Upcoming Events

October

Harm Outside the Home: Risks Our Safeguarding Systems Were Never Designed For

Free 1-Hour CPD Session
Thursday 29 October 2026 | 12pm–1pm

As part of our monthly Safeguarding Spotlight Series, join us for a thought-provoking one-hour session exploring what happens when the risks facing children and young people sit outside the family home.

Our child protection system has traditionally been built around the assumption that the greatest risks to a child are found within the family, and that parents or carers can take action to keep them safe.

But what happens when the harm sits somewhere else?

For young people experiencing exploitation, grooming, serious youth violence or harm through peers, online networks and the places and spaces they spend time in, traditional safeguarding responses do not always fit.

We can find ourselves applying approaches designed for harm within families to risks occurring outside them. Parents may be held accountable for risks they cannot control. Children may be moved away from an area while the harmful context remains unchanged. And, perhaps most concerningly, young people who are being exploited can sometimes be viewed as perpetrators rather than recognised as victims of harm.

In this focused session, Sean Monaghan will explore where our processes, thresholds and professional responses can fall short when harm happens outside the home, and why this matters for the children and young people we support.

Drawing on frontline experience in hospital-based violence intervention alongside strategic and system-level safeguarding work, Sean will encourage us to look differently at extra-familial harm and question some of our established responses.

This isn't intended to provide a complete framework in an hour. Instead, it will give experienced practitioners and leaders an opportunity to reflect, challenge assumptions and consider the questions we should be asking when our existing safeguarding approaches don't quite fit the harm we're seeing.