How do beliefs and values influence your approach to safeguarding?
How you perceive the seriousness of the risks you identify, and the steps you take to manage these risks, is influenced by what you believe in and value.
Do you know the difference between your beliefs and values?
Let us check our understanding of what is meant by our beliefs and values.
Beliefs – these describe things that we hold to be either:
- ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.
- ‘true’ or ‘false’.
For example, if you think it is ‘right’ that taking part in sport should be enjoyable – then this is a belief, it is something you believe to be ‘true’.
Values – these are things that are important to you. ‘Respecting other people’ is a value. If you feel strongly about this, you will protect and attach more importance to it.
Let us look at how your beliefs and values are shaped by life experiences.
Understanding your beliefs and values
Listed below are five statements describing different behaviours.
Consider the order in which you would place each statement? from the most serious behaviour at the top to least serious at the bottom.
| Taking paper from work for personal use at home | Most serious |
| Driving above the speed limit in bad weather | - |
| Failing to report an incidence of serious domestic violence between your neighbours to the police | - |
| Stealing clothes from a washing line | - |
| Sharing illegal drugs with your friends | Least serious |
Your previous life experiences, beliefs and values influence your approach to safeguarding
We do not all share the same beliefs and values. Therefore, how we identify the seriousness of risks and the actions we take to manage them will be different.
This is why it is important to develop codes of conduct, because they provide a way of describing common standards of behaviour which everybody understands and agrees to.
We will examine codes of conduct in more detail next.