Youth serving organizations take the lead to prevent child sexual abuse

While the headlines in newspapers highlight horrific cases of child sexual abuse in youth serving organizations, after a #PowerInPrevention Ending Child Sexual Abuse web conference last October I felt hopeful learning about the opportunities that these organizations can take to advance the work to end child sexual abuse.

By having organizations create an environment where child sexual abuse is a topic that can be discussed, where people are seen as approachable about this topic and there are strong guidelines in place, youth serving organizations can be in the front lines in efforts to prevent child sexual abuse. Jetta Bernier of the Enough Abuse campaign in Massachusetts and Malia Arlington of the United States Olympic Committee shared resources to assist youth service organizations in preventing child sexual abuse. For example, check out the SafeSport toolkit that includes resources, templates, and standards to create effective policies.  Several years ago the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Preventing Child Sexual Abuse Within Youth-serving Organizations: Getting Started on Policies and Procedures.  In the September 2013 issue of the Prevention Researcher, #PowerInPrevention co-host Joan Tabachnick wrote Creating Organizational Policies to Prevent Sexual Abuse.

The web conference, Power of Organizational Practices: Innovations to Keep Kids Safer, was third session of a the most recent series of web conferences sponsored by the Ms. Foundation for Women and PreventConnect.  You can listen to the following podcasts summarizing the web conference.

• Joan Tabachnick and Cordelia Anderson, Working with youth organizations to end child sexual abuse
• Jetta Bernier, Enough Abuse Campaign: Resources to end child sexual abuse
• Malia Arrington, Preventing forms of misconduct in sports: SafeSport Initiative

This web conference followed up a previous web conference held in 2012 titled After Sandusky: What we have learned to prevent child sexual abuse in youth-serving organizations.

Click here for more information about this series and sign up here for announcements for future web conferences.