Best Practice #2 is focused on who has access to children. In Best Practice #3 you'll see our focus change to establishing boundaries relating to the behavior of those who have been granted access.
Establish Responsibility
Responsibility for the protection of children needs to come from the top down and someone needs to be accountable for ensuring the safety of the children in your care. For non-profits and even for-profit corporations, typically the highest authority is the Board of Directors.
Integrate Child Protection into the Applicant Screening Process
We grant child molesters access to our kids. We grant access as parents and as leaders of youth serving organizations. It's tough to hear but it is a reality. Every time you hire an employee or bring on a volunteer, you have potentially given a child molester access to the precious children you serve. You have potentially put your children in extreme danger that could change the course of their lives and they may never tell.(6) Your kids are counting on you to make conscious choices about who you allow to be with them.
We grant child molesters access to our kids and our kids are coubnting on us to make conscious choices about who we allow to be with them.
Child molesters seek opportunity and what better way to gain access to kids than to choose a career (or community service role) where it is your job to spend time with them. More importantly, staff and volunteers who go above and beyond their assigned duties to develop strong relationships with kids and their families are typically well respected by their management, peers, parents and kids. This is the exact image that child molesters attempt to hide behind and use to their advantage.
This Best Practice is designed to transform the way you think during the application screening process. It's important that you take everything you learn throughout theChild Sexual Abuse Best Practices program and use it as a filter during the applicant screening process.
An effective child protection focused screening process is designed to achieve two key objectives:
- To ensure that you are not unknowingly staffing someone with a criminal record or pending charges of a sexual offense or other offense against children; and
- To deter child molesters from wanting to work for you.
Your Child Sexual Abuse Best Practices program should be discussed within the interview process including 1) boundaries that limit private access to kids, 2) your assessment and communication process, 3) mandatory child sexual abuse prevention training for staff members and volunteers, 4) the creation of an accountability team with parents and children, and 5) pre-established consequences to boundary infractions.
Child molesters will quickly realize that they will not have their desired access to children and it is highly probable that they'll be caught if they try. Child molesters will likely want to work somewhere else that is still consumed by silence.