?
Sex abuse / molestation (SAM) is an even bigger issue in youth sports and recreation as a result of the Sandusky incidents and Penn State?s failure to properly deal with the situation. Insurance carriers that write General Liability policies that include coverage for sex abuse / molestation are concerned that publicity from Sandusky may open the floodgates for more victims to come forward and more litigation.
Whenever a SAM incident occurs, a civil lawsuit will likely be filed against not only the alleged perpetrator, but also the organization, officers, board, and others for failure to adequately screen staff, failure to implement policies and procedures to prevent an incident, and failure to appropriately respond to an allegation. Most insurance carriers that write SAM coverage on sports organizations won?t offer the coverage unless the organization has implemented certain controls that impact these areas.
Most sports and recreation organizations rely exclusively on running criminal background checks on all staff with access to youth. While this is required by case law and is a minimum level of due diligence, the effectiveness of solely relying on criminal background checks is questionable. The reason is because studies indicate that only about 5% of all predators have a criminal background that could even be discoverable upon running a background check. Therefore, the question becomes what is your sports organization doing to protect against the other 95%? What it should be doing is educating administrators and staff to create a hostile environment for predators, implementing simple policies and procedures, and implementing an allegation response plan that requires notification of law enforcement.
Many sports organizations get into SAM risk management by just shooting from the hip and running background checks without putting much thought into the entire process and what can go wrong along the way such as:
- slander, libel, and invasion of privacy lawsuits against the organization if background check results are not kept confidential
- illegal questions on staff application form and consent to run background check form
- unequal treatment of different candidates and resulting litigation due to lack of pre determined, written disqualification criteria
- failure to properly understand the nature of a conviction on a criminal background check and misclassification of the offense
- failure to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act and other similar laws
- failure to have written policies and procedures in place to make an incident less likely to occur
- failure to have allegation response procedures in place including a requirement to notify law enforcement
Long Form Sex Abuse / Molestation Risk Management Program (7 pages):
RECOMMENDED
Due to the problems outlined above, before running the first criminal background check, we recommend that a sports organization implement our written Sex Abuse / Molestation Risk Management Program which provides important administrator and staff education on the topic and protects against the above mentioned pitfalls. This program can be found at?Sadlersports.com/riskmanagement??in a word doc format (7 pages) entitled Sample Abuse / Molestation Plan that can be easily customized for a specific sports organization. Just make a few decisions about what policies and procedures you want to activate and fill in a few blanks and your custom program is available for adoption by board action, implementation, and distribution to all administrators and staff. Current clients of Sadler should access the latest and most up to date version of this document under the password protected section (right hand side of page) after entering the password that they are provided with their proof of coverage email upon binding of coverage. On the other hand, sports organizations that are not current Sadler clients should access this document under the unrestricted access section of the webpage available to general public (left hand side).
Short Form Sex Abuse / Molestation Risk Management Program (1 page)
However, we realize that some sports organizations may not want to adopt and implement our recommended 7 page SAM risk management program even though it is incredibly simple and we have already done just about all the work on their behalf. For these organizations, we offer a 1 page SAM risk management program that provides a basic educational program for administrators and staff; includes written policies and procedures to make an incident less likely to occur; and provides instructions on how to appropriately respond to an allegation. This 1 page SAM program can be found under the unrestricted access section (left hand side of webpage) at?Sadlersports.com/riskmanagement under the document entitled Child Abuse / Molestation Protection Program ? Administrators (short form).
Educational Videos
In addition, we offer the following free educational training videos to our clients that can be found under the password protected section of our risk management page:
- How To Implement An Abuse / Molestation Risk Management Program ? Administrators 14 minutes
- Abuse / Molestation Awareness Training ? Administrators And Staff (28 minutes)
John Sadler
Source: http://www.sadlersports.com/blog/set-sex-abuse-molestation-protection-program/
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.