The ethical and institutional consequences of reversing protection.
📄 Summary:
This is not a complaint — it’s a record of survival. A parent shares how safeguarding systems designed to protect her daughter instead became tools of harm. Based on real evidence, formal records, and lived experience.
Safeguarding, at its core, is a duty of protection.
It is the commitment that when harm is disclosed — especially sexual harm — every professional involved will act promptly, supportively, and in the best interests of the child.
Safeguarding policies are clear.
When a child discloses abuse, professionals are expected to:
- Listen without judgement.
- Record the disclosure factually and sensitively.
- Refer to designated safeguarding leads and statutory services.
- Protect the child from further harm — including from peers, systems, or professional behaviours that may retraumatise.
- Believe the child.
- Act in accordance with both national guidance (like Keeping Children Safe in Education) and local safeguarding policies.
Every document, every training module, every policy briefing — they all say the same thing:
When a child is harmed, the institution must become a shield. Not a weapon.
So why — in case after case — do we see that shield fall?
Why is it, when children disclose abuse, so many institutions react not with urgency, but defensiveness?
Why do safeguarding professionals — trained, accredited, experienced — become the architects of additional harm?
Because they know.
They know what trauma looks like.
They know what retraumatisation does.
They know that isolation, disbelief, refusal to provide adjustments, and the denial of access to education compound the original harm.
Yet still they do it.
They downgrade risk. They delay action. They deny adjustments unless "legal proof" is provided. They reinterpret distress as defiance. They frame survivor families as antagonists — and in doing so, reposition the child as a problem to be managed, not a person to be protected.
So we ask:
What is this, if not abuse of power?
When a safeguarding lead knowingly ignores trauma-related behaviours, that’s not oversight, it’s harm.
When a risk assessment is withheld or downplayed despite professional recommendations, that’s not a procedural slip, it’s strategic inaction.
When a child with a confirmed trauma history is excluded from learning, or ambushed in meetings, or placed back in the proximity of their disclosed abuser… what else can we call it but institutional abuse?
Because this is not about failure through ignorance.
This is about harm with knowledge.
And when harm is done with knowledge, by those in positions of trust and authority, that meets the threshold for something far more serious than misjudgement. It enters the territory of systemic abuse, the kind that is difficult to name because it wears the mask of professionalism.
It is abuse hidden behind emails that ignore your concerns.
It is abuse justified by procedure and sanitised in policy language.
It is abuse where no one lays a hand on the child, but everyone contributes to their breakdown.
Let us be absolutely clear:
- When trauma is punished, safeguarding has failed.
- When disclosures are met with withdrawal of care, safeguarding has failed.
- When institutions protect their reputation at the expense of the child’s recovery, safeguarding has not only failed, it has been weaponised.
And the emotional toll?
For the child — shame, confusion, exhaustion, withdrawal.
For the parent — fear, grief, and the deep moral injury of knowing you handed your child to a system that claimed to protect them and watched it do the opposite.
So again, we ask:
Where is the accountability for safeguarding harm done by safeguarding professionals?
If I, as a parent, ignored my child’s trauma, refused to acknowledge her distress, isolated her when she cried out for help, and denied her access to education because her pain was inconvenient… the system would act.
If I failed to provide safety, dismissed disclosures, exposed her to risk, and then claimed she was the problem when her behaviour changed… social care would intervene.
If I documented 30 instances of emotional distress and did nothing to protect her, they wouldn’t call it “a communication breakdown.” They’d call it neglect.
And rightly so.
Because safeguarding frameworks exist to uphold the rights of the child, not the comfort of the adult.
So how is it that when institutions, professionals, or leadership teams cause that same harm, the outcome is simply a complaint?
How is it that a safeguarding failure by a parent leads to referral, potential child protection plans, even removal, but when professionals cause that same harm, it's framed as "lessons to be learned" and quietly buried under procedural review?
How can it be that when harm is caused within the system, the system protects itself?
That contradiction should shake every safeguarding professional to their core.
Because this isn’t about finger-pointing. It’s about parity.
We do not accept double standards in safeguarding.
We do not accept the idea that training justifies immunity.
And we cannot accept that survivors should pay the price for someone else’s reputation management.
What we’ve seen is not the absence of knowledge, it is the absence of accountability.
And that absence is the abuse.
Safeguarding cannot exist on paper alone.
It must be lived, enforced, and upheld, with the same rigour for institutions as for individuals.
Until then, those most trained to protect will remain those most capable of causing harm… without consequence.
And children like mine will continue to survive not because of the system — but in spite of it.
I am not a safeguarding specialist. I am a parent. But I have read more safeguarding policies in the last three years than any parent should ever have to.
I have sat in meetings quoting directly from peer-on-peer abuse guidance, from safeguarding frameworks, from statutory duties. I have asked, calmly, why those policies weren’t followed. And instead of action, I was asked what I wanted to happen.
But I didn’t write the policies. They did. They already say what should happen.
I have handed over police crime reference numbers and been told they "could be fake." I have reported harm to social workers, only to be met with silence. I have asked directly: where is your duty, when the harm is not from a parent, but from a professional? The answer is always the same: raise a complaint.
So I did.
Complaints that are mishandled. Skipped stages. Biased outcomes. Processes used to excuse rather than investigate. And when you persist, you are labelled "malicious."
Meanwhile, you’re holding your children together. You’re trying to teach them they still matter. That the harm they experienced was real. That they do not deserve to be punished for surviving it.
You watch them lose hope in their future. You watch the light go out in their eyes. You watch professionals push them further away, and then blame them for disappearing.
We escaped abuse. And for a short while, the system did protect us. But once that system became the source of harm, everything changed. From that point on, safeguarding became about shielding the institution, not the child.
How can this happen?
I’m tired of seeing hashtags like #SafeguardingMatters when it clearly doesn’t. Not if your child is seen as a problem. Not if the institution decides their trauma is too inconvenient. Not when being scapegoated follows them for years, across schools, across settings.
That’s not failure. That’s cruelty.
That’s abuse.
And the people who enable it? They smile for posters. They sit on panels. They claim to be "outstanding" while children like mine are quietly buried, silenced, erased.
Tell me how they look in the mirror.
Tell me how we survive that too.
Disclaimer:
This article is based on real lived experience, supported by documented evidence, safeguarding policies, formal complaint correspondence, and professional records. It reflects the personal truth of a parent navigating institutional responses to peer-on-peer abuse and safeguarding failures. It is not hypothetical. It is not exaggerated. It is the reality many families face. Every line speaks to evidence held, policies read, and harm endured.