Why ‘Common-Sense’ is Complicated: Unearthing the Cultural Facilitators of Contextual Safeguarding Structures

Summary: From being sexually/criminally exploited by adults in public spaces, to being sexually or physically harmed by peers in their schools, young people are significantly harmed beyond their families. Historically, many of these children have been criminalised rather than protected, and despite mounting concern from governments, and efforts at structural reform, many countries still struggle to offer welfare-orientated responses that effectively target the contexts where such harm occurs. In this paper we use cumulative evidence from four projects within a multiyear research programme to surface cultural factors that hinder or facilitate the development of welfare-orientated and contextual responses to extra-familial harm. Findings: We analyse nine published outputs from these four projects using a synthesis of Schein's theory of organisational culture and the ‘cultural rules’ of Contextual Safeguarding, developed through an application of Bourdieu's social theory. The results of our analysis locate cultural misalignment not solely within the social work and wider child welfare organisations that participated in the project, but in the underlying assumptions of the systems in which those organisations are based. Consequently, we illustrate why seemingly ‘common-sense’ responses to young people in need of protection are complicated to enact. Application: To resolve such complications, we argue that victim-offender binaries, individualised outcome measures, and the relationship between state and parental responsibility, require reconceptualization in the design of child protection systems and research; and in the interim, offer four questions organisations can ask themselves to test, for the first time, their cultural readiness for adopting a contextual approach to extra-familial harms.