The Role of Mentors in Keeping Kids Safe

The child abuse tragedy uncovered at Penn State has been a big focus of attention in the mentoring world.  Aspects of it have been addressed in posts on mentoring blogs, debated in exchanges on mentoring list serves, and served as the topic of many conversations in our office.  While much of the attention from our field focuses on how we safeguard youth from access by predators, I keep coming back to the same question: “Who should have been keeping these kids safe after they were harmed?”

In mentoring, we put much of our efforts into separating out the “wrong” (in intentions, availability or attitude) potential volunteers from the “right” ones.  We take our obligation to shield youth from harm that could come through our programs very seriously and make every attempt to reduce the risks that being involved in mentoring could pose to them, through the relationships that are built or the activities that mentors engage in.  While we try to control as many of the risks that might stem from our programs as possible, we cannot ignore risks that we have no control over – conditions in the rest of a child’s world.

We place mentors in the lives of youth as witnesses to their everyday experiences in homes, schools and communities; as such, mentors may recognize things that no one else does about a child’s struggles or pain.  If we are serious about protecting youth, we need to help mentors understand how to keep children safe, as well as how to avoid harming them, and to realize that their relationships with mentees continue beyond the time they spend together.  With recent events, questions have been raised about the role of volunteers and their obligation to report abuse under Minnesota’s child protection laws.  According to the applicable statute, mandated reporters are those considered “a professional or professional’s delegate” in fields related to care of others (such as medicine, social services, mental health, education).  Isn’t delegating the care of a child what mentoring programs do every day?   

I believe the law provides clear instructions for mentors and mentoring programs.  Programs can’t take on the obligation to report abuse for their mentors.  Aside from legal ramifications, a report of abuse coming from a person who did not directly observe a situation or identify concerns will be less effective in helping those assessing the report determine whether there are grounds for action.  The challenge for mentoring programs is how we help mentors understand their role in protecting children, educate them about ways they may encounter harmful situations in their mentees’ lives, and instruct them about how to respond if they are concerned about a child’s welfare.  We also need to address the emotional side of this issue with mentors – fears that about how a report of abuse might affect a child, concerns about the potential impact on important people in a child’s life, myths about how the child protection system works, and more.  

While “wake-up call” is an over-used term, the furor surrounding the Sandusky scandal serves as a reminder that we must do everything we can to ensure the safety of youth we serve.  Penn State’s response to abuse allegations will be held up for years to come as an example of institutional failure and complicity; how that abuse happened, and continued, will be the subject of a high stakes blame game for just as long.  What we can take from this is the commitment to do better by all youth in the future and hold ourselves and our mentors to the highest standards of care.  How do you prepare your mentors to protect the children they care about?

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