What to Do in the First 24 Hours After an Incident

When Pawleys Island Community Church’s then-pastor Don Williams addressed his congregation about allegations that the church had allowed a sex offender to have access to children, he did not engage with parents shouting questions at him. Days later, his resignation letter described staff as “unfairly caught in the crossfire of this past week” and asked for prayer. It never directly addressed what leaders knew or when.

Four criminal charges and four lawsuits later, that response looks like ordinary legal advice that didn’t serve the organization’s mission. How an organization responds to a crisis becomes part of the story. It often becomes the part a jury and the public remember longest.

Part of the problem is that you are having to make important decisions in the midst of a crisis.  Silence may be the safest short-term option, but it could cause long-term damage in terms of trust and reputation.  Before you find yourself in the situation, build a plan that will help you respond with transparency without putting your organization at risk.

Activate Your Team Before You Have Time to Think

The moment a report comes in, your child safety coordinator or crisis lead needs to activate your response team. Do not try to assemble one from scratch. Each person on that team should already know their job: legal, insurance, communications, documentation, and law enforcement liaison.

If your organization is small, one person may hold several of these roles. But every role still needs a name attached before a crisis hits, not during one.

Run tabletop exercises regularly so your team has practiced this before it matters. Pull a recent news story and put it in front of your team. Ask what your organization would do if the story were about you.

That exercise builds the reflexes you need when an actual report arrives. It also gives you the chance to pre-draft the shell of a public statement. Then you are filling in blanks under pressure, not starting from a blank page.

Isolate the Accused, Even When It Feels Unfair

Suspend or otherwise separate the accused person from contact with children immediately. This rule applies whether the allegation is current or decades old. Doing this will feel unfair to the accused, and sometimes it is. But innocent-until-proven-guilty is a criminal law standard, not an organizational one. Your first obligation is keeping every child in your care out of the zone of danger while investigators sort out the facts.

Report, Notify Insurance, and Start Documenting Immediately

If you have reasonable grounds to believe a child suffered abuse, you have a mandated reporting obligation. Report to the appropriate authority right away. Do not delay the report while you investigate further.

Notify your insurance carrier the same day. Carriers can deny coverage later if you failed to give timely notice. That is not a fight worth having on top of everything else.

Start collecting written statements from every witness immediately. Get them in writing. Memory is not static, and people experience hindsight bias without realizing it.

A statement taken a month later will not match the actual events as closely as one taken the same week. If children are involved, do not ask leading questions. Let them describe what happened in their own words.

Gather every file connected to the claimant and the accused, not just the obvious personnel or student files. Emails, training records, curriculum files, attendance sheets, and time cards can all become relevant later. Preserving them now is far easier than reconstructing them after the fact.

This matters even more for historical claims. The paper trail is thinner there, and every surviving document counts.

Silence Reads as Guilt, Even When That’s Not the Intent

Every organization gets some version of the standard legal advice to say as little as possible. That advice protects the organization from litigation risk, and it is not wrong on its own terms. But a YSO is not an ordinary defendant. You have an ongoing relationship with the families you serve.

Those families notice the difference between “we cannot discuss specifics while investigators do their work” and total silence. The first is honest and protective. The second reads as concealment, whether or not that is the intent.

Silence compounds the very problem it was meant to prevent. That is exactly what happened at Pawleys Island. Williams never engaged with parents who shouted questions at the meeting, and his resignation letter never addressed what leaders knew or when.

You do not have to disclose facts you do not have yet, and you should not speculate. But you can say what you are doing right now. Tell families who you have notified, what steps you have taken to protect children today, and when they should expect to hear more.

Silence on all three of those points is what makes people assume the worst. Once a community decides your organization is hiding something, no later disclosure fully undoes that impression.

Keep Information on a Need-to-Know Basis, Then Meet With Your Community Anyway

Confidentiality protects the integrity of your investigation. It also protects you from becoming a source of gossip and misinformation. But confidentiality does not mean silence.

Meet with parents and staff within the first week, or as soon as you can. If you expect the meeting to be hostile, consider having someone other than your most visible leader deliver the message. This is a practical decision about who can absorb the room’s anger most effectively. It is not an attempt to hide.

With employees, you can lean on confidentiality obligations already built into their employment agreements. With parents, do not ask for a non-disclosure agreement.  Parents owe your organization no duty of confidentiality. Asking for one signals that you are hiding something instead of answering honestly.

Stay in the Loop With Law Enforcement, But Don’t Let Them Silence You

Continue communicating with law enforcement and CPS throughout the process. Be prepared to negotiate when they request records your regulations treat as confidential. Ask for a warrant or a written release if you need one to protect yourself.

At the same time, do not accept a blanket instruction that you cannot tell your own families anything. Investigators sometimes tell organizations that any disclosure could constitute obstruction. That claim is rarely true. Rather than simply accepting the restriction, ask your lawyer to intercede with them about your obligation to communicate to your parents and stakeholders.

The Bottom Line

A crisis response plan, built and rehearsed before you need it, changes everything. It is the difference between reacting well and reacting in a way that becomes its own liability. Take these steps now, before your organization faces its own version of this story:

• Name your crisis response team and its roles before an incident happens. Run tabletop exercises regularly.
• Suspend or isolate an accused person immediately, regardless of how old the allegation is.
• Notify your insurance carrier and start collecting written statements the same day a report comes in.
• Say what you are doing right now, even when you cannot share every detail. Do not let “no comment” be your entire response.
• Meet with your community within the first week. Never ask parents for a non-disclosure agreement.

You may not be able to avoid a crisis in your organization, but these steps will help you avoid making it worse.