Every plaintiff’s attorney in a youth sexual abuse case asks the same question: did the organization follow accepted safety practices? Many organizations assume the answer required two adults present at every activity. That assumption does not hold up under scrutiny. No universal legal standard requires it, and no research shows it works better than the…
As summer programs wind down and school-year programs start up, many organizations pause between training cycles. That pause is worth using to look at your training program. One of the first questions anyone asks after something goes wrong is whether your organization trained its staff. The real question is not whether a training happened, but…
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…
Most youth-serving organizations treat the field trip permission slip as a formality. Parents sign it, someone files it in a folder, and everyone moves on. That habit creates real legal exposure. A permission slip is not just paperwork. It is evidence, and in litigation, it can become the single document both sides fight over. Describe…
Georgetown County, South Carolina prosecutors have charged three former Pawleys Island employees, including its former pastor, with obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Sheriff Carter Weaver said an “abundance of evidence” showed the three placed children at risk by concealing a volunteer’s status as a convicted sex offender. In addition, four plaintiffs have filed lawsuits against the church, the…
Every August, as new volunteers sign up for the school year, the same question crosses an administrator’s desk. How thorough should this person’s background check be? The instinct is to answer by job category, treating volunteers as one group and staff as another. The dividing line that actually matters is access to children, not the…
A background check that comes back clean does not end an organization’s legal exposure. It only removes one source of it. The larger risk is in constructive knowledge: what an organization knew, or should have known, before something went wrong. Two ways to be negligent, not one Negligent hiring and negligent supervision claims do not…
A federal court in Texas once found that the state’s child welfare agency had done nothing to reduce caseloads, even though it knew children were being harmed as a result. Caseworkers were carrying more than double the recognized caseload limit. Some went months without seeing the children on their lists. The court did not describe a…
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…