Delphine is an applied social researcher in the Sociology Department at Durham University and has been part of the Contextual Safeguarding Research Programme (as it was previously known) since 2018. Through participatory and action-orientated research, Delphine works alongside practitioners and young people to develop new approaches to safeguard young people from harm in their communities. Delphine’s research explores the social and structural conditions of harm experienced by young people and opportunities for contextual responses in child-protection systems in the UK and internationally, including in the voluntary and community sector.
Delphine is currently lead researcher on the Seeking Safety project, exploring young asylum seekers’ experiences of harm and safety as they navigate asylum and safeguarding systems and how professionals can better support and safeguard them. She also oversees the Contextual Safeguarding Local Areas Interest Network (LAIN), which supports children’s services across local authorities, voluntary and youth organisations, to scale and embed Contextual Safeguarding.
Her previous projects have explored the applicability and feasibility of Contextual Safeguarding in Europe with asylum-seeking and refugee adolescents; how children’s social care and voluntary sector services are innovating to address extra-familial risks and harm; the impact of ‘out of area’ placements as a response to extra-familial harm on young people’s experiences of safety; and documented the first piloting of Contextual Safeguarding in Hackney’s Children’s Services through embedded research.
Before joining the team, Delphine worked in the Safer Young Lives Research Centre at the University of Bedfordshire where she researched the participation of young people with lived experiences of sexual violence in advocacy, practice, and research in Europe. Prior to this, she worked in The Children's Society's Safeguarding and Quality Practice team and, before that, at the French branch of the humanitarian NGO Care International. Delphine studied Political Sciences, specialising in International Relations and Peace Studies.