Bullying Prevention Month is an occasion to talk about kindness. It is also a reminder to check your negligent supervision exposure, because the numbers are not close. A 2022 analysis of English and Welsh police data found that 52% of child sexual abuse and exploitation cases involved another…
Last week, we presented a workshop at the CAFO Summit on planning for a crisis before it happens, drawing on content we had already built through prior work and our online courses. I expected the content itself to be the most valuable part of our…
Minnesota made grooming a stand-alone felony this August, and other states have passed similar laws in recent years. It is a genuinely interesting development in criminal law, and it is worth understanding. But the law really doesn’t address how grooming works. More importantly, if you run…
Many youth safety trainings tell organizations to keep two adults present with any child. The rule is a good one when an organization can staff it, but not many organizations can do that. The rule also breaks down fast for a mentoring program or a…
As summer programs wind down and school-year programs ramp up, many organizations have a natural pause between training cycles. That pause is the best time to audit what your training accomplishes, not just whether it happened. Many youth-serving organizations train staff once or at most…
Earlier this week, I presented a poster at the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN)‘s 2026 World Congress, three days of sessions with people doing child protection work in dozens of countries. A few themes kept surfacing no matter who was…
A South Carolina church now faces four criminal defendants and four civil lawsuits, all traced back to a volunteer with a criminal history. The details of that case matter less than the pattern behind it. Most of the failures that lawyers and sources allege in recent…
Every August, as new volunteers sign up for the school year, someone on staff asks the same question. How thorough should this person’s background check be? The instinct is to answer by job title, treating “volunteer” as one category and “staff” as another. That instinct…
A background check that satisfies your state’s minimum legal requirement can still miss the exact record that matters most. Organizations run the background check, treat a clean result as proof of due diligence, and move on. Neither the check nor the confidence it produces always…
One of the biggest problems in youth organizations is staff burnout. In one survey of Colorado child welfare workers, half reported high levels of compassion fatigue. That’s not an unusual number for youth organizations. It’s a problem that we need to notice and address, because compassion…
Most administrators think of a code of conduct as a child protection tool. Attorneys and courts think of it as evidence. If your organization receives any federal funding, a written harassment or conduct policy will likely become a central exhibit in any serious Title IX…
On July 17, 1938, pilot Douglas Corrigan took off from Brooklyn with a flight plan filed for California. He landed in Dublin, Ireland twenty-eight hours later and blamed a faulty compass. History remembers him fondly as “Wrong Way” Corrigan. Your organization’s child protection program will…