RESUMO
Protecting people from harm and upholding their right to be protected is a central tenet of social work. ‘Safeguarding' as a term is, however, a relatively new introduction to the language of international research practice for protecting people. Practices of judging and categorising risk, harm, and vulnerability are nevertheless not new territory for either social work or research. Inherently imbued with power and ‘othering' practices, the problematic aspects of these categorisations, especially in Global North-South relations, are in fact long established (Munck and Kleibl, 2019). They sort and classify people as those who pose a ‘risk' or challenge to certain social norms, and those who are deemed to be ‘at risk, ' ‘vulnerable, ' or in need of protection. In this way, risk as a concept and ‘risk-work' as practice can be understood to be a colonial project. Systemic and institutionalised, or ‘baked in, ' to both research institutions as well as research and welfare practices. Researching social work, especially at this time of global pandemic, therefore has the potential to reify these colonial logics. Drawing on the growing literature on the impacts of COVID-19 on development challenges, and work undertaken by YOLRED to assess safeguarding issues for working with at-risk or marginalised groups, including former child soldiers, this chapter explores the conceptual, linguistic, and practical challenges of ‘safeguarding' for praxis. Further, it will illustrate, from the authors' ongoing works within this area, lessons learned and key takeaways for how the concept of safeguarding can be reimagined as a potential framework for decolonising research. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.