The Politics of Safeguarding

This interactive 3-hour workshop explores how safeguarding practices can be reimagined through an anti-oppressive and justice-based lens, equipping helping professionals with tools to provide support in times of crisis while actively resisting systemic oppresison and working to reduce harm.

Safeguarding is often framed through institutional and risk-averse models that reinforce power differentials and hierarchies, heighten surveillance, and undermine personal agency. This session interrogates our role and our complicity within oppressive systems, and the personal agency and responsibility that we have in shaping our safeguarding practices towards more power and liberation.

Through discussion, embodied practices, case studies, and reflective exercises, we will:

• Develop a nuanced understanding of safeguarding as a relational and political act
• Identify how dominant safeguarding approaches can marginalise vulnerable communities
• Explore strategies to uphold safety, autonomy, and dignity in ways that resist coercion and support the rights of those we work with
• Learn to navigate ethical and political tensions between our professional obligations and social justice values

We welcome your lived experiences, thoughts and feelings as reimagine safeguarding together and discover new perspectives and possibilities for ourselves and for those we support.

Facilitator - Kim Loliya

Kim is a trauma psychotherapist, supervisor and director of Black Psychotherapy, a mental health service providing decolonial, intersectional and anti-oppressive therapy to Black and racially minoritised communities, alongside justice and liberation-centred supervision, training and consultancy, to professionals across the health and social care sector. Black Psychotherapy operates clinics virtually and in community settings to end mental health stigma and address cultural barriers to seeking support. The team’s dedication to delivering excellent standards of care led to being nominated for Best Mental Health Service of The Year in 2024. Outside of Kim’s role within the service, they research, dream and write about Afrofuturism, ecologies of liberation and the use of speculative practices for collective resistance. Kim's recently released podcast, 'My Mother's Trauma', offers a politicised perspective on how to break the cycle of intergenerational and ancestral trauma within Global Majority cultures.