One area that we're seeing many youth organizations get caught these days is lack of clear rules about contact between adults and young people on social media. Social media is an area where groups can encourage positive communications. Welcome messages, group chats and email lists can be great ways to build morale among team members or classrooms. Social media groups can help keep campers tied into seasonal camps and coming back in later years.
Unfortunately, social media also can be a way in which predators can establish inappropriate relationships with the minors you serve. We recommend that all youth groups consider the following principles and ideas to see which will work for your organization.
1. Include social media and correspondence in your content rules. Be clear in your handbooks and codes of conduct that harassment, bullying, and boundary rules apply to communications both inside and outside your program, in person and online.
2. Prohibit individual (one-on-one) interactions on social media. Social media can be either a great tool for your organization or a serious liability. The best protection that we have found is to prohibit individual friending and following on personal social media accounts. Your organization's official social media accounts can follow different rules. Allowing staff individually to follow or friend students on social media platforms, however, blurs boundaries between professionals and students. Individual interactions also are impossible for you to monitor.
In our experience, emotionally healthy adults generally appreciate this particular boundary. Most adults don't particularly want to have minors as part of their personal social media experience. Younger adults may not know quite how to make the transition from teen to adult leader, and a restriction on social media is a good guardrail for them. In either instance, a bright-line rule makes it easier for workers to deny a child's request without hurting their feelings.
3. Limit individual communications to approved program platforms. There may be many good reasons for an adult in your program to communicate individually with a minor. A schoolteacher doesn't need to include the entire class in an email discussion about one student's homework problems, for example. Similarly, a child may reach out to a trusted adult about a personal problem, and we don't want to completely isolate children from healthy relationships with trusted adults. The best way to encourage those healthy communications is to require that they only happen via your program's email server or other approved platform. This requirement allows administrators in your program to have a record of the communications and to check them at any time. This level of transparency is essential to a good child protection program.
4. Monitor program-related social media or email groups. Many organizations find that social media groups help build a strong community. If you decide that a social media group or email list could benefit your program, be certain that an administrator is included. Then be sure that the administrator monitors it periodically. The administrator needs to not only enforce content rules, but also to watch for problematic behavior. If an adult, for example, suggests that a conversation be taken outside the group, then the administrator needs to know why. There may be a good reason, such as a student's disclosing trauma or abuse, in which case the administrator needs to become part of the conversation. What does not need to happen is an adult's isolating a child from the group, even electronically.
5. Consider requiring that workers include parents or administrators in emails. In most organizations, it isn't practical for administrators to read every email that workers send to minors in the program. If your organization is small enough, then definitely consider taking advantage of the transparency that comes from including an administrator in communications. But if it's not practical, then don't set yourself up for failure with a rule that you can't follow. Instead, consider requiring that workers copy parents on all their emails. Parents generally will have both more time and personal motivation to keep up with who is saying what to their kids.
If the conversation is one that the kids want to keep private from their parents, then you can require that an administrator be copied or blind copied. That category will be a smaller, probably more manageable number. More important, if the issue is a serious one, such as a disclosure of abuse, then an administrator will need to be involved anyway.
6. Communicate the rules to parents. Finally, be sure that you have clearly communicated these rules to your parents. Parents generally are the best supervisors of their children, and they are much more likely than anyone else to notice problematic communications. Furthermore, simply having the information in the parents' handbook adds a level of transparency that can deter bad behavior from an adult. Don't overlook this powerful resource for your child protection program.
This post is an excerpt from our upcoming book, "Protecting Other People's Children: 120 Days to A Strong Child Safety Policy." Preorder it on Amazon, or email us for a copy.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.