KidCheck Secure Children's Check-In Shares The Top Safety Challenges and How To Address Them

Children are vulnerable, so child protection and safety are essential topics to prioritize. Understanding current safety challenges and that you will never entirely rid your organization of potential danger is an excellent first step to finding solutions that reduce risk and prioritize protection.

If you search for child safety information, you’ll see different philosophies for addressing everything from securing your facility to stopping predators. We aim to provide resources that effectively address the top safety challenges and help you create a secure environment.

Here are the top safety challenges and their solutions.

1. Child Abduction Prevention

Challenge: Protecting children from potential abductions. This can happen during children’s check-out, an event, a local field trip, or a bus ministry.

Solution: Implement secure children and youth check-in/out processes for only those authorized to retrieve the child. To prevent unauthorized pickup, use child name badges that include matching security codes, unique current identification photos, and distinguishable watermarks.

2. Speak Up Culture

Challenge: Build a strong culture that enables volunteers and staff to raise concerns about policy violations, ask questions, and deliver comments to leadership without fear of reprimand or retaliation.

Solution: As senior leadership, lay the foundation for accountability, commit to setting policies that support people who choose to speak up, offer a well-defined reporting process, and include it in onboarding and training information.

3. Crisis Communication

Challenge: Keep families and guardians informed about their children’s safety and well-being during a crisis.

Solution: Prioritize relevant, timely, and specific information that families need to know during a crisis. Share info with a calm tone that eliminates extraneous or exaggerated details. When communicating, try to immediately convey the point of your message and eliminate details that don’t align with it. Use text messaging, broadcast email, or an emergency alert system to keep families and other stakeholders informed. Apply these same principles to communicating with volunteers, staff, and leadership.

4. Legal Compliance

Challenge: Understand and comply with your state’s mandatory reporting laws. Who does your state include on its list of mandatory reporters? Is clergy or a pastor one of them? Do “pastorally privileged conversations” exempt you from disclosing abuse if a volunteer or family member discloses?

Solution: Learn about the laws in your state. But commit to reporting all known or suspected cases of child abuse, even if you aren’t considered a mandated reporter in your state.

5. Bullying

Challenge: Preventing and dealing with bullying and behavioral issues among children, youth, volunteers, and staff. Yes, kids and youth are not the only ones to experience bullying. Adults can also be victims.

Solution: Have a prevention strategy that outlines how your organization defines bullying, provides training, leads by example, openly discusses the topic, and acts.

6. Facility Security

Challenge: Secure your facility to prevent an indoor emergency such as unauthorized access, fire, power outages, chemical spills, and health or behavioral emergencies.

Solution: Ensure your Emergency Action Plan contains contact info for first responders, utility companies, poison control, a locksmith, and facility management. Utilize KidCheck safety resources such as the Emergency Instructions Flip Book to provide step-by-step instructions.

7. Predator Proofing

Challenge: Protect children and youth from potential predators that try to infiltrate your organization.

Solution: Prevent high-risk people from gaining access to children by establishing a Child Protection Policy, implementing a comprehensive screening process, and following guidelines that decrease isolation and increase accountability, such as the Rule of Two, bathroom procedures, and never putting a minor in charge of other minors.

8. Screening

Challenge: To eliminate easy access to kids and youth, protect all participants, and reduce the legal risk of poor placement of staff and volunteers.

Solution: Implement a comprehensive screening process that includes a written application, background check, social media review, personal & professional references, an in-person interview, motor vehicle report (if transporting), and a waiting period.

Click here to learn more about the benefits of using secure children’s and youth check-in to help manage your children’s area and improve safety. For more safety tips and information, subscribe to the KidCheck blog or connect with us on X, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube.

Photo by Michael Mims on Unsplash