Young students participate in an art class, guided by their teacher in a creative indoor setting.

When the Two-Adult Rule Doesn’t Work for Your Organization, and What to Do Instead

ByDebbie Ausburn

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 alternatives. Organizations that cannot staff a two-adult policy are not automatically negligent, but they do need to document a defensible alternative.

No Universal Standard Requires It

California comes closest to a codified rule, and even there the requirement is narrower than most organizations assume. A 2021 California law requires two mandated reporters present “to the greatest extent possible,” not two adults in a general sense. A 2022 amendment then exempted one-to-one mentoring organizations from that requirement entirely, so long as they adopt reporting, screening, training, and regular-contact policies instead.

A 2018 federal statute limits one-on-one contact for organizations under the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic movement, a narrow category that excludes most YSOs. I found no other state statute imposing a general two-adult requirement, and no regulatory body treating two-deep leadership as a mandatory national standard.

The Evidence Base Is Thin

This matters for standard-of-care analysis. Plaintiffs’ experts sometimes argue that an organization deviated from “industry standard” by not running a two-adult policy. That argument carries less weight than it sounds like it should. A 2024 peer-reviewed review noted that two-deep leadership and the related “rule of three” have never been evaluated for effectiveness. Youth-serving organizations use these practices because experts have recommended them, not because research demonstrates they reduce abuse. The same review states the practice “may not be ideal” for one-on-one program models.

An unproven practice may still a practice worth following when you can staff it. But a plaintiff cannot fairly argue that an organization breached a national community standard by using a documented, principle-based alternative instead of a rule with no evaluated track record of its own. Courts ask whether an organization exercised reasonable care under its individual circumstances. They do not ask whether it copied a not-similar national organization’s internal policy.

What Similar Organizations Do

Absence of a codified rule and absence of proof of effectiveness do not end the standard-of-care inquiry. Courts and experts also look at custom: what do organizations of comparable size and staffing actually do in practice? A national organization with paid staff and a deep volunteer bench faces a different standard than a three-person nonprofit running a mentoring program on volunteer hours alone. The more defensible comparison for a small YSO is not “what does the Boy Scouts require,” but “what do other organizations our size, with our staffing constraints, actually implement.”

This cuts both ways. If most comparably sized organizations in your field have found a workable alternative to two-deep leadership and yours has not, that gap is worth closing before it becomes a liability question. If most comparably sized organizations can’t staff two-deep leadership either and rely on the same observable-interruptible principles, that shared practice is itself evidence of a reasonable standard, not a shortcut around one.

Document which comparison applies to your organization. It matters more than whether you match a recommendation from a national organization with a different staffing model than yours.

What This Means for Your Organization

If your organization cannot staff two-deep leadership, three things reduce your exposure:

  • Document the alternative in writing. A supervision plan that exists only informally gives you nothing to point to if a claim arises later.
  • Match the alternative to your program model. Group programs can rely on sightlines, scheduled walk-throughs, and visual-distance rules. One-on-one mentoring programs can follow the screening-training-monitoring structure that national mentoring standards and California’s own mentoring exemption both rely on.
  • Train your board and supervisors on the policy you use. A written policy nobody follows creates its own liability problem, separate from whether the policy itself was adequate.

The Bottom Line

Two-deep leadership is a reasonable choice when you can staff it, but it is not a legal mandate outside a narrow set of contexts.  More important, there is no proof that it’s more effective than the alternatives. If your organization runs a different model, document why, document what you do instead, and make sure that documentation matches your actual practice. That is what a court will look for. It is not whether you matched an outside organization’s internal rule.


Chalmers, Adams, Backer & Wallen advises youth-serving organizations on building defensible child protection policies suited to their actual staffing and program models.

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