Protect Children with a Just Culture
In recent years, development NGOs have reenergized their efforts to safeguard children and vulnerable adults they work with from abuse and sexual exploitation. Many NGOs have adopted zero-tolerance policies for harassment, abuse, and exploitation. But safeguarding scandals continue, and even strenuous efforts to abide by Core Humanitarian Standards haven’t been effective in stopping them.
For humanitarian organizations that may be new to the struggles of safeguarding participants and staff, there are lessons on organizational culture that can be gleaned from the efforts of other sectors to address safety: domestic child welfare systems, hospitals, and space exploration.
The Promise of Just Culture
In the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster, “o-rings” that were known to be a problem failed and caused the shuttle to explode. A safety review found that lower-level engineering staff knew the o-rings became stiff at lower temperatures and had cautioned about launching the shuttle if the weather was cold. Middle management overruled the decision and no one else spoke up, leaving launch control unaware of the risks of a cold-weather countdown. Sociologist Diane Vaughn has argued that the problem was a cultural one. As known risks were ignored, staff became complacent to the point that they actually believed there was no risk. “Normalized deviance” is the term that has been used to describe such a culture.
Building on this work, in 1999 the U.S. Institute of Medicine published “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System,” a deep review of why it may be that almost 100,000 people die each year from preventable medical errors in the United States. The study showed most medical errors resulted not simply from human error but from systems that were not designed to account for human frailty. From that work came a set of “just culture” or “safety culture” principles now widely applied in hospitals and other medical settings.
Just culture assumes that people will err and that most errors actually don’t lead to harmful outcomes. In a compliance-driven culture, action is usually taken only when there is a bad result or harm. In just culture, the organization focuses on ensuring that risky behavior is hard to get away with, is reported, and is acted upon in a way that reduces risk.
I am by no means the first to suggest that humanitarian organizations focus their safeguarding efforts on building culture in the field over a centralized, compliance-driven approach. See here and here. The question is not so much whether to address organizational culture to improve safeguarding efforts, but how. Here are four key elements to ensure a just culture within aid organizations.
Principles of Just Culture
1. Psychological safety
Psychological safety is the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Humans like to go along with the crowd, and if the crowd is engaged in risky or inappropriate behavior, the culture can become one of normalized deviance.
But fear often prevents staff from speaking up: fear of retaliation by supervisors, of being ostracized by work colleagues, of the stress caused by any resulting investigation, and too often of the disappointment of being ignored.
Leaders can foster psychological safety by building connections with employees, being vulnerable and transparent, and setting the expectation that mistakes are opportunities for improvement, not reasons for discipline.
2. A grassroots approach
A grassroots approach works better than a top-down one. Staff on the front lines of the work are those best situated to spot risky or inappropriate behavior before it results in harm, but those staff are often the least likely to speak up or to be heard.
In the humanitarian aid sector, secondary trauma, burnout, and the urgency of the work can contribute to a culture in which risky behavior is tolerated. Staff in the field may resent being mandated to follow policies and practices they had no hand in developing. Hierarchical reporting systems can also impede reporting. Because risky or inappropriate behavior can become normalized, staff in the field must feel ownership of safeguarding duties.
Conveying that ownership requires involving field staff in the development and testing of policies and requesting from them regular feedback on how their safeguard efforts are faring.
3. A nonpunitive response is critical
Abuse and exploitation are emotional issues that trigger emotional reactions. To prevent actual harm, staff must feel confident that if they intervene to stop inappropriate or risky behavior, the organization’s response will be measured.
Most actual abuse and exploitation of children and vulnerable adults occurs at the end of a longer process in which the offender is allowed to break boundaries, make inappropriate comments, and slowly isolate the victim. Field staff who see these warning signs need to feel that if they report them, the organization will respond in a way that preserves the local working team while holding the wrongdoer accountable.
Organizations should create tiers of responses, clearly describe for the field what types of actions or behavior should be reported, and demonstrate that responses to risky behavior will be addressed in a way that does not damage local working relationships. Actual abuse or exploitation, on the other hand, should result in quick and decisive discipline.
4. Supportive leadership
Supportive leadership is the final and perhaps the most important element. In the many child protection scandals that I have witnessed over the past 20 years, before the scandal became public there were incidents, rumors, and concerns that were not addressed.
Leadership responses to those prior situations often revealed two common themes. Either the organization had fired a few bad apples and moved on, or the leadership had stuck its head in the sand in fear of having information revealed that could damage the organization’s reputation.
Moving Forward
For aid organizations, safeguarding your team and those you work with requires going beyond creating and enforcing good policies: It requires building a culture that encourages and motivates staff to see their value.
