Many of us who
work professionally with youth have been following the reports of former
Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky, from the initial accusations to the
arrest, then trial, and now conviction on most counts. In addition to this
story, there is the series
of articles about a culture of abuse at a private prep school in Manhattan
and, in the San Francisco Bay Area, we’ve also seen several other
significant reports of adults in trusted positions who have sexually abused
youth. While we’re encouraged in seeing an increased awareness about this issue
(as these abuses happen far more often than most people think or hear about),
we are deeply saddened that there continues to be more incidents.
Child
sexual abuse cases like these often prompt responses similar to, “It shouldn’t
have happened!” or “How could these people have had access to vulnerable
youth?” or “Why wasn’t anyone noticing what was going on?” For many people who
don’t have exposure to abused or neglected youth or know someone who has had
this experience, it is natural to be upset even hearing the words used to
describe such incidents. Indeed, it can be difficult to even consider that
another person is capable of hurting a child this way. Even though it is an
extremely uncomfortable topic that generates anxiety and fear, the potential
danger for youth is too great for us not to talk about it.
Friends for
Youth has been the leader in the youth mentoring field in developing guidelines
for programs to implement in order to only select volunteer mentors who are
safe. Based on research over the years to produce our resource SAFE(Screening Applicants for Effectiveness): Guidelines to Prevent ChildMolestation in Mentoring and Youth-Serving Organizations – and more recently for our chapter to be
included in the new Handbook on Youth Mentoring, available by the end of this year
– we help organizations do better by offering recommendations on the screening
and monitoring process and developing policies and procedures to ensure
compliance.
In recent
trainings with mentoring professionals, I’ve been able to discuss very
realistic examples to illustrate our recommendations, including
- Perpetrators often become so well known and liked in a community that family, friends, and acquaintances will go to great lengths to defend them
- By relying solely on a criminal history background check, programs aren’t adequately doing their job of ensuring their volunteers are safe
- Perpetrators will seek many opportunities to have access with children they wish to harm, including volunteer and charitable work
- Most people don’t want to think anyone else is capable of sexually abusing a child, so they often “discount” what they see and hear
- Often, though, after the abuse has been publicized, these same people reflect back on what they saw or heard and realize that they did notice something that made them uncomfortable
After a
similar event from several years ago, Kenneth Lanning, a retired FBI behavior
analyst who studied child molesters, said the perpetrator showed indicators of
concern, but “the indicators are
things the average person is not trained to recognize.” Through SAFE,
we educate program staff about those indicators and recommend specific tools
and processes to implement in order to spot them.
If you are feeling helpless, hopeless, or discouraged by the state of
programs designed to support youth and help them thrive, know that you can do
something. We recommend
- Asking if other programs that work with children in your community are effectively screening volunteers, both adults and other youth (check out this list of questions for parents from Stop It Now!)
- Letting them know about our SAFE training and resources that we provide to other youth-serving organizations
- Donating to our SAFE 2012 Campaign in order to help us raise funds to produce a new edition of SAFE that will include more recent recommendations and a trainer’s guide, allowing us to reach more youth-serving programs than ever
Thank you
for doing all you can to support youth by keeping them safe and helping them
thrive!
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