Increased monitoring of adult-child interactions is an important strategy to enhance the safety of children participating in YSO programming. This approach does, however, require tailoring to meet the differential needs of both “place-based” YSOs (e.g., Dance Studios, Youth Sports) and one-to- one mentoring programs (e.g., Big Brothers Big Sisters of America).

Increased Monitoring In Place-Based YSOs

The most direct way to ensure that adults maintain caring and professional relationships with children is to make certain that adult-child interactions are observable and interruptible. That is, adult-child interactions must be visible to other adults. Typically, we behave towards or in the presence of children with greater care and professionalism when we are in the presence of our peers and supervisors. Absent the immediate presence of other adults (e.g., during one-on-one instruction), the strong likelihood of being interrupted or observed also helps adults maintain professional behavior towards or in the presence of children.

Design the organization’s physical space to maximize visibility of adult-child interactions. Ideally, an organization’s buildings are designed, or redesigned, to enhance child health, safety, and wellbeing. Core principles of safe design should be followed to protect a child’s physical integrity. For instance, guardrails and protective gates are used to prevent small children from entering areas that present a risk for a fall, and secure storage areas are used to prevent children accessing hazardous materials such as cleaning supplies.

Similarly, spaces designed to increase the observability of adult-children interactions can enhance child safety by reducing the likelihood of abusive behaviors.

For example, the use of half walls (versus floor-to-ceiling walls) to divide spaces may ensure that interactions between a dance instructor and children are observable by other adults in the building. The use of glass panels in office walls and doors allows for other adults to observe interactions between staff and children. Organizations’ risks in all physical spaces should be identified and mitigated while maintaining a child’s right to privacy. For example, when children are using a bathroom or a changing room, they should be afforded a developmentally appropriate amount of privacy (e.g., older children and teens receive full privacy while younger children may need assistance). Other strategies to address safety while maintaining child’s right to privacy may include: restricting particular bathrooms to use by children in the same development stage or who are close in age, remodeling to increase the number of single stall bathrooms, limiting the number of children who can be in a bathroom at one time, or putting staff in charge of bathroom passes while encouraging staff to monitor how long children spend time in a bathroom unsupervised.

Establish regulations to enhance the visibility of adult-children. It is not always possible for adult child-interactions to occur in physical spaces with direct lines of sight available to other adults from the organization. For example, limitations in visibility might occur as a result of the characteristics of the organization’s physical space or due to the nature of the activity (e.g., in some mentoring programs, children and staff or volunteers are allowed to meet outside the organization’s physical space).

In these cases, regulations can enhance visibility. For example, a regulation that requires drivers to check in and check out after transporting children would enhance visibility by allowing supervisors to detect whether trips take longer than anticipated and to follow up accordingly. Similarly, rules can be established to increase the likelihood that adult-children interactions are interruptible or observable by other adults. The situations in which direct lines of sight to other adults in the organization is not possible might vary across an organization’s sites as well as between organizations. It will be necessary to create general rules that apply across all organization sites, as well as specific rules that address the local context of any given site.

The process of identifying situations in which adult-child interactions occur and procedures for increasing their visibility should be carried out with input from representatives of all relevant stakeholders, including organizational leaders and supervisors, front-line staff and volunteers, parents, and the children themselves. This process of identifying solutions to local circumstances with input from key constituents should help increase buy-in for implementing new rules.

Equally as important is the need for organizations to periodically and formally assess the implementation of new rules and to identify solutions when rules are occasionally or routinely violated. Further, staff and volunteers should be trained to address and report unexpected circumstances in which unobservable adult-child interactions are unavoidable. These circumstances can happen, for example, due to a reduction in the staff to child ratio when an employee calls-in sick, when a staff member has to leave the room to help another child, or when a parent does not show up to pick up a child.

Some situations of adult-child interaction are inherently more isolated and less visible. Some of these situations may also inherently present higher risks for abusive or inappropriate behavior.

Absent both the immediate presence of other adults and a strong likelihood of being interrupted or observed (e.g., when transporting a child to an event, or administering therapeutic treatment), the likelihood of children and parents being asked about children’s experiences in the YSO may serve to deter inappropriate behavior and foster caring and professional behavior.

YSO staff see and talk with children on an almost daily basis and have many opportunities to engage them about their experiences. Moreover, regular dialog between staff and children has a long-term benefit of teaching children that the staff are interested in hearing what they have to say and may help reinforce the norm of reaching out to staff “about anything”.

Likewise, YSO staff frequently encounter parents (e.g., during drop-off/pick-up) and can take advantage of those moments to ask about their or their children’s experiences. Additionally, such dialog could help identify occasional or common rule-violating behaviors, which indicate the need to intervene around a given staff/ volunteer or to revisit the rule itself and generate new solutions in cases where the rule is violated by several people.

Increased Monitoring in Mentoring Programs

National mentoring programs have demonstrated their ability to ensure high levels of safety for the children and teens that they serve for a great many years.

Mentoring programs are expressly designed to establish and encourage one-to-one relationships between a mentor and a well-matched youth in need of a caring relationship.

Since most programs encourage mentors to engage youth in a broad range of one-to-one healthy activities, the concept of “increased visibility” is not a good fit. However, as some mentoring programs have demonstrated, powerful monitoring strategies are available to maximize youth safety in this type of organization, as well.

The following discussion reflects the cutting-edge approaches that some of the most effective mentoring programs have put into place to ensure the safety of the children and teens involved in their mentoring programs.

Monitoring prospective mentors. Mentoring programs have utilized extensive background screening approaches. Some have paired this strategy with intensive applicant interviews and comprehensive reference checks to ensure that mentor applicants are as safe a choice as possible for pairing with program youth. The applicant process often also involves matching mentors to youth on a number of dimensions to foster successful and lasting relationships.

Training to strengthen safety monitoring. Training provided to youth and their parents, as part of the program’s orientation, allows them to play an active role in the safety monitoring process.

Training often includes, but is not limited to, such topics as: appropriate boundaries; prevention strategies and early indicators of child sexual abuse; how to report abuse; and program rules and expectations.

Mentor training also highlights these topics, as well, setting clear expectations and outlining program policies and strategies intended to maintain youth safety.

Intensive match monitoring & supervision. Youth safety has been enhanced through the use of ongoing and active program staff monitoring of the mentorship relationship as well as regular mentor supervision. Program staff receive extensive training to ensure their ability to closely monitor the mentorship match and to position them to identify early indicators of child sexual abuse and other forms of maltreatment. Some of the most effective match monitoring involves regular contacts by program staff with parents, youth, and mentors. For example, during the first year, Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America’s (BBBSA) match staff have monthly conversations with parents, youth, and mentors. During these contacts, staff collect general feedback on the match as well as “triangulating” descriptions of recent mentor-mentee outings. If discrepancies arise, they follow-up to ensure that mentors are following program guidelines and that there are not indicators of safety concerns. This process also offers staff an opportunity to work with mentors to provide them with supervision to support the match as well as clarify organizational guidelines and policies. Monitoring is a part of BBBSA’s ongoing safety efforts and after the first year is completed quarterly for all matches. It should be noted that this pattern of staff check-ins with youth, parents, and mentors is done on a random schedule to foster the clearest possible picture of mentor – youth interactions.

What Steps Does the Organization Take to Increase Monitoring of Adult-Child Interactions?

This table identifies critical questions to ask that are central to ensuring the organization has a systematic and effective approach to increasing the visibility of adult-child interactions, and when visibility is low. Leaders can use these questions and suggested strategies for addressing these questions to create their organization’s approach to visibility and monitoring.