Common Vigilance: A Perspective On the Role of the Community in Safeguarding Children

Since the Children Act 2004 (HMG, 2004), it has become commonplace to read that
safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility. No distinction is made, though, between
‘everyone’ individually and ‘everyone’ collectively, with the result that efforts to unpick
exactly how everyone is able to respond to children’s safeguarding and protection needs
are frustrated. This chapter asks whether or not ‘community’ is a useful concept to help
organise these efforts and to prevent the slogan from unhelpfully collapsing the issue of
responsibility together. It considers Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model (Bronfenbrenner,
1979) and bio-ecological model (Bronfenbrenner and Ceci, 1994) to understand how
community might animate child protection efforts at a level beyond the scope of distinct
families but without encompassing statutory responsibility either. Bourdieu’s concept of
‘habitus’ (Shusterman, 1999) is used to examine the social worlds of children in their
respective communities to understand the risk and vulnerabilities of children, on the one
hand, and the safeguarding responses by concerned adults in the community.
Recent analysis of serious case reviews (SCRs) and inquiries relating to child sexual
exploitation to understand how the ‘community’ inform the discussion of communitylevel
communication regarding common concerns for children’s safety and well-being.
The chapter proposes that common vigilance may serve as a more robust concept than
does community in efforts to produce social conditions that secure children’s safety from
maltreatment. The chapter encourages you to consider your position as a professional
who embodies interest in children’s safety from harm as well as compliance with
statutory procedures and expectations of competence.