Youth-serving organizations that send staff to trauma-informed care training often come back with a quiet, unstated conclusion that consequences are now optional. A camp counselor stops enforcing the no-phones rule for a camper with a hard home life. A program director drops a three-strikes policy because staff worry about retraumatizing anyone. Nobody writes this down…
Youth-serving organizations that receive federal funding face a specific liability framework under Title IX that most administrators understand only in outline. The deliberate indifference standard sounds protective — you cannot be liable unless you responded unreasonably to known harassment. In practice, though, the 11th Circuit’s cases show that a code of conduct, a harassment policy,…
On July 17, 1938, pilot Douglas Corrigan filed a flight plan from Brooklyn to California and landed in Dublin, Ireland twenty-eight hours later. He blamed a faulty compass. Corrigan’s story earned him the nickname “Wrong Way Corrigan” and a permanent place in aviation folklore. A youth-serving organization does not get that kind of forgiveness. When a program…
Debbie Ausburn and Tom Rawlings are leading a free webinar on July 22 that walks youth-serving organizations through building a child protection policy that works in real life, not just one that reads well in a binder. The session runs 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. ET through Early Childhood Investigations Webinars. Register in advance; the webinar…
The Founders built something that has lasted 250 years not because they got everything right the first time, but because they encoded principles, designed a system that could evolve, and then did the unglamorous work of making it function. I have spent decades advising and defending youth-serving organizations, and I see the same three failure…
Tom Rawlings and I recorded a six-part podcast series for YSO Academy, and all six episodes are now available. The series is called “Cultivating a Culture of Safety.” If you advise youth-serving organizations, or if you are an administrator working through child protection policy development, this series covers the full process. The six episodes run…
When a church in Delaware retained a pastor who had sexually abused two minor girls at prior churches, a jury found the organization liable after he committed a third assault at the new church. The decision illustrates the central question every youth-serving organization faces: what does adequate staff supervision actually require, and where does falling short become…
Every incident report your organization files is a legal document, not potentially, not only if something goes wrong, but a legal document from the moment someone signs it. After three decades of advising youth-serving organizations through litigation, licensing investigations, and regulatory audits, I have seen more cases turn on the quality of an incident report…
How a youth organization responds to a parent complaint about staff can determine its legal exposure. Here is what the law requires.
Many youth organizations have discovered the hard way that their child protection policies had a critical gap: they addressed what adults must not do to children but said nothing about what happens when one child harms another. That gap is not a minor oversight. Research, shows that more than 70% of child sexual abuse is perpetrated…