What are Policies and Procedures?
Policies and Procedures are an essential backbone of your prevention strategy at your Youth-Serving Organization (YSO), providing an overarching…
Home / Safe Environments / Safe Environment Strategies: Visibility
Whether or not you can control the design of your space, physical safety depends on your ability to continuously account for all the children and youth in your care. From this perspective, visibility is key to protecting children and youth. Being seen is the greatest fear of those who would bully, assault, steal from, sexually abuse, or otherwise victimize children. Therefore, you should take actions within your means to design, build, or adapt your existing spaces to maximize visibility; to minimize or eliminate space where children and youth cannot be seen; and to establish policies and procedures for access to and use of the space (when both on- and off-site). Those policies should include:
*Find more information on staff-to-child ratios from the American Camp Association, and the Massachusetts Afterschool Research Study Report.
Overnight trips present different challenges related to visibility. If youth are staying in hotel/motel rooms, policies and procedures should:
Policies & Procedures
Policies and Procedures are an essential backbone of your prevention strategy at your Youth-Serving Organization (YSO), providing an overarching…
Policies & Procedures
Policies for youth-serving organizations in Massachusetts should clearly identify the duties and responsibilities of all staff, reflect both Federal…
Screening & Hiring
To determine what screening tools are most appropriate to use for a particular position and to ensure consistency in your screening protocols, we…
Screening & Hiring
Certain organizations, such as public schools and licensed childcare programs, must also query national criminal record and fingerprint-based…
Sustainability
Leadership at Youth-Serving Organizations (YSOs) should maintain regular communication on the culture of safety with staff, volunteers, parents, and…
Safe Environments
Standards should be implemented to ensure safe physical spaces for children, such as clear sight–lines and visitor procedures. To ensure child…
Screening & Hiring
To strengthen your screening and hiring process, you can use the questions in Thinking About Risk to make decisions about what additional background…
Screening & Hiring
If a criminal record is discovered, its existence alone does not necessarily automatically disqualify a candidate from employment or volunteer…
Code of Conduct
Every YSO has certain risks associated with its activities, functions, and responsibilities—and thinking about those risks is an important part of…
Training
The approaches in the chart below can provide frameworks that make your organization most effective when training adults and/or children/youth….
Customized child sexual abuse prevention guidelines to meet the unique needs of any organization that serves children.
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