Reporting Abuse/Sexual Abuse Training

[Allison K]

Originally Posted by Carolyn_Grace

In most churches (and all American Catholic churches now), if you are working with minors in any way you have to go through a training on sexual abuse. I believe the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are working on implementing a similar program (if they haven't already). FIRST is a similar situation: adults working with minors. Part of mentoring should be knowing what to do if this situation ever comes up.

Boy Scouts has offered Youth Protection Training for many years (as long as I can remember), and as of June every adult volunteer is required to take the course to register as a Boy Scout Leader. It covers the BSA's Youth Protection policies, kinds of abuse, signs of abuse, how to respond to disclosure of abuse, and proper reporting procedures. It goes beyond sexual abuse and (in a reasonable manner and time frame) covers a variety of situations that, if handled poorly, could have a drastic negative impact on the organization.

An important note on youth protection is that it's not only important to protect youth from possible harm, but also to protect adults from false accusations.

The training offered by the BSA doesn't take long and I think it provides valuable information. I think FIRST would probably benefit from something similar but they do not appear to be set up in a way that would facilitate mass training opportunities. There is a lot of infrastructure that would need to be put in place.

~Allison