Safeguarding in humanitarian organisations: a practical look at response
by Kelsey Hoppe and Christine Williamson
In part one of this two-part article, Kelsey Hoppe, CEO of Safer Edge, a UK-based security risk advisory company, and Christine Williamson, director and founder of Duty of Care International and an HR and duty of care specialist, discussed the prevention side of safeguarding. In this article, they continue their discussion with a look at safeguarding responses.
For the purposes of this article, ‘safeguarding’ is defined as all actions taken by organisations to protect their personnel from harm and to prevent them from harming others. This is expanded from the UK legal definition of safeguarding, which only applies to children and vulnerable adults. Safeguarding procedures and activities relate to harassment and abuse (including sexual harassment, abuse and violence).
KH: In discussing prevention, we looked at several practical steps organisations can take to make safeguarding part of their regular practice. What good practices have you seen in relation to response?
CW: Organisations with good safeguarding practice take staff engagement seriously, and have made it continuous and built it into their systems. These are things like asking safeguarding questions in staff engagement surveys, conducting focus groups with staff and managers, relaunching the safeguarding policy or using staff meetings to talk about safeguarding and what the organisation is doing.