Raising awareness of abuse in marginalised communities

This report presents findings from Healthwatch Greenwich’s Raising Awareness of Abuse project, a community-based, co-designed programme delivered in partnership with the Greenwich Safeguarding Adults Board and community groups across the borough. 

The distribution of safeguarding cases across communities in Greenwich does not appear proportionate, suggesting that some groups are less likely to come into contact with formal safeguarding pathways. This raises the likelihood of underreporting. Under-reporting in this context is not an absence of harm. Rather, it indicates that harm may be continuing without visibility to services, and that opportunities for earlier, preventative intervention are being missed. The findings from this project help explain why this gap exists. 

While the project aimed to increase awareness of abuse and how to raise concerns, its central finding is more fundamental: safeguarding does not struggle solely because people lack awareness, but because systems are not aligned with how people experience risk, trust, and consequence. 

Residents are making considered decisions about whether to act, but where the system is not experienced as safe, proportionate, or predictable, the threshold for engaging with it becomes higher. This suggests that improving safeguarding is not only about increasing awareness or encouraging reporting. It requires addressing the conditions that shape whether people feel able to come forward at all.