What This Year’s ISPCAN Congress Confirmed About Safeguarding Culture
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 gap should sound familiar. I have written about it before in the context of negligent supervision claims and Code of Conduct enforcement. What struck me at this congress is how consistently the same gap showed up across different legal systems, cultures, and sectors, from national workforce training programs to individual schools to community organizations.
Several sessions converged on a similar diagnosis. The problem is rarely that staff have never seen a policy. The problem is that staff do not trust their own judgment when they hit a gray-area decision in real time. One project working across several countries on frontline training for online abuse found that workers often assumed online harm required specialized technical skill they did not have, so they hesitated instead of reporting. The training had not built their confidence to apply ordinary safeguarding judgment to an unfamiliar context.
A second theme surprised me. Presenters described a rise in reported concerns as a good outcome, not a warning sign. One workforce framed an increase in reports as a shift from silence to vigilance. For organizations that treat every rise in incident numbers as bad news, this reframe is worth considering. A higher report count can mean people trust the system enough to use it.
A third theme addressed accountability structure directly. Several presenters discussed independent, external oversight models, built specifically because trust and loyalty within an organization can compromise internal reporting lines. That is a different answer to “who reviews the reviewer” than most YSOs currently have in place.
We presented a poster at this congress on just culture principles, building on our own writing about how organizations should respond when staff make mistakes.
Finally, one session raised an argument I had not seen framed this way before: training accessibility is itself a safeguarding control, not just an equity feature. If staff cannot understand a training because of language, literacy, or format, organizations cannot expect them to reliably recognize or report harm. That has real implications for any organization that treats training completion as proof of a functioning safeguarding program.
Before your fall training cycle, three questions are worth asking:
- Does your training build staff confidence to act on judgment calls, not just knowledge of the policy?
- Do you treat a rise in reported concerns as a system working, or a system failing?
- If loyalty or hierarchy compromises your internal reporting line, is there any independent path for a concern to surface?
If you have any thoughts or questions about how to implement these research topics into your program, continue following this blog or call us for direct help.
