Won't somebody think of the children?

Now that I’m a ‘stevedore’ (work it out, people), I have a new and different perspective on the business of working with children – especially children who are vulnerable to or have been exposed to some form of abuse or harm. Prior to my current job, the only time I really heard about it was when I did the mandatory para-legal stuff in training for youth ministry, but now that I’m on the government side of it all, it makes me think about how the church has responded to the legislative and moral imperatives to implement processes and procedures to protect children who are involved in our churches.

I’m not familiar with what other denominations are doing, but a summary of the Sydney diocese of the Anglican Church’s approach can be read here. The predominant efforts revolve around the use of ‘Working with Children’ checks for screening volunteers and paid employees, safe ministry training for people working with children within an activity run by a congregation, and the need for key staff or leaders to report any incidents or cases where they have reasonable grounds to suspect that physical, psychological, and/or sexual abuse is taking place to the NSW statutory child protection agency (which is mandated under s27 of the Care and Protection Act 1998). These are all very good things, and, I think, make those ministries which involve caring for children more transparent and more accountable.

Still, coming now as one who works in the field of protecting children from abuse, I get a bit rankled when there appears to be some resistance from people within the church to such measures. At the last safe ministry training session I attended, there was a bit of emotion running high at certain suggestions, such as care needing to be exercised when changing nappies or taking children to the toilet. It feels like whenever people are told that they must think carefully about how to physically interact with children, the automatic response is often, ‘I am not allowed to touch children, lest I be perceived as a child molester’. This leads to a certain degree of defensiveness and, in some cases, grumbling about how complicated it all is now.

My personal view is that there are certain ways you can interact with children within a church context on a physical level without appearing dodgy. What it’s all about is being above reproach. There are two reasons for this, I feel: the first is that we are called to be of godly character in our interactions with each other, and this includes how we relate to children. As child abuse is so often a covert activity that may not leave physical indicators, and as anyone can make a report regarding a child or young person being at risk of or enduring actual harm, there is a certain amount of transparency that must be retained if we, as Christians who work with children, are to be free of suspicion. This may mean we have to let go of the way we did things before and look at revising activities such as taking small children to the toilet, or how we play or sit with children. It’s unfortunate, in a way, that we have to be less ‘hands-on’ with children and a lot more ‘careful’ about how we interact with children and young people – and, from experience, I know it’s a pain when situations come up where child protection takes precedence over expedience (youth leaders will be familiar with the dilemma of ‘I need another another leader to come with me so I can drop this young person home, even though he/she only lives two minutes away’). However, it really is a small price to pay for a valuable level of accountability and decorum which is more or less essential in the current climate of child protection concerns.

Secondarily, it is my opinion that the church has a very poor reputation with both child protection professionals and the community at large when it comes to the safety and welfare of children and young people. Given the increasing awareness that the public has gained of the terrible cases of (mostly sexual) abuse which were perpetrated by church workers in the past, there is a real loss of trust in many Christians who work with kids, and we more or less have to wear that loss of trust when it comes to interacting with families and community members. I personally have not had an issue with this kind of poor reputation, but I know a lot of the other ‘stevedores’ I work with hold some pretty poor opinions of ‘the Church’ (which, by all appearances, is an imagined conglomerate of any and all organisations, Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise, which professes even the vaguest notions of Christianity, meets in a [usually daggy] building, and run programs for children). This suggests to me that not only do many non-Christians fail to distinguish between groups within ‘the Church’, but that if this is so, then all Christian churches should be seeking to be rigorous about implementing effective safe ministry policies. Otherwise, we will all just continue to wear the bad press and distrust.

The summary: don’t grumble about the need to change the way we do things! We are changing because we want to keep our kiddies safe!

In other (less gloomy) news, I have a shiny black new computerbox to edit videos with (sans monitor until further notice). I’m pretty impressed with all the things I will be able to do from now on, though I’m not sure if I should fork out the cash for Office 2003 or wait for Office 2007. Either way, I’m sure going to miss the good times and the bad times of my old 133MHz laptop with 48mb RAM and the antediluvian 1Gb hard drive.