Gunnar Simonsen was kind enough to sent me a link to this article on Twitter late last week, right as I was going offline for much of the next few days. So, I haven’t had a chance to share it with you here. It is his perspective on being in the court room as a family friend faces her abuser. It’s quite moving, and inspirational. Take a look for yourself:
This makes sense. Even something as common and necessary as background checks are only going to catch people who’ve already been caught before. It’s a good thing to do, but it leaves that gap. What doesn’t leave a gap is having policies and procedures in place that prevent anyone from being able to abuse kids when working with your organization. If being alone with a child is simply not acceptable for anyone, that closes those gaps.
As the article goes on, that means rules like not giving kids gifts, not driving them home, etc. That’s what works, and it has to just be the culture in the organization, no questions asked. Create that culture, and you’re making the best effort to protect kids that you can make.
What if the operators on the line do get the necessary training and we make all the improvements we can make as we learn how to do this better, and there is just no system to hand the caller off to? Because I feel like that might be the case for some callers. The call is a door to care, but is the follow-up care available?
The Times published a report about the ongoing issue of natural parents circumventing the official channels by using Facebook to contact children that had been adopted. Since The Times sits behind a paywall, the Daily Telegraph’s take on the story, with collected stories in the centre of the page, is here. – CBG
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