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We spend most of our time thinking about risks that come from outside the safeguarding function: predatory staff, partners who cut corners, communities under pressure. The harder conversation, and the one we have less often, sits closer to home.
What happens when integrity slips inside a safeguarding role itself?
This week's piece comes from Geoffrey Mugisha, our Global Safeguarding Advisor. Geoffrey has spent years inside humanitarian organizations as a technical specialist, a strategic leader and safeguarding advisor. In those roles, he experienced how safeguarding leads, focal points, or senior protection officers sometimes became part of the problem. Rarely through abuse. More often through bullying, favouritism, negligence, or quietly burying concerns that would have been inconvenient to raise.
The piece below is his, and it's written from inside the profession, for the profession.
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The role asks a lot of us
Safeguarding professionals hold a vital responsibility: protecting vulnerable people from harm, abuse, and neglect.
The role asks for empathy, judgement, and accountability every working day, and most of us carry it well. Some of us carry it under conditions that would test anyone, with heavy caseloads, professional isolation, unclear authority, a plethora of confusing guidelines and weak organisational backing.
Occasionally, in a small number of cases, the behaviour of a colleague in a safeguarding role starts to drift in a direction that matters. The damage doesn't stay contained to one person. It ripples out into team trust, organisational integrity, and the confidence of the communities we exist to serve.
What this drift can look like
It's rarely dramatic.
It usually shows up as something quieter: a senior figure who manages through intimidation rather than support; a focal point who favours certain colleagues and freezes out others; a manager whose response to inconvenient concerns is to recategorise them as personality clashes.
Sometimes it's negligence rather than malice, a quiet pattern of cases that don't get followed through. Sometimes it's misplaced loyalty, where protecting a long-standing colleague becomes more important than protecting a beneficiary.
When this happens in a senior safeguarding role, the position itself becomes part of the problem. The authority of the role can shield the behaviour from scrutiny, discourage reporting, and let the pattern persist for years.
And every year it persists, confidence in the safeguarding function quietly erodes alongside it.
What makes this difficult is that the harms hide inside ordinary organisational life.
Biased decision-making looks like good judgement until you trace the pattern. Supervisory practices that silence dissent look like firm leadership. Performance assessments used to punish look like rigour. Reports that get lost or recategorised look like administrative oversight. None of it looks like abuse on paper, and all of it causes damage over time.
The lesson everyone watching takes away is that the system can't be trusted, even if no one ever says it out loud.
Recruitment is where this is often won or lost
After high-profile scandals, organisations frequently rush to fill safeguarding roles. The urgency is understandable.
It's also a risk in itself. When vetting gets shortened in the name of speed, reference checks become formalities, interviews skim the surface, and the wrong person ends up in a position of trust. The cost shows up years later, and it's almost always paid by someone who had nothing to do with the original hiring decision.
Safe recruitment isn't a tick-box exercise. It's the moment where safeguarding either gets serious or quietly doesn't.
Job descriptions and interviews need to reflect safeguarding values directly. Reference checks need to go beyond formality, with proper conversations that filter out individuals with patterns that don't belong in a position of trust. And the work continues after the contract is signed, through induction, probation, and supervision that keep safeguarding visible rather than letting it fade into the background once the role is filled.
Culture is what either holds the line or doesn't
A single colleague in a safeguarding role who has lost their footing can, over time, normalise poor conduct, erode psychological safety, and silence the warning signs that a healthy safeguarding culture depends on. Turnover rises. Morale drops. Colleagues stop raising concerns because they've watched what happens to those who do.
Leadership shapes this more than any policy.
Effective leaders model the values they ask of others, create real space for concerns to be raised, and act on what comes to them. The alternative is paper compliance, where the policies on the website say one thing and practice on the ground says another. This is the most dangerous configuration of all, because it creates a false sense of security while vulnerabilities go unaddressed.
What protects against this
Three things, mostly. The first is reflective supervision.
Safeguarding professionals are often expected to support others through difficult work without much support themselves. Without somewhere to bring difficult observations about colleagues, those observations either become formal complaints people aren't yet ready to file, or they go nowhere. Reflective supervision and internal champions create the conditions where concerns surface before they become crises.
The second is reporting routes that actually function when the concern involves senior staff.
One channel never works. Plural routes, including anonymous and external options, with visible endorsement from leadership, and a clear path that bypasses the normal reporting line when seniority is part of the problem. Without this, the safeguarding system has a built-in blind spot exactly where it can least afford one.
The third is leadership willing to look at itself.
The hardest cases involve people who hold the same authority that would normally handle the complaint. When senior leaders, safeguarding heads, and HR teams demonstrate that they will be held to the same standard they ask of everyone else, the rest of the system starts to work as intended.
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A question worth sitting with
If a concern was raised tomorrow about a senior safeguarding colleague in your organisation, who would handle it? And would the person raising it trust that process? If you can't answer both questions clearly, that's where the work is.
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Where we can help
Most organisations don't have a problem with intent.
They have a problem with the systems that surround their safeguarding professionals, and how much real support those professionals receive.
This is part of what we do at Safe Path International. We carry out safeguarding role assessments that look at how leads, focal points, and senior managers are recruited, supervised, and supported, and we map what's needed to close the gaps we find.
We run capacity building for safeguarding professionals themselves, through reflective supervision frameworks, peer learning structures, and coaching for those who carry heavy caseloads without much support. We help organisations set up independent review channels that work even when concerns involve senior staff, including external-facing options through our partnerships with leading software service providers.
And we work with senior leadership teams on the accountability habits that turn safeguarding from a function and compliance into a culture.
If any of this resonates with where your organisation is, reply to this email. Happy to talk it through, no pitch.
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Three takeaways
The vast majority of safeguarding professionals do this work with integrity.
The small minority who don't, especially in senior roles, can cause damage that's slow to detect and hard to undo. Recruitment, supervision, and independent reporting routes are where this is won or lost.
And policies on their own aren't enough; daily culture and the support our profession actually receives are what protect people in the end.
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Looking ahead
Next week: Digital safeguarding; AI risks, data security, and what consumer tools mean for protection work.
Coming soon: Safeguarding in emergencies. Training that actually changes behavior. The business case for safeguarding investment.
With thanks to Geoffrey Mugisha, Global Safeguarding Advisor at Safe Path International, for this week's piece.
Safe Path International helps organisations build safeguarding systems that hold up under pressure; recruitment review, leadership accountability, capacity building, and culture work.
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