Learn about safeguarding and how it relates to child protection on transport networks.
How we protect and safeguard vulnerable young people from exploitation and partner with transport communities to create a safer world.
Date: 28th November 2024 | Author: Hannah Gossett
At Railway Children, we aim to create a safer world for vulnerable children and empower them to sustain positive change in their lives. Central to our work in India, Tanzania and the UK is identifying children who are experiencing or at risk of harm and taking action to keep them safe and supported long-term.
Safeguarding and child protection are terms that often used interchangeably, but there are some key differences between them. While safeguarding has a broader and more preventative approach, child protection tends to focus on immediate responses to harm or abuse.
Safeguarding refers to the steps taken to ensure that children and young people are protected from abuse, neglect and exploitation. In relation to our work, this could involve making a train stations safer for young people. Safeguarding also focuses on promoting the wellbeing of children by ensuring they are healthy, happy and able to achieve their potential.
Child protection is related to safeguarding but focuses specifically on protecting those who we know or suspect have been harmed or are at risk of harm.
Importantly, both share a common goal: to ensure children’s safety and wellbeing.
To do this, both approaches look at the wider context, circumstances, policies and specific environment of each scenario.
For example, if a child is at risk of exploitation, effective safeguarding and child protection approaches will look holistically at the child’s family situation, their school, what other risks they face, if any protection plans are in place and if any statutory services are involved.
In the UK, there are a set of laws and guidelines that outline the responsibilities of organisations and individuals in both safeguarding and child protection, helping to ensure a consistent approach across services.
Professionals such as our youth practitioners, social workers, teachers and health specialists, each have a duty of care to protect children and they will often work together to share knowledge and expertise to identify potential risks, raise any safeguarding concerns and ensue that preventive measures are in place.
Many children around the world use trains and buses to escape their everyday realities, which can involve abuse, neglect or difficult family relationships. Some may also be at risk of criminal or sexual exploitation, or have poor mental health.
In the UK, our Safeguarding on Transport programme is focused on improving the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable children and young people using the transport network.
In Tanzania and India, our child help desks in tstations and bus terminals allow vulnerable children passing through to get help. They’re a safe space where young people can get temporary care while our workers assess their situation and determine what support they need.
We train transport professionals and raise public awareness to create a network of ‘eyes and ears’ on the ground to strengthen safety responses across the transport network so that vulnerable children are spotted quickly, and effective action is taken to protect them.
Key to this work is looking at the places that young people interact with outside of the home – in this case, rail and bus networks, where we know there is a high number of child safeguarding incidents taking place.
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