Securing a Sense of Safety for Adopted Children in Middle Childhood

This research will contribute to the debates within children's geography, childhood studies and the profession of social work; by drawing together the knowledge from human geography on security, insecurity, cultural geography and spatial belonging with the knowledge in social work of narrative, attachment and outcomes for adopted children in order to consider the concept of security for them. It will explore how children's security is conceptualised through the interventions of adults and, how children make meaning about their immediate world. By engaging with the debates on the social and materialist construction of spaces by adults and children and creatively utilizing mapping techniques the research will add to our understanding and practice of how to increase the well-being and feeling of ontological security experienced by adopted children when engaging in life story work. In using co-produced children's keys and maps of their places and analysing the sense they make of how to feel secure (self-securitisation) within them the research will provide recommendations for researchers, practitioners and adoptive families to enhance engagement with life story work. Thus adding to our understanding of how researchers and practitioners can help extend robust multi-dimensional (physical, virtual, temporal, imaginative) pathways of security (safety narratives) within their worlds.