Empowering Child-Serving Organizations to Prevent Abuse

Discover how to build a fortress of safety around children in your organization with insights from Greg Love, co-founder of MinistrySafe. Greg, who has a wealth of experience litigating sexual abuse cases, shares the eye-opening patterns of abuse that often go unnoticed in child-serving entities like churches, camps, and schools. This episode promises to equip you with the knowledge to recognize the less obvious, yet far more common, preferential offenders and understand how to effectively prevent abuse by focusing on behavioral cues rather than stereotypes.

You'll gain a profound understanding of the grooming behaviors of these offenders and why visual cues are insufficient for safeguarding children. Greg emphasizes the importance of constructing safety systems based on recognizing and responding to these behaviors. This essential episode sheds light on how to develop robust, tailored safety measures that can protect children from abuse, offering valuable insights for anyone involved in child-serving organizations. Join us for a compelling discussion that stresses the significance of proactive measures in child protection.

Learn more at https://ministrysafe.com/restoration/

Chapters

• 0:00 Preventing Child Sexual Abuse Patterns
• 5:46 Understanding Grooming Process and Behaviors

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Well, greg Love, it is so great to have you on Beyond the Couch. Welcome. Thank you, happy to be here. How did this amazing organization come about?

Speaker 2: 0:11

with your legal background, with your experience, tell us where this came from organization that's designed to provide prevention resources to child-serving organizations churches, camps, schools, nonprofits, youth sports organizations but it's a full suite of resources, services, trainings. But it all arose not because someday I decided, you know, there's a great need and I want to serve that need. It backs up about three decades into my wife, who's my law partner, kimberly. Kimberly and I were litigating sexual abuse matters. Okay Now, even then that wasn't our design, it wasn't our intention, and it all started with Kim representing somebody that was a whistleblower, someone who tried to report sexual abuse in 1992 and was fired from his job from trying to report sexual abuse. And, as you know, in Texas you can fire someone for just about anything, but you can't fire someone for trying to comply with the mandatory reporting requirements. Now, of course, back then it wasn't presumed that all reports were good faith. So, as a part of that whistleblower claim, kim had to find those people that were claiming to have been physically and sexually abused at this organization. And turns out, we wound up talking to 49 victims of abuse, covering another 20, 30 years period of time before that, with multiple molesters. So it grew into a multi-plaintiff litigation at a time when there was really no such thing as sexual abuse litigation. And so from there it was, and see, this is where I got to get a little legal on you. So tolerate this.

Speaker 2: 1:53

See, as a civil trial lawyer, we're not prosecutors, we're not criminal lawyers. We deal in what are called standards of care. Now, standard of care is a snappy lawyer term for with respect to a foreseeable risk like sexual abuse. You know, I'm bringing that lens with me to the train wreck and that lens is standard of care. This is what you should be doing.

Speaker 2: 2:15

But when we stand over the train wreck, oftentimes what we find is this is in fact what you were doing, and see if there's a difference between what you should have been doing to protect and what you in fact were doing. That's what gives rise to liability. We call it negligence or gross negligence. So, as civil trial lawyers, we're standing over the train wrecks and ultimately standing over hundreds of train wrecks, as this type of practice began to morph after people found out about the successful result we had. And so, after hundreds of times of standing over the train wrecks, see, as civil trial lawyers, we're seeing the patterns that most child serving organizations are not seeing and see, and that actually is one of the good words in this is pattern, as you probably know.

Speaker 1: 3:04

Right, and as you guys are seeing these patterns, is this what you're? Is this the development of ministry safe is from these patterns?

Speaker 2: 3:13

Correct Because you see, if something has a pattern, it becomes predictable. And what's on the lawyer coffee cup is if something's predictable, it's preventable, it's just not intuitive. And so, after standing over hundreds of these train wrecks, we get to see the patterns and get to realize, of course this is how it happens. I don't care whether it's Catholic, I don't care if it's Boy Scouts of America, I don't care if it's YMCA, it's all the same pattern. It's the grooming process of the preferential offender. And so once we understood that we can design safety around how the risk unfolds, and so that ministry safe is not just the subject matter experts creating resources, but finding also a way to take those resources and deploy them so people can design and implement something that can be a glove that fits their hand, so people can design and implement something that can be a glove that fits their hand.

Speaker 1: 4:06

Yeah, that's brilliant. You know being a therapist and you know we see the outcomes of the trauma of these patterns when they're not interrupted and we're often left with the train wreck of trying to help heal the wounds that come from all that has cycled through there. So I probably am going to say this a lot in this podcast, but thank you, can you, can you explain to our listeners the patterns of this predatory behavior that you guys have identified?

Speaker 2: 4:51

Yeah, and it's, it's. There's language that's necessary to understand this risk because, in in describing something to you, what I'm going to identify is one of the types of risks. And so when you say, well, what do you mean? Types of risks? You mean there's types of abusers. It's like, yeah, see, most people are conditioned to think that this is all this. Watch out for the guy with beanie babies who drives the white van.

Speaker 2: 5:19

Okay, that's the caricature of this, but the reality is that more than 90% of the risk to children is posed by what we call the preferential offender, who looks like you and me. So, stranger, danger is not what works to prevent 90 percent of the risk, and 90 percent, I'm talking about 60 million sexual abuse survivors, one out of five Americans, you know. And so what we need to do is understand. This preferential offender has no visual profile. So the way we come at this is starting with the idea that the type of fence you build is driven by what you want to keep out. And since there's no visual profile, here's the big idea. Here's what goes on the next other side of the lawyer's coffee cup.

Speaker 2: 6:03

We cannot recognize this risk visually. We must understand this risk behaviorally, which begs the question what are the behaviors? And it's where we get that term that we call the grooming process. So, putting all of that together, the type of fence you build, the safety system you develop, is driven by what you want to keep out. You want to keep out the behaviors. So it desperately requires people to understand what are the behaviors, what is the grooming process, what are the behaviors by which somebody with a deviant sexual desire will try to target a child, create trusted time alone, manipulate and deceive that child unto inappropriate touch and no-transcript.