Afterword: Safeguarding – The Future of Risk and Responsibility

Calibrating Risk and RewardIf one were to ask the average member of a Church of England congregation what the biggest threats or risks they currently faced were, I think that many would respond with a cluster of concernslack of youth, numerical decline, soaring costs for maintaining buildings, fewer clergy (and those who are available are spread evermore thinly), demands for more money from their Diocese and the rapid ageing profile of the membership. 1 If it featured at all in the list, safeguarding would be cited as another burdensome bureaucratic irritanta necessary 'tick-the-box' exercise.As we have seen in this edition of the Journal, the fact that the Church of England spends around 50 million a year on safeguarding hardly represents value for money.The measurement of risk is a controversial field, and as Laurence Tribe observes, it can have a tendency to 'anaesthetise moral feeling'. 2Defining risks clearly enough to measure them will inevitably bring value-related fundamentals into focus.Risk necessarily entails losing something of value, and this, of course, means that if individuals, families, communities or societies value different outcomes, they will define their risks quite differently.What we presume the risk to be reflects our core values.Mary Douglas' classic anthropological study Purity and Danger 3 argued societies define themselves by how they manage the perceived dangers they face.Douglas followed her mentor,