In Unit 1 you learnt that safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility, and we looked at the fundamentals of this concept. In this unit we focus on the ‘‘identification’ part of the safeguarding cycle.

It is important that you and your organisation’s staff who have direct or indirect contact with children or vulnerable adults are able to recognise factors which make individuals vulnerable to harm. This will equip you better to prevent exploitation, abuse and harassment, and be able to respond appropriately if it does happen.

To do so, we will be exploring the inherent (internal to the person) criteria that make a child or adult vulnerable to harm and those which are external to the person. These criteria or factors make children and adults vulnerable to various forms of harm including sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment (known as SEAH).

We will also look at how the intersectionality of internal and external criteria can increase the risk of vulnerability of children and adults, and therefore those of us who are aware of this increased vulnerability should ensure that we take measures to prevent the likelihood of harm occurring by using various tools such as a situational analysis and risk assessments.

In each unit of this course, we will apply our learning to certain types of programmatic activity to demonstrate how safeguarding principles can be implemented. In this unit we will apply our learning to research programmes, such as data collection, working safely with research participants, and the importance of safe programming.

We will look at tools that could support you to reflect on how to gauge risk and vulnerability when working with research participants on any given programme. There are also activities that will help you further understand your role and responsibility in safeguarding.