Protecting the Sexual Innocence of Children In Youth-Serving Organizations

Most organizations have not invested the manpower to read thousands of research papers so they understand how abuse happens and how to prevent it. We understood the size of that undertaking, so we did it for you!  In fact, we have summarized our learning into clearly defined best practices and can help you assess how your policies compare and identify opportunities for improvement.

Are Your Policies Best Practices?

Whether you do the gap analysis, comparing your current policies and practices to best practices, or you leverage our expertise to help, you will first need to determine your starting point.

Formal policies that relate to child sexual abuse are typically dispersed across many departments and documents and leaders often don’t have a full understanding of what already exists, let alone it’s effectiveness. We encourage you to gather your existing policies from throughout the organization. At minimum, we recommend you look in your employee handbook, school or organization safety plan, emergency plan, title IX documentation, and your human resources manual.

Though this gathering process will help you get your arms around the formal policies that have been created over the years, it is not likely a good representation of the day-to-day practices of your staff.  So we also encourage you to use the policies you find as the foundation for dialog with your staff about their informal practices in the area of child sexual abuse and document what you learn.

Then and only then can we compare your current policies and practices against best practices to determine the gaps, identify opportunities for improvement, and determine a strategy and timeline to close the gaps. Since we live and breathe best practices, we can streamline the analysis process and quickly get you on your way to better protecting the children in your care!

Contact us to get a customized quote for analyzing your policies and practices.

Our hope is that in the end, your organization would have a centralized policy for child sexual abuse prevention and response so you can ensure the policies:

  • are complete and consistent across the organization
  • are distributed and communicated effectively to all who need to know
  • are monitored, enforced, and measured for effectiveness