During the 30 or so years that I have been active as a social work practitioner, educator and researcher, the landscape of child protection has become considerably more complex, so much so that we may consider it something of a minefield. I have observed how problems arising in safeguarding have increased as the changing ethnic and racial demographic of children in the child welfare system has become more diverse, and that the issues that bring them into the child protection system have become more complex and multi-layered. All told, we know that families from low-income backgrounds living in neighbourhoods with high levels of youth violence, gang activities and peer-on-peer violence find it much more challenging to protect their children from extra-familial harm (EFH). Conversely, there has been an underappreciation of the role of structural inequalities in extra-familial contexts and its impact on the risks and harms experienced by young people, which has critical safeguarding implications. In this sense, in the multi-racial, multi-cultural and multi-faith social contexts of contemporary Britain, how to effectively safeguard the diverse population of children and young people that come to the attention of child protection systems is an ongoing concern.

Additionally, amid the debates about the need to recognise and understand the social determinants of harm, there is resistance to the notion that structural and institutional racism is both within child welfare systems and part of society at large, which contributes to the over-representation of racially minoritised children and young people in the child welfare and criminal justice systems. Furthermore, the shifting landscape of inequality and disadvantage, exacerbated by the pandemic, will no doubt play a significant role in children and young people's subsequent psychosocial development. Thus, in many ways, for children's services, improving the lives of vulnerable and disadvantaged children and young people and their families is more challenging than ever.

Nevertheless, although I do not seek to deny that responding to EFH is challenging, I argue that marginalised populations are typically underserved and over-policed. In particular, I posit that Black children are usually underserved, under-supported and over-policed (Bernard and Harris, 2019). They frequently experience adultification, the subtle and unconscious racebased bias that negatively affects the treatment of Black children in the child welfare and justice systems (Bernard, 2019).