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Making a Neighbourhood Safer

An overview of safeguarding responses and interventions that can help to make a neighbourhood safer.

Having defined your goals, the next task is to agree what you’ll do to meet them. Designing responses for neighbourhoods can require you to ‘think outside the box’ because this type of safeguarding is relatively new. Whatever you do should have a clear link to the problems you have identified and the goals you have set. It isn’t enough to deliver a generic safeguarding response in the neighbourhood where you have identified harm. Ask yourself – does the response target the harm we’ve identified? What do we hope the response will achieve? How will the response impact young people? For example, if you’ve found out that a risk to the safety of young people in that area is the negative attitudes of some adults, then the response would target the attitudes of adults rather than seeking to intervene with the young people involved.

The Contextual Outcomes Framework guides you to choose goals and plan responses in three areas:

This could involve working directly with young people, building relationships and supporting trusting relationships to develop between young people and community guardians. It could also involve running activities for young people to meet their social and recreational needs. You can read about what young people said they need from professionals tasked with safeguarding them in the ‘Young people’s relationship framework’ in the Related Resources below.  

This could involve training people to spot signs of exploitation and abuse so they can report it – but it doesn't end there. We also need to engage guardians to take ownership for creating safety in their communities and to support them to develop appropriate trusting relationships that will reduce harm and promote safety. This crucial part of a neighbourhood assessment can be missed when the assessment only focuses on disrupting risk. The short video ('What is a community guardian?') in the Related Resources, below, explains what a community guardian is.

This could involve working to change the policies, resources and/ or physical environment in a place to meet the needs of young people. For example, you might address the lighting in a park to reduce the risk of young people being assaulted in this location, identify a safe space in a local facility for young people to spend time at, or work on multi-agency policies to ensure they prioritise safeguarding young people. In the carousel of Related Resources, below, the location-assessment case study shares an example of creating safety in a park.

To help you design new responses, we have developed a catalogue of short case studies – see the Response Catalogue in the carousel of Related Resources below. You can filter the catalogue according to what you want the focus of your response to be. 

Related resources