October is National Bullying Prevention Month and often prompts programs and pledges. It is also a useful occasion to examine what negligent supervision claims require when a peer, not an adult, causes the harm. That standard is more precise, and more forgiving in some cases, than most administrators assume. Peer Harm More Common Than Adult Abuse The…
Seven states have enacted a version of Trey’s Law, and a federal bill has passed the U.S. Senate. Those laws prevent settlement agreements in child abuse claims from requiring confidentiality. Every version voids a nondisclosure clause to the extent it prohibits disclosure of child sexual abuse or facts related to it. Most of them leave settlement-amount confidentiality intact. None…
Minnesota made grooming a stand-alone felony this August, and other states have passed similar laws in recent years. It is a genuinely interesting development in criminal law, and it is worth understanding. But the law really doesn’t address how grooming works. More important, if you run a youth-serving organization, none of these new criminal statutes…
Every plaintiff’s attorney in a youth sexual abuse case asks the same question: did the organization follow accepted safety practices? Many organizations assume the answer required two adults present at every activity. That assumption does not hold up under scrutiny. No universal legal standard requires it, and no research shows it works better than the…
As summer programs wind down and school-year programs start up, many organizations pause between training cycles. That pause is worth using to look at your training program. One of the first questions anyone asks after something goes wrong is whether your organization trained its staff. The real question is not whether a training happened, but…
Earlier this week, I presented a poster at the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN)‘s 2026 World Congress in Melbourne. Researchers and practitioners from child protection systems around the world presented their work, and one theme surfaced again and again: a safeguarding policy on paper does not guarantee safe practice. That…
Most youth-serving organizations treat the field trip permission slip as a formality. Parents sign it, someone files it in a folder, and everyone moves on. That habit creates real legal exposure. A permission slip is not just paperwork. It is evidence, and in litigation, it can become the single document both sides fight over. Describe…
Georgetown County, South Carolina prosecutors have charged three former Pawleys Island employees, including its former pastor, with obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Sheriff Carter Weaver said an “abundance of evidence” showed the three placed children at risk by concealing a volunteer’s status as a convicted sex offender. In addition, four plaintiffs have filed lawsuits against the church, the…
Every August, as new volunteers sign up for the school year, the same question crosses an administrator’s desk. How thorough should this person’s background check be? The instinct is to answer by job category, treating volunteers as one group and staff as another. The dividing line that actually matters is access to children, not the…
A background check that comes back clean does not end an organization’s legal exposure. It only removes one source of it. The larger risk is in constructive knowledge: what an organization knew, or should have known, before something went wrong. Two ways to be negligent, not one Negligent hiring and negligent supervision claims do not…