Better information sharing, or 'share or be damned'?

Safeguarding, and the information sharing between professionals and bodies which underpins it, is crucial for the prevention of harm to the vulnerable. But sometimes it is worth exploring the 'hard cases', where safeguarding practices might ultimately prove troublesome themselves, on rarer occasions. As Sue Peckover (2013) has highlighted, a key idea is that sometimes we respond to risks of harm in an overly bureaucratic or otherwise superficial way because we can't find more resources to intervene most effectively and change risky behaviours presented by (actual potential or alleged) offenders or abusers. This is a theoretical and policy analysis-based piece that aims to prompt some questions for readers as to the flourishing culture of information sharing, and the growing body of public policy in relation to public protection disclosures. The piece also offers up some conclusions on new 'naming and shaming' strategies, as part of the "public protection routine" (Grace, 2013b); which is the multi-agency work of adult and child safeguarding, in essence. This 'direction of travel' toward increasing the ways in which knowledge about risk (and 'risky people') is spread around communities is the creation of what I would call a culture of 'share or be damned' for professionals to navigate. In this way, multi-agency information sharing and disclosures of information to the public (for safeguarding purposes) are an element of what Mike Nash has articulated as the 'politics of public protection' (Nash, 2010). This 'politics of public protection' can be summed up as the social, cultural and policy pressures which affect decision- making in the public protection and safeguarding contexts.