A CTDC reflection on affect, confidentiality, power, and the hidden harms organisations overlook
Safeguarding in many organisations remains confined to a specialised unit, a safeguarding officer, focal point, or department. While these roles are important, treating safeguarding as a discrete function has become a significant limitation on institutional accountability.
Safeguarding is not a technical checklist.
It is a governance commitment that shapes how power is held, how harm is interpreted, and how people are protected.
When safeguarding is siloed rather than integrated into organisational governance, institutions overlook the emotional, relational, and systemic dimensions of harm, specially forms of misconduct that fall outside narrow sexual categories but still have profound and lasting consequences.
🌱 Safeguarding Is Broader Than Sexual Misconduct
Across different sectors, safeguarding is still strongly associated with sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment (SEAH). This narrow lens means that many forms of non-sexual misconduct, although deeply harmful, are misclassified as interpersonal conflicts or HR issues.
These harms operate through the same dynamics of power, vulnerability, and inequality as SEAH, and they can be equally damaging.
Common but overlooked non-sexual safeguarding harms include:
- breaches of confidentiality
- retaliation or punitive action after reporting
- defamation and character assassination
- malicious gossip and internal exclusion
- coercive supervision and intimidation
- misuse of power in workloads, contracts, or promotions
- community-level social violence following internal disclosures
Such behaviours can:
- destroy reputations and livelihoods
- trigger long-term psychological distress
- silence survivors and deter future reporting
- produce climates of fear and organisational instability
If safeguarding is to protect people’s safety and dignity, these harms must be recognised as safeguarding concerns, not downgraded to routine HR matters.
💜 Why Attending to Affect Is Essential
A truly survivor-centred safeguarding system does not assess harm solely by category or type. It examines how the harm affects the person emotionally, socially, psychologically, and materially.
Affect captures:
- how violations are felt
- how they shape identity, confidence, and agency
- how fear, shame, anger, and vulnerability influence decisions
- how material and reputational losses alter a person’s life
Two individuals can experience the same incident yet be affected in profoundly different ways, depending on their positionality, risk exposure, power relations, or past experiences.
Ignoring affect leads to generic, procedural responses that fail to meet survivors’ needs, and can even worsen harm.
To be survivor-centred, safeguarding must ask:
- What did this harm do to this person?
- What emotional or social consequences are they navigating?
- How does this affect their ability to speak, act, or seek support?
- What forms of agency are available or restricted to them?
Survivor-centred safeguarding requires an understanding of the lived, felt impact of harm; not only the incident itself.
⚠️ Confidentiality Breaches as Harm
Among the most damaging safeguarding failures are confidentiality breaches. These are too often treated as administrative mistakes, rather than as acts that expose individuals to serious and lasting risk.
A breach of confidentiality can lead to:
• retaliation by colleagues, managers, or partners
• targeted defamation or social shaming
• exclusion from teams or professional networks
• loss of employment or diminished career opportunities
• community-level hostility, especially in small or politically tense settings
• psychological trauma, fear, and isolation
These outcomes constitute significant harm; not merely procedural lapses.
Confidentiality breaches often retraumatise victims and silence entire teams, eroding trust in organisational systems.
Effective safeguarding requires robust, consistently applied confidentiality protections that prioritise safety over institutional reputation.
🧩 Safeguarding Must Be Embedded Across Governance
Safeguarding cannot be outsourced to a single team. It must be embedded across every department and function of the organisation.
This means integrating safeguarding principles into:
- programme design and implementation
- HR policies, recruitment, and performance management
- MEAL frameworks and learning loops
- leadership behaviour and organisational culture
- communication protocols and data governance
- partnership management and due diligence
Every department has the capacity to cause harm or prevent it.
Safeguarding becomes meaningful only when it is recognised as a collective governance responsibility, not a departmental task.
💡 Key Questions for Organisations
To build safer and more accountable systems, organisations must cultivate reflective practice. These questions can guide leaders and teams:
Understanding Harm and Affect
- What emotional, social, or material impacts is this person experiencing?
- What risks or fears shape their ability to speak or seek help?
- How does this incident affect their agency and choices?
Knowledge and Interpretation
- Whose perspectives shape the dominant narrative?
- Which experiences are being minimised or overlooked?
- How might bias or assumptions shape institutional responses?
Power and Decision-Making
- Who is protected by existing policies, and who is left vulnerable?
- How could confidentiality or information handling expose individuals to harm?
- Do our systems inadvertently allow retaliation or exclusion?
Practice and Implementation
- Are responses designed with those affected, rather than for them?
- Are non-sexual forms of harm addressed with seriousness and consistency?
- Do our actions align with the justice and protection we claim to uphold?
✳️ Safeguarding as a Governance Practice
Safeguarding is not an intervention triggered by incidents; it is a continuous organisational practice grounded in ethics, justice, care, and accountability.
It requires organisations to look beyond isolated events and to examine the environments, cultures, and power dynamics that make harm possible in the first place.
The fundamental question becomes:
Not only “What happened?” — but “Why was this able to happen here?”
This shift from procedural to reflective safeguarding strengthens trust, transparency, and institutional credibility.
🌍 At CTDC
We work with organisations to:
- integrate safeguarding into governance and culture
- address emotional, relational, and reputational forms of harm
- strengthen confidentiality and prevent retaliation
- recognise and respond to non-sexual misconduct
- build systems rooted in care, justice, and accountability
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