Jenny is a social and cultural geographer working around harm to young people in their communities. This can include harm between young people such as sexual harassment and violence at school, serious violence and the use of weapons, and young people that are criminally exploited.
Jenny is an embedded researcher; she spends time in organisations to understand how they work and what needs to change to improve how safeguarding systems work with young people. A lot of her work has focused on being embedded in children's social care but she now works in schools and with voluntary- and community-sector organisations. Jenny’s work focusses on preventing and addressing inter-personal violence to young people but she is particularly interested in how systems designed to keep young people safe can also inflict harm. Jenny’s most recent work has looked at zero-tolerance and school exclusion.
Jenny’s work is focused on ensuring children's rights and welfare are upheld, and she is critical of approaches to safeguarding that promote behaviourist and individual approaches to harm. Jenny believes that change can happen and to do this we need to make safer environments and communities that value and listen to young people.
As a member of the Contextual Safeguarding leadership team and lead for education, Jenny’s research has concentrated on a range of projects focused on 'extra-familial harm' including: designing children's social care systems to work in contexts beyond the home via the National Scale-Up project, addressing harmful sexual behaviour in schools as part of the Beyond Referrals project, and most recently looking at the education experiences of young people impacted by extra-familial harm as part of the In The Name Of Safeguarding project.
Jenny cares about turning academic research into resources and learning that can help professionals and practitioners. She manages the Contextual Safeguarding website, chairs a sub-group of the International Taskforce for Child Protection and frequently works with policy makers and organisations including the Department for Education and Ofsted.