Child sexual abuse tolerated is the worst manifestation of a toxic institutional culture!. Wherever child sexual abuse is tolerated there will be all manner of other wrongdoing happening. True culture change means ‘putting all the rubbish out’!. This is a complicating factor for those trying to improve child safeguarding in an institution or organisation.

Even those institutional leaders desirous of eliminating CSA are apprehensive knowing that to do this there needs to a fulsome accounting of everything that has been happening behind the scenes. Those willing to turn a blind eye to child abuse will have no qualms about overlooking all manner of misconduct. When one pulls on a cultural ‘thread’, you can’t really tell what’s going to unravel. But still, you can’t fix something until you know what in fact is broken. Institutional leaders who are really committed to eradicating child sexual offenders must necessarily find the moral authority and courage to go wherever the evidence leads.

Takeaways:

1. Half-measures are not going to work, and cultural remnants which see influential individuals permitted to continue to engage in any form of misconduct will invariably see the institution backsliding.
2. A return to “Business as Usual’ will invariably see a return to ‘Abuse as Usual’.
3. Those who have presided over a culture tolerant of child sexual abuse will not have the moral authority to remediate it.
4. A new institutional leader has only one opportunity to ‘put the rubbish out’ as the saying goes.