Transitional Safeguarding: The Case for Change

Recent developments within safeguarding policy and practice have included changes to the law regarding safeguarding adults, and a variety of innovations in safeguarding adolescents. Despite these developments, safeguarding has retained a distinctly binary notion of childhood and adulthood with little attention paid to the period of transition. Harm, nor its effects, cease at 18. Yet safeguarding support is usually withdrawn as young people approach 18. For many young adults, there is little or no support available through statutory adult services, creating a gap through which young people fall. This article sets out the case for a more transitional approach to safeguarding young people into adulthood. It argues that there are compelling moral and economic drivers for an ecologically and developmentally informed approach, which is participatory by default, and in which the design challenge is to create not a discrete service, but a whole system approach.