Sexual abuse is rising.

Most organizations are required to use the same, failing prevention process. Instead, you could:

1. Understand how the children or vulnerable adults in your care are potentially at risk of sexual abuse.
2. Select appropriate controls for your organization.
3. Ensure your controls are always appropriate and effective.

Sexual abuse is rising because of incomplete and out-of-date prevention practices.

If you work with children or vulnerable adults, and you see sexual abuse headline after headline, rising sexual abuse is likely leaving you with a gnawing feeling that you could be doing more to protect them from sexual abuse.

Unfortunately, there’s a good reason for your feeling.

Sexual abuse is rising because the approach most organizations use to prevent sexual abuse is incomplete and out of date.

The approach is called the “safe environment,” though it’s known in different sectors by names like SafeSport, Charter Safe, Safe Parish, and others. The safe environment approach performs a vital function. It ensures at least minimum sexual abuse prevention is universally applied.

But, so that it can be used universally, it only includes controls every organization can use; it’s necessarily incomplete. And to keep it simple to use, its basic framework hasn’t been updated in over twenty years.

And that’s why sexual abuse is rising; no system can be effective if it is incomplete by design and doesn’t adapt.

Because you work with children, you would choose to use the best practices to protect them if you knew you had the choice. But because you work with children, you are likely not a risk management expert, so you don’t realize the risk management choices you have.

The result is that, currently, you are almost certainly using abuse prevention controls required by your version of the safe environment, which are a long way from risk management best practices. Risk management best practice is the research-proven most effective way to prevent negative events like sexual abuse. A safe environment is at least two generations of risk management best practices behind current best practices.

Instead of continuing with incomplete and out-of-date controls, we’ll show you how to use risk management best practices. We’ll help you identify where the minors and vulnerable adults in your care may be at risk of being sexually abused. We’ll show you your control choices for addressing the vulnerabilities you identify and help you implement them. We’ll also show you how to establish processes that ensure the controls you choose work and keep working over the long term.

We’ll ensure that, instead of a gnawing feeling you could be doing more to protect the children and vulnerable adults in your care, you will have good reason to be confident you are protecting them as well as possible.

Out-of-date practices have real consequences.

You are right if you think you could be doing more to protect children from sexual abuse – because there is so much more you need to do to protect them effectively.

1. You cannot rely on a safe environment to keep children or vulnerable adults safe.

The basic safe environment framework hasn’t changed in over twenty years. Its controls are important but are not even close to enough to prevent sexual abuse from rising.

2. A safe environment is an unconvincing way to describe how seriously you take child protection.

You need to be convincing when you ask people to trust how seriously you take child protection. To be convincing requires using the best practices, which you cannot claim with a safe environment because it only involves minimum requirements.

3. You need to protect your organization from the consequences of a safe environment not being enough to prevent sexual abuse.

The safe environment was designed to protect children, not organizations that cannot prevent sexual abuse, even when they diligently use the safe environment. The consequences of failure (disruption, reputation damage, legal threats, and financial costs) have all risen exponentially in the last ten years.

You're not a risk management expert, so how do you start using its best practices?

If you are like almost all youth-serving organizations, you have limited risk management experience. You can’t afford a full-time risk manager and don’t have the funds or patience to wait months for a consultant to develop your sexual abuse risk management system.

So, though you want to use the best practices to keep children as safe as possible and reduce your legal, disruption, reputation, and financial risks as far as possible, where do you start?

We have created BRM – for BOK Risk Management.©

BRM makes using risk management best practices to manage sexual abuse risk easy because it guides you step-by-step through the process and ensures you always have access to the information you need to make well-informed choices.

We guide you all the way

We have helped hundreds of organizations to develop their sexual abuse risk management system.

Our service includes training, step-by-step guidance, direct facilitation, constant real-time support, and practical sexual abuse risk management tools. We only take on so many new customers at a time, so we can devote time and attention to you and make it easy for you to learn how to manage sexual abuse risk like an expert, even without any risk management experience.

The result is that, instead of worrying if you are doing enough to protect children and vulnerable adults, you will be:

Confident you are protecting the children and vulnerable adults in your care using the best practices.
Convincing when you ask others to trust that you are using the best practices to protect children.
Confident you are comprehensively protecting your organization.

The core elements of BRM

The Sexual Abuse Risk Management Application

Our application guides you step-by-step through the three-stage cycle of risk management best practices customized for sexual abuse risk.

The SAM Risk BOK

The SAM Risk BOK is a constantly updated body of knowledge containing everything we learn and everything you need to know about sexual abuse risk and how to use risk management best practices to manage it.

The Stages of BRM

1. Assess

A sexual abuse risk assessment ensures you understand all the sexual abuse vulnerabilities and risks that result from your organization's nature.

2. Customize

When you understand your vulnerabilities and risks, you can customize a risk management system of controls and processes that keeps children and your organization as safe from sexual abuse and its consequences as possible.

3. Manage

Managing your risk means performing the processes that ensure controls remain effective, synchronized with your organization and its risks, and continuously improving, so you keep them all at best practice levels over the long term.

You will also contribute to improving child protection best practice

Our objective is to reduce sexual abuse as far as possible. That’s why we are formed as a platform.

As a platform, we can measure sexual abuse risk management performance across multiple organizations and sectors and share everything we learn with you, as soon as we learn it.

By contributing to our platform, you directly, albeit anonymously, contribute to the continuous improvement of child protection best practices.

It's not just your sexual abuse risk management you transform.
You contribute to continuously improving the best practices to protect every child and vulnerable adult.

If any of these thoughts sound familiar, BOKRIM is for you.

"I feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of keeping our children safe. There are so many risks, and I don't even know where to begin addressing them."

"It's difficult to balance protecting children with maintaining a welcoming and open environment. I don't want to scare away families or make them feel like we don't trust them."

"I lose sleep over the thought of potential lawsuits and the damage it could do to our organization. I want to be confident that we've done everything in our power to prevent abuse."

"It's crucial for everyone to be on the same page and equipped with the right knowledge to prevent and identify sexual abuse but we lack the resources and expertise to properly train our staff and volunteers."

"I'm not sure how we would handle a situation where we suspected abuse might be occurring. What are the proper protocols, and who should we turn to for help?"

"We want to protect all the children in our care as well as we can but we just don't know where to start."

It's obvious to us that a criminal background check, a video, and a policy about not being alone with children isn't enough to protect children. But what is 'enough'?"

What our customers say about our service

Thank you for making this so easy for us.

This is exactly the practical help I was looking for.

Our community expects that a plan exists to identify abuse risks, develop criteria to implement athlete safety, and a framework to monitor, report and continually improve with transparency. Now we have that.

Thank you! This is great, great, great stuff!

The system is great - I always learn something new when I use it!

Over the past five years, SAM-related cases have increased, as has public awareness. Our stakeholders have become increasingly sensitive to SAM-related risks, and rightfully so. We expect this arc to continue over the next three years.

Scandals with USA gymnastics, swimming, soccer, and at Michigan State have made worldwide news. Parents are more wary of what we are doing to protect their kids. We anticipate that expectations will continue to evolve to demand the best practices to avoid such incidents.

Implementing BOKRIM across our sport is the proudest thing I have done as CEO.

The Ten-Step Sexual Abuse Risk Management Best Practice Guide

You can read how to develop a risk management best practice child protection system in our free Ten-Step Guide.

Sexual abuse is rising.

Most organizations are required to use the same, failing prevention process. Instead, you could: