Have you ever been at a party standing with a stranger and they have asked you the predictable question ‘so what do you do for a living?’ If you are reading this book, it is likely that you – like us – groan at this question. Despite having worked in this area for many years, we haven't got very good at answering this in a ‘party-appropriate’ way. Maybe you say something vague about safeguarding, maybe you say something about children's rights or perhaps you go bold and mention the words ‘exploitation’ or ‘violence’. Depending on who is asking the question, you might get a range of responses from ambivalence to macabre excitement. But what if instead we said ‘I’m working to create societies where children can know love’? We imagine the partygoer might suddenly see someone they ‘haven't seen for ages’, make their excuses and leave. Love can seem a bit ‘icky’, but if there is one theme that threads across this book, and the matter we turn to now – values – then perhaps it is love. In this chapter, we draw on bell hooks's (2001) definition of love, which she notes is formed of six elements: care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility and respect.

We don't often hear the word ‘love’ used when talking about children experiencing harm in their communities. Love is rarely discussed in assessments, during panels or as part of plans. Love can seem quite unfashionable, or even slightly perverse when we’re talking about safeguarding. When children are involved in high-profile incidences of harm, newspaper articles rarely talk about them in ways that open up the opportunity for love. They favour instead titillating titles about ‘gangs’ and ‘thugs’. But as we think about the work that moves us, the examples of practitioners that ‘get it’, the children who have shared their stories of friendship and what it's like when it ‘works’, love feels like the best explanation for what it is we are trying to do. CS is about creating societies where children can know love and we are doing that by trying to create systems that show it too.

In our journey to create safer communities, we have often led with our four-part framework, and it is these ‘domains’ that have provided the structure of this book.