Introduction

CS has been shaped and primarily implemented in England and Wales, yet the issues it confronts are not unique to the UK. The CS team have begun exploring the applicability of the CS framework in European and Australian contexts as part of the ‘Contextual Safeguarding Across Borders’ (CSAB) project. This project specifically explores the feasibility of CS as an approach to support safeguarding responses to refugee and asylum-seeking young people in Europe, and Indigenous young people affected by EFH in Australia. Beyond exploring the international transferability of a CS approach, the project also explores the ways in which CS can support child protection responses to acknowledge and address the impact of structural inequalities in young people's lives – such as poverty, racism, sexism and so on – on their experiences of harm. Safeguarding refugee and asylum-seeking young people has become a salient child protection issue across Europe, particularly over recent years in the wake of the so-called European ‘refugee crisis’. Refugee and asylum-seeking young people, in addition to facing significant risks of EFH on their migration journeys and within their host countries, face an additional set of structural barriers within European child protection systems that are ill-equipped to protect them (Degani et al, 2015; Dimitrova, Ivanova and Alexandrova, 2015; D’Addato, 2017; Giovannetti, 2017; Barn, Di Rosa and Kallinikaki, 2021). In Australia, research has highlighted that young people from Indigenous communities can also be particularly vulnerable to forms of harm and discrimination situated within social welfare interventions (Ivec, Braithwaite and Harris, 2012).

This chapter is based on the European strand of the CSAB project. Particularly, it draws from a literature-scoping review that was conducted as part of this project to better understand how EFH is responded to in Europe. The chapter focuses broadly on European challenges to responding to EFH and does not go into depth about responses specific to refugee and asylum-seeking young people – this aspect of the study has been published elsewhere (Peace and Wroe, 2022). This chapter aims to explore the applicability of CS in other contexts. It begins by presenting key trends and challenges across European child protection systems related to responding to EFH, before offering some initial thoughts on how CS speaks to these challenges.