by a youth work charity.
Increasing awareness of how voluntary youth organisations can contribute to protecting children and young people is the ongoing aim of the forum's annual campaign (see box), being promoted this week. We also want to highlight the concerns we have about the impact that changes in local authorities and funding cuts for the youth sector is having on charities' ability to invest in safeguarding roles and staff training.
Funding support for safeguarding has almost disappeared. Government funding for partnerships like Safe Network have ended and when local authorities are under pressure, it feels like the safeguarding support for youth charities has ceased. Cuts to services such as this hit smaller organisations as they cannot afford to train or employ a specialist safeguarding officer who will ensure proper child protection procedures are in place and concerns acted upon. It is organisations like this that face the biggest challenges, and could potentially pose more risk to young people.
For several years, we have had concerns about the amount of appropriate safeguarding training for youth workers. Often when they do access training, it is based on the social work model - focused on recognising signs of abuse and child protection concerns.
For youth workers, it is also important to know how to work with volunteers and develop safer recruitment practices. They need to recognise worrying adult behaviour, know how to create safe environments for young people and about the proactive response.
Youth organisations need to understand that people who abuse will try to get into youth organisations and, therefore, creating safe environments should be a priority.
A large part of safeguarding is about empowering young people to be safe and responding to their needs. Many of the children and young people at risk are teenagers, as they are developing, trying out new identities and taking part in risky activities.
If you look at CSE, radicalisation and grooming, young people of secondary school age are those most at risk. There is often an expectation that teenagers can take care of themselves, but they are the most vulnerable, so it is important that knowledgeable and supportive adults are there to listen to them.
With a shortage of funding, training and advice for youth organisations on safeguarding, we need leadership from government over where charities can turn for support and guidance. Local safeguarding children's boards (LSCBs) have fulfilled that role in some places, but experiences from the sector have been patchy.
LSCBs are short of funds and the subject of a review by government. Maybe this could result in a renewed focus from boards on supporting voluntary youth organisations to play a greater part in the safeguarding of children.
How do we help youth charities to put the right policies in place to protect the children and young people they work with, and provide them with someone they can turn to for help and advice? Where can someone running a youth club go for help and advice, or talk through a problem they have when it isn't a child protection incident? Where can youth workers with a limited budget get training and knowledge from?
These questions and others need to be addressed. The youth sector has been forgotten about in terms of safeguarding, but we want to raise awareness of how important it can be in protecting children - and remind people of the importance of networks like the safeguarding forum, which exist to support them and each other.
Guide to the safeguarding youth forum
- The National Safeguarding Youth Forum was set up in 2013 to refresh the National Safeguarding Standards and to offer peer support good practice advice to safeguarding officers, and to ensure that voluntary sector organisations have access to good quality information through the Keeping it Safe resource
- An underlining principle of the forum is that safeguarding should involve young people. They should play an active role, not only in taking ownership of their own and their peers' safety, but by working in partnership with adults in the writing and implementation of safeguarding policies, supporting delivery of activities; and in agreeing how best to educate, help and support
- It has about 80 members including GirlGuiding, Sea Cadets and Marine Society, Federation of Young Farmers, Kidscape, 4Youth, Brooke, UKYouth and Canal and River Trust, and meets three times a year. For more details, contact Isabelle@NCVYS.org.uk
- It runs the Stop, Look, Listen campaign annually to raise awareness about safeguarding young people. For details, visit www.ncvys.org.uk/stop-look-and-listen-national-safeguarding-day
Sam Marks is chair of the the National Safeguarding Youth Forum