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Contact us today 800-743-6354 Login to your service Armatus Online Training Background Checks Know Your Score! Online Self-Assessment Home The Impact About Praesidium About Praesidium Praesidium was started more than two decades ago in response to a request from a youth-serving organization where a volunteer sexually abused a child participant. Overview Safety Equation ® Experts Clients News and Press Corporate Brochure Industries Industries Every organization that puts one person in charge of another runs the risk that a child or vulnerable adult will be sexually abused by an employee, a volunteer, a member of the clergy, or by another program participant. Overview Catholic Child Care Church and Faith-Based Elderly Higher Education Hospitals and Health Care Resort, Hospitality, and Entertainment Schools Social Services Youth Development Solutions Solutions Every organization is unique, with its own culture, practices, and risks. And the tools you use to prevent abuse must be unique also. Overview Anonymous Reporting Hotline Background Checks Bullying Prevention Catholic Men’s Religious Accreditation Catholic Safe Environment Getting Your Board on Board Incident Investigations Insurance Advantage Know Your Score! Policy Development Praesidium Guardian ™ Program Reputational Risk Management Risk Assessment and Accreditation ® Screening and Selection Training Youth and Parent Education Blog Contact Contact Praesidium exists “to help you protect those in your care from abuse and to help preserve trust in your organization.” We have designed this site as a resource and look forward to continuing the abuse prevention conversation with you. Contact Careers THE FACTS ARE ALARMING… THE FACTS ARE ALARMING… One in four girls and one in six boys sexually abused before age 18. Ten percent of school children targets of sexual misconduct. Incidents of children molesting other children up 300 percent in three years. One in seven nursing home residents and thousands of adults with disabilities abused. THE IMPACT OF ABUSE THE IMPACT OF ABUSE An incident of abuse can scar a child or vulnerable adult for a lifetime and destroy trust in an organization, its leadership, and its legacy. Allegations lead to lawsuits, plaintiff’s attorneys prevail in two-thirds of cases, awards run in the millions, and insurance costs skyrocket. LEARN MORE OUR TEAM. OUR EXPERIENCE. OUR TEAM. OUR EXPERIENCE. With more than two decades of experience, our dedicated team of researchers, psychologists, attorneys, social workers, and human resource professionals has analyzed thousands of cases of abuse in organizations and synthesized the latest scientific research. We know how abuse happens in organizations…and how to prevent it. LEARN MORE VALUABLE PARTNERSHIPS VALUABLE PARTNERSHIPS Praesidium partners with the leading organizations serving youths and vulnerable adults across the nation. Find out more about our work in your industry, then put our expert team to work for you. LEARN MORE BECOME AN EXPERT. BECOME AN EXPERT. Become a Certified Praesidium Guardian ™ . New dates available. Class size is limited! ENROLL NOW Overlays Share Tweet Previous Next Previous Next Home 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. LEARN MORE 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. Online Training Effective and dynamic sexual abuse prevention training with easy compliance tracking. Login Learn More Background Checks Run the most comprehensive checks in the industry on potential employees and volunteers. Login Learn More Online Self-Assessment Find out your organization's Safety Score with the click of a button. Login Learn More About Praesidium 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 organiz...