In almost every sphere of human activity, the better you do something, the more reward there is; it is simple stick-and-carrot thinking.

Many rewards are tangible; money works well for me in most situations!  Other rewards are intangible; the satisfaction of having done something better than before or doing something right or well.  

Because of this simple stick and carrot thinking, it’s always confused me why, when everyone agrees that every child should be as well protected from sexual abuse as possible, there is currently no way to reward an organization for doing just that.   Organizations can be and are rightly penalized if they fail to protect children, but any penalty will always be too late to help the child who has been abused.  

The problem is that we address child protection as a compliance challenge; we should manage it as a risk.  

• With compliance, an organization is either compliant or not; compliance is its own “reward.”  
• With risk management, however, there are best and less-than-best practices; different practices have different value, and some systems are more complete than others.  But, assuming you can identify an organization’s practices, you can reward them the more they use the best practices.  

To enable organizations to be rewarded for protecting children, BOKRIM applies a sexual abuse and misconduct (SAM) risk management rating to all its members.  The rating is our understanding of how well an organization’s SAM risk management activities compare to what we consider a complete SAM risk management best practice system.   

And because what we consider to be the best SAM risk management system keeps evolving, organizations must continuously improve their SAM risk management to maintain their rating.   Therefore, we hope that, just like a credit rating, a SAM risk management rating will incentivize ever-better child protection from sexual abuse until sexual abuse is eliminated.  

The combination of supplementing compliance with risk management plus continuous improvement means the leading SAM insurer at Lloyd’s has agreed to discount their SAM premiums by as much as 25% for highly-rated organizations.  This means BOKRIM members insuring at Lloyd’s can usually save more than BOKRIM costs in premium savings.  

That good child protection and sexual abuse prevention should be rewarded is a BOKRIM core principle.