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Safety Equation^®

Praesidium's Safety Equation® identifies eight organizational operations that provide opportunities to decrease the risk of abuse by employees, volunteers, or other program participants. Using current research and root-cause analyses of thousands of cases of abuse across a diverse range of organizations, Praesidium has identified best practices in each operation and created products and services that help organizations implement these practices.

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Policies	Screening and Selection	Training
Monitoring and Supervision	Internal Feedback Systems	Consumer Participation
Responding	Administrative Practices	A Safe Environment

Click on the tiles above to read about each operation of the Safety Equation^®

Policies

Policies define the bandwidth of acceptable behavior in an organization, and offenders often violate policies in their interactions with clients. When employees can identify policy violations, they are able to interrupt and report them. Simply interrupting a policy violation can prevent a false allegation of abuse or put an offender on notice that the rules apply to everyone and violations will not be tolerated.

Screening and Selection

Offenders must have access to clients before they can offend, so organizations should do everything possible to avoid giving access to someone who should not be in a position of trust. While criminal background checks are necessary, less than 5 percent of offenders have criminal records. Comprehensive screening and selection requires organizations to systematically discover and consider everything they can about applicants.

Training

Offenders often act in predictable ways and effective training can provide employees and volunteers with the information they need to identify high-risk patterns of behavior and high-risk program characteristics. Training must be specific, frequent, and useful and it must teach how offenders operate, how to recognize suspicious or inappropriate interactions or policy violations and suspected abuse, and how to respond effectively.

Monitoring and Supervision

When employees and volunteers are adequately supervised, potential offenders are less likely to act on their impulses because they face detection. And when clients are adequately supervised, they too are less likely to engage in inappropriate interactions with others. Effective supervision and monitoring requires the systematic use of a variety of methods, including locations that might permit unauthorized privacy.

Internal Feedback Systems

Information about program operations can identify high-risk programs or individuals; where increased monitoring, supervision and training or policy changes may be needed; or even whether a program should be allowed to continue. Complaints from employees, volunteers, or consumers; serious or frequent incidents; and violations noted by external licensing bodies, for example, can be used to identify potential gaps in safety practices.

Consumer Participation

Educated consumers—both clients and interested others—can contribute to overall safety. But to do so, they must know the organization's policies and how to respond if they notice policy violations or interactions that make them uncomfortable. Encouraging consumers to share their concerns, and periodically surveying them about their experiences, provides useful information about program operations.

Responding

How an organization responds to suspicious or inappropriate interactions or policy violations, and to incidents or allegations of abuse, can dramatically affect the harm to the individual and damage to the organization. Once an organization learns of a concern or allegation about the treatment of a client, swift and determined action, including reports to authorities, must be taken to reduce any subsequent risk of harm.

Administrative Practices

The board of directors ultimately owns the responsibility for establishing policies that ensure safety. To do this they must be well informed of the risks the organization embraces in each of its programs and the practices in place to ensure safety. Organization leadership must see to it that programs comply with policies and that drift from standards is quickly remedied.

Praesidium was started more than 20 years ago in response to a request from a youth serving organization that was reeling from an incident of child sexual abuse. At that time, little was known about how abuse occurred in organizations and what could be done to stop it.

After two decades of research and experience with more than 4,000 youth and vulnerable adult serving organizations, Praesidium knows who's at risk, what types of programs are the most dangerous, and where and under what circumstances incidents and false allegations are most likely to occur.

Armed with this knowledge, Praesidium has built a comprehensive range of products and services to help your organization.

Learn more about Praesidium’s history, our expert team, and the methodology behind our work.

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