The first International Contextual Safeguarding Conference, hosted by Durham University in partnership with the AoCPP. This two-day in-person event will launch the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding and bring together practitioners, researchers, young people, policymakers and parents from around the world to explore how we protect adolescents beyond their homes.
Durham University and the Association of Child Protection Professionals (AoCPP)
9:30am - 5:30pm Wednesday 17th September 2025, followed by Conference Dinner
9:20am - 3:30pm Thursday 18th September 2025
Durham University, Teaching & Learning Centre, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LS
Early Bird Booking Deadline: 16th May 2025
Abstract Submission Deadline: 16th June 2025
Contextual Safeguarding pilots in the UK and beyond have allowed the framework to be tested, and further developed, with children’s social care teams and wider safeguarding partnerships, schools, and voluntary and community sector organisations."
These tests have raised important questions about the right conditions for Contextual Safeguarding; specifically relating to resource, policy frameworks, organisational cultures, and attitudes toward young people, their parents/carers, and communities. International testing has helped to shine a light on how national policy and practice contexts may affect such an approach, and has also provided fresh ideas and examples of practice that align with the framework and that are enabled by taking place outside of UK child protection systems.
This conference invites researchers, service leaders, practitioners, policy makers from a range of backgrounds - and the young people, families, and communities with whom they work - to share their perspectives on the theory and practice of Contextual Safeguarding. We are particularly interested in contributions on:
- Contextual responses to extra-familial violence, exploitation and other harms including:
- Efforts to build ‘community guardianship’ or ‘relational safety’ in public, school and peer contexts
- Implementation of Contextual Safeguarding in non-traditional safeguarding settings including hospitality, retail, parks and recreation, licencing, housing, sports, faith and youth service settings
- Legal, policy and practice frameworks that enable or challenge effective responses to extra-familial harm and adolescents including:
- The impact of, and responses to, system and service harms
- The relationships between justice and welfare responses
- The relationships between responses focused on risk-management or meeting need
- Engaging young people’s rights to family life, education, protection, participation, privacy and peer relationships in responses to extra-familial harm
- How we understand the challenges we face and find solutions we hold, across countries and sectors, including sharing how different systems:
- Respond, or offer protection, to adolescents
- Define extra-familial harm
- Understand relationships between challenges within families and extra-familial risks and pressure
- Measure the scale and nature of extra-familial harm, and the impact of responses
By exploring these three themes, this conference will expand upon how we:
- Maintain care for young people, and for each other, in systems that often see them as a risk to others rather than in need of support
- Use welfare-orientated responses to harm previously managed through criminal justice frameworks
- Respond in ways that, move beyond disruption and dispersal, and build safety for young people in extra-familial contexts
- Centre, and seek to meet, needs, in systems that focus on identifying and mitigating risk
- Develop creative and collaborative approaches to understanding harm and safety from young people’s perspectives
- Work with parents as partners in child welfare and child protection processes
- Resource responses to extra-familial harm that meet young people’s needs
- Understand social work identity and leadership in the field of extra-familial harms
If you have any queries, please contact the conference organiser.
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