ABSTRACT
This chapter is arguably the most hopeful of all those in the book. It documents the efforts of practitioners to effect change in peer groups, school environments, and public places where young people have been abused – and to do so under the guise of child protection. Taking the same systems structure, Firmin relays the changes made in referrals, assessments, planning, and intervention activities, and the difference these systems changes have made to interactions between professionals, young people, families, and communities. The author draws upon a host of examples to illustrate that practitioners have believed they could make a difference beyond the context of families and have set out to achieve this. Firmin also signals where questions emerged during testing – many of which are explored in greater depth in Part 4 of the book. The chapter closes, as the one before, by drawing out what this looks like across a whole system when mapped against the four domains of the Contextual Safeguarding framework.
