Family Trauma Institute: How to Heal Trauma…
One of the biggest fallouts from the pandemic is that parent-child conflict was amplified or…
Build Your Toolkit
A Comprehensive Resource to Keep Children Safe
Ready to create a customized path toward understanding and preventing child/youth sexual abuse at your organization?
There’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach to keeping children/youth safe from sexual abuse. That’s why we took an inclusive approach to creating this resource, addressing the child/youth protection needs and concerns of any organization, establishment, facility, small business, or club that provides services and activities for children/youth. With this inclusive focus, we present an evidence-based process with the building blocks that YSOs of every type need to create a comprehensive child sexual abuse prevention program. In this way, each YSO can assess and strengthen their current safety practices, or craft a safety program that applies to their community, function, culture, and circumstances.
Our prevention and intervention practices and tools can be applied by individuals or groups and tailored to meet the wide-ranging needs of YSOs of every type, size, and function.
- Abuse prevention policies and procedures
- A screening and hiring process to detect and deter prospective employees and volunteers who should not be placed in positions of trust with minor children
- A code of conduct detailing expected and prohibited behaviors and interactions between employees, volunteers, children and youth
- Methods that help to create and maintain a safe physical environment, and establish safe boundaries for the use of social media and technologies
- Protocols for employees and volunteers in the event a child/youth discloses abuse, or when abuse is suspected or observed
- An onsite and/or online child sexual abuse prevention training and education program for all staff, employees, and volunteers
A Leadership Imperative
Our recommended organizational changes and policy initiatives require leadership—not only in making the case for the new safety initiatives, but in ensuring a wide collaboration among all those who will be affected by them: managers, supervisors, employees, volunteers, parents, and children/youth. Collaboration must account for both the necessary strategies and the organizational culture in which the changes and new processes are going to take place. Maintaining forward movement in your safety program depends on monitoring, assessment, feedback, open lines of communication, encouragement, and sustained engagement—all focused on that one important outcome: child/youth safety.
