Building protection around children with experience of care

In October 2025, I travelled to the USA to set out on the first leg of my Churchill Fellowship to answer a question at the very heart of my working life as a corporate parent with Police Scotland: “How can we protect and support the care-experienced community?”

What I found is that "protection" in the USA is being redefined. It is moving away from a cold, clinical bureaucracy that merely monitors failure, and towards approaches that ground children and help build a foundation for them.

In the USA, the definition of a good police officer, support worker, or social worker is shifting towards what can be called the "Second Base Rule." In the heat of a moment, when a choice is 50/50, real protection requires the courage to, in baseball terms, "call the child safe." It is an act of mercy and trust that keeps a child in the game when the rules of the world can feel stacked against them.

In Albany, The Schuyler Center highlighted how the terminology we use to protect can actually erode a child's sense of self. When the system uses an acronym like LAC (Looked After Child), it thinks it is being professional. But to a ten-year-old, it sounds exactly like the word "lack." By defining children by what they are missing, we inadvertently force them to view themselves through a lens of deficit.

The “Coat Test”, introduced to me by The Osborne Association in New York City, offered another way to think about protection. In a traditional model, if a child is shivering, the system’s instinct is mandated reporting – documenting the neglect. But Osborne argues for mandated supporting. They recognise that you cannot address a child’s behaviour or trauma if their basic material needs are unmet. When a child is shivering, you don't immediately file a report; you give them a coat.

Another powerful lesson was the importance of physical presence. In Brooklyn, I observed how a situation can be de-escalated before a single word is even spoken. When a police officer chooses to park their car two blocks away and walk to a door in plain clothes, they are protecting the sanctity of the child's environment. Seeing these "soft arrivals" in practice was a powerful moment of professional solidarity for me: confirmation that efforts to de-stigmatise our presence in Scotland are part of a wider shift in practice.

In Seattle, I saw the power of restorative justice in action through Choose 180. Their model is built on the understanding that, for a young person in crisis, the traditional justice system often acts as a trap rather than a safety net. By shifting the focus from prosecution to possibility, Choose 180 shows how believing in a child's potential, rather than just their case file, can completely change their trajectory.

The Centre for Children and Youth Justice (CCYJ) is also leading important work on child welfare and juvenile justice in Washington State. Across their work on violence intervention, juvenile fees, and foster care initiatives, the voice of the child guides everything they do. This resonates with the work we are doing in Scotland with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

Bringing these lessons home, I feel immense pride that Scotland is part of this global movement. We are moving away from the practitioner who simply writes a report, and towards the supporter who actively preserves a future.

The first part of my journey has also reframed the questions guiding my research. I am now asking: how does policing affect the support, protection, and wellbeing of children with experience of care, and what unintended harms can police involvement cause within a community already shaped by trauma and re-traumatisation?

This journey is only just beginning. Over the coming months, I will be travelling to New Zealand to explore how its unique cultural and systemic approaches to supporting and protecting children can further inform our mission to keep The Promise here in Scotland.

I will also be turning the audio interviews from my time in the USA and New Zealand into a series of podcasts, where you can hear directly from the practitioners and advocates who inspired me.

Stay tuned for the next chapter.