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Child protection and safeguarding
Our child protection and safeguarding services
GoodCorporation helps organisations to design, embed and evaluate the practices and procedures necessary to ensure appropriate child protection and safeguarding.
Our Framework on Safeguarding Children is used by our clients as an evaluation tool or as guidance for best practice. We used this framework to review the BBC’s child protection and whistleblowing policies following the Jimmy Savile scandal.
While avoiding harm is clearly the primary motivation for any organisation working with children, prevention must be highly prioritised with careful risk assessments conducted to ensure that proper systems and processes are in place to prevent abuse.
Our Framework on Safeguarding Children
GoodCorporation's three-page Framework on Safeguarding Children helps organisations ensure that their practices for safeguarding children are robust. It can be used to design, embed or evaluate and organisation's safeguarding practices.
Areas covered by the framework include:
- Policy and governance: top-level commitment to safeguarding children is evident. There are clearly articulated polices and procedures with adequate resources devoted to implementation.
- Culture and awareness: the organisation communicates its safeguarding policy and practice to all stakeholders and makes it clear where concerns can be raised and guidance sought.
- Vetting: there are strong processes to screen employees, contractors and agency staff who come into contact with children.
- Products and services: the organisation considers how its products and services might affect the wellbeing of children.
- Marketing and communications: a responsible approach to marketing and advertising is taken to avoid any adverse effect on children.
- Managing third parties: contractual requirements to have effective safeguarding procedures and adequate safeguarding standards in place are enforced.
- Child exploitation: the organisation understands the risks of child exploitation and has policies and procedures in place that take international best practice into account.
- Dealing with concerns and incidents: there is training and guidance on how to recognise inappropriate behaviour with systems in place for raising concerns.
- Monitoring and review: the efficacy of child protection procedures is regularly reviewed and monitored, including at board level.
Endorsement of our child protection services
Leading sports organisations committed to the fight against child trafficking in sport have also given their support for the principles outlined in the framework, including FIFA.
Paul Tergat, former world marathon record holder and elite Kenyan long-distance runner has also given his full support for the framework. “There is a general growing and serious problem where people are exploiting sports to engage in human trafficking, especially targeting children. Every effort to curb this vice deserves the support of all of us that love and protect the beauty and spirit of sports. As such, I welcome the launch of this noble and timely framework and laud the efforts of Mission 89 and GoodCorporation in seeking to combat this menace. I ask people, especially those with leadership and positions of influence to give their voices to this effort”.
The framework can be used by organisations as a self-assessment tool or as the basis of an external review conducted jointly by GoodCorporation and Mission 89. The assessment would help establish whether the organisation has the correct practices and procedures in place to mitigate the risk of child trafficking taking place within the organisation or on its behalf. It can also be used by commercial organisations to help mitigate the risk of child trafficking within the supply chain.
In addition to ensuring that the rights of children in sport are enshrined in the code of ethics, the framework outlines the practices and procedures that should be followed to manage the safe recruitment of child athletes from around the globe.
GoodCorporation has also produced a self-assessment form to help organisations review their systems and processes and assess the risk of child trafficking occurring within their organisations. For a copy of the self assessment form, please contact us via email.
Our specialist child protection expertise
GoodCorporation works with child protection expert Moira Murray.
Moira was Head of Safeguarding at the Children’s Society from 2005-2009 and was appointed by the then Secretary of State to the Board of the Independent Safeguarding Authority from 2007-2012. Moira was the Safeguarding Manager for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in London 2012 and was appointed to the Wass Inquiry Team, as part of the inquiry looking into allegations of child safeguarding issues in the British Overseas Territories of Ascension Island and St Helena in the South Atlantic. The report was published in December 2015.
Moira has written and chaired case reviews into the death and serious abuse of children. She has conducted safeguarding audits for local authorities and the NHS and worked with corporations to advise on best safeguarding practice.
Moira worked with GoodCorporation on both reviews for the BBC.
Safeguarding children from trafficking in sport
GoodCorporation has worked with clients in a variety of sectors to test and strengthen their safeguarding practices and procedures. Last year we joined forces with Mission 89 to develop an assessment framework that can help sporting bodies safeguard children reduce the risk of athletes being trafficked into their organisation.
Every year hundreds of thousands of children are trafficked for sport. Smuggled across borders they are sold as commodities by fraudsters masquerading as agents, some claiming affiliation to high-profile, sports organisations. Many of the children “recruited” never reach the organisations allegedly seeking their talents: most are abandoned in their own continent; others are left abroad in cheap hotels without passports or money.
Human trafficking is a global problem acknowledged by the United Nations, whose Special Rapporteur has highlighted in her Report the growing economic exploitation of child athletes. .
GoodCorporation are impressive people, they made 53 recommendations, 51 have been accepted, one we are still working on and one we have found a better way of doing. These people are experts; these are not people who will not speak the truth … because they have done.
Lord Tony Hall
Director general of the BBC, speaking at the publication of the Dame Janet Smith Review
Explore our frameworks
Browse our frameworks and request your copy