After the Contracts End:The Space Left Behind

Finding oneself again in a virtual room is never a neutral act for those who have spent years working in child protection within humanitarian settings. The screens light up, names appear, and for a moment the places return — the emergencies, the coordination meetings where urgency and complexity had to coexist. These are people I have worked with, studied with, built fragile protection systems alongside. Once, we met inside organisations, mandates, funding streams. Now we meet outside all of that.

We are not here to discuss programmes or strategies.

We are here to talk about what happens when the work ends, but the meaning of the work does not.

The stories that surface are not individual stories. They speak of a broader unravelling within the humanitarian sector: restructurings, cuts, mergers, closures. A technical vocabulary that hides a simpler truth: whole bodies of expertise are being pushed out, along with the people who embody them. When this happens, one does not simply lose employment. One loses a moral position — a way of being in the world shaped by responsibility toward others.

For those who have worked in child protection, this loss is particularly wrenching. Protection was never just a technical function. It was a moral pact. We learned to recognise harm in its most sophisticated disguises, to see risk where it was unnamed, to build imperfect systems to contain injustice. When that work is interrupted, the fracture is not only professional; it is existential.

One of the trajectories shared involved the shift from humanitarian child protection to statutory social work. The protection of children remains the core, but the context shifts dramatically. Within national frameworks, harm is often confined to the domestic sphere. The violence that threads through communities — sexual exploitation, coercive networks, structural poverty — rarely registers as collective responsibility. Those arriving from the humanitarian world bring a broader lens, but must learn to translate it: in interviews, in forms, in codes. Explaining what it means to protect a child in a refugee camp or in a protracted crisis requires a sustained act of simplification — and sometimes of self-erasure. Starting again means accepting a symbolic and economic step backwards, while glimpsing a possibility: that rigid systems can be subtly transformed by practices born elsewhere.

Not a return, but a crossing.

Another story spoke of a sudden suspension. Being at home while the world continues to generate emergencies. Asking what it means to keep serving systems that can no longer sustain the people who hold them up. From there, a shift toward movements, local partners, and those who demand structural change — not merely technical refinement. A transition made possible by privilege — networks, recognition, relational capital — and therefore narrated without self-deception. The humanitarian crisis continues, but it does not strike everyone equally.

And then there are the stories of those trapped in recruitment limbo. Interviews that lead nowhere, feedback that explains nothing — not the right fit, not aligned. Many with years of child protection experience now accept lower-paid, less-recognised roles just to remain near the field. Not out of ambition, but out of fidelity. The paradox is clear: skills considered essential in emergencies become invisible in more stable contexts.

It is enough to open LinkedIn to see the collective scale of this shift. The green “open to work” halos multiplying by the day, a silent chorus no one quite knows how to answer. Forums of humanitarian workers without jobs fill with messages: practical questions, quiet fears, attempts to translate expertise into a language that makes sense beyond the sector.

I am there too, among them. And nearly a year in, I realise that the fear is not that I no longer know how to do my old job.The real fear is looking beyond that world — the world that became identity, coherence, purpose — and discovering that it no longer exists for you. That your knowledge has no recognised name, that the language you spoke for years is no longer understood, that everything becomes heavier, slower. And that this weight feels different when you are in your mid-forties — no longer young enough to start over lightly, not old enough to be considered “senior” in a sector that treats you like an outsider, a misplaced fragment from another universe.

Eventually, the conversation always returns to values. Not as motivational framing, but as a working compass. Values remain, but their priorities shift.

Sometimes stability matters more than direct intervention. Sometimes proximity matters more than mobility. Change, we know well, is not an extraordinary event — it is the substance of our life and work. And yet, experiencing it in our own lives comes at a cost rarely acknowledged.

Many speak of grief. Grief for a sector that no longer knows how to protect those who protect. Grief for identities built on competence, responsibility, presence. When the work disappears, a difficult question remains: how does one continue to care without being consumed? For women, the question carries additional weight. Care has always been treated as elastic, expandable, sacrificial. When it finally breaks, the fracture is renamed adaptability.

And yet, in that shared space, something begins to reassemble. The value of often-marginalised skills resurfaces: building trust with communities, working across cultures, coordinating without dominating, holding protection and dignity in the same hand. Skills the humanitarian sector demanded constantly but rarely honoured.

Today, in new contexts, they become rare resources.

Listening to these stories, I recognise myself. In those who have slowed down to avoid breaking. In those who have found other forms of coherence — in writing, study, or work that seems distant but is guided by the same principles.

In those who carry with them a knowledge that cannot be contained in a CV.

I have made my open to work status visible. Not as a plea, but as a declaration of intent. What I offer is not only technical competence, but an ethical stance, a capacity to work with complexity and a desire to do so for the just cause and with the right people.

Not at any cost.Not against myself.

This moment is not a parenthesis. It is a threshold.

Crossing it together, speaking it aloud without shame, may be one of the most concrete forms of protection we can practice today.

Z. Liew