In partnership with Derby City Council, Safe and Sound are looking to identify businesses and venues within Derby that can become a ‘Safe Place’ for women children and young people.
What is it?
An awareness campaign has been launched to rally communities across the city to prevent, tackle and challenge violence against women and girls in public places.
The Safe Derby campaign is backed by the Home Office’s Safer Streets funding stream – secured through The Office of Derbyshire Police and Crime Commissioner. It is jointly led by Derby City Council and other key VCSE partners – including local specialist child exploitation charity Safe and Sound.
The overarching objective of the campaign is to signal Derby’s zero tolerance to and a city free from gender-based violence, abuse, harassment and exploitation.
What does it mean for you?
If approached by a women, child or young person, it could require you to either contact the child or young person’s parent/carer or someone they know and let them stay in your venue until the person you have contacted arrives or for them just to have five minutes to feel safe and make their own call/ have time away from where they felt unsafe.
If the matter is more serious, then we would encourage that you would contact the police instead. (not unlike you would if anyone came into a store and asked for help)
We will also offer you a window sticker to display at the front of your venue. This is so that women, children and young people will be able to see that your business is part of the project and that they can approach you.
The support that we are asking for you to provide does not require any training as such, however Safe and Sound will be happy to accommodate any staff training on safeguarding/child exploitation if you felt your staff would benefit from this awareness.
This project is an opportunity to support the Place Based Risk work within the City which focuses on identifying and understanding the places/areas which pose risks to individuals outside of their family home. We would welcome you to also share any intelligence and information which you think would be beneficial to supporting the safety and wellbeing of our children and young people.
Please send this through to safertogether@communityactionderby.org.uk
