We’re Presenting at ISPCAN 2026
Tom Rawlings and I are presenting a poster at the ISPCAN 2026 World Congress next week. The poster, “Creating a Just Safety Culture within Youth-Serving Organizations,” makes an argument we think every YSO administrator needs to hear: a written policy does not protect children. A culture that supports it does.
The Boy Scouts of America, the Catholic Church, and Oxfam all had written child protection policies before each name became shorthand for a catastrophic failure. The paper was never the problem. The problem was whether staff felt safe enough to report a concern, and whether leadership fixed the system instead of punishing the messenger.
Our poster walks through why policies fail even when everyone follows them on paper, what the research on psychological safety and error reporting tells us about fixing that gap, and a just-culture framework for responding differently to a systemic failure than to a deliberate violation. It closes with four capacities we think every resilient organization needs: the ability to anticipate risk, monitor supervision in practice rather than on paper, respond quickly when something goes wrong, and learn from every audit rather than just the ones that make the news.
We will be at Poster P021, Theme 2, during the Congress, August 24 to 26. If you’re attending, stop by. We’d like to hear how your organization handles this same balance.
