Three Lessons From a Current Scandal

The police investigation into staff at the Rainbow House in Clayton, County, Georgia, offers three important lessons for youth organizations. Police have charged an employee, the son of the director, with sexual abuse of a 15-year-old client at the center. According to police reporter, that employee has confessed to sexual contact with the client. Police also have charged the director and two other employees with knowing about the abuse and either covering it up or failing to report it.

The first lesson is to be certain that your child protection policy is very clear about off-campus contact. Police have charged the center’s CEO with facilitating the abuse by taking the child off-campus on family trips. According to newspaper reports, the CEO told investigators that she “was in the process of fostering the victim and that for those reasons she had taken the victim off site from the Rainbow House Inc. on multiple occasions to meet her family to include a trip to Florida.”

At this point, it‘s impossible to know what the true facts are. At a minimum, however, it’s clear that the CEO either hadn’t drafted clear guidelines for employees about off-campus contact with clients, or she didn’t follow them. Good staff will have generous impulses toward clients, and that generosity is one of the reasons that they are in the field and that we want to hire them. However, we have to keep those impulses within safe— and clear — guidelines. Our organizations must have clear distinctions between work done for the organization (here, a residential program) and that done in a personal capacity (here, being a foster parent). We also need clear rules about off-campus contact and any sort of favoritism that can lead to grooming.  

The second lesson is to not panic about staff shortages. Last summer, the CEO said in a newspaper interview that the center was facing serious staff shortages. Police say that the employee charged with molestation was fired in January 2023, and then rehired about 10 days later. It’s far from clear whether the rehiring was due to the staff shortages, or the fact that his mother was the CEO, or another reason entirely. However, the possibility of the link to a hiring shortage should remind all of us not to lower our standards just to find more staff. It is better to cut back our program than to needlessly expose our clients to higher risks.

Finally, we have to pay attention to reported concerns about staff misconduct. The third employee that the police charged had told investigators that she had no knowledge of the alleged abuse. Police say, however, that they found incident reports from both staff and students, all of which had that employee‘s signature on them. News reports do not give any details about the incident reports, and the reports may have been vague, nonspecific concerns that look nefarious only in hindsight after a confession of abuse. Their existence, however, reminds us that it is a good practice to periodically audit incident reports and follow up on the concerns. If all we do is write up the report and stick it in a file, it may come back to haunt us.

Protecting children is an important responsibility. Fulfilling it requires that we have clear policies, including policies about off-campus contact, keep high standards even in the face of hiring shortages, and follow up on even vague concerns about misconduct.