Community Safety Incident Reporting Process

Concord Friends Meeting

Community Safety Incident Reporting Process

Friends are clear in their commitment to assure the safety of all members of our community.  With God’s help we seek a community where no child is at risk for emotional, physical or sexual abuse and where no adult is at risk for false accusation.

If you believe a child or children has been, or is at risk for being, abused or neglected, please take the following steps immediately.

• Make sure all involved are safe.
• Make sure you know and/or can identify everyone who is involved.
• Contact a member of the member of Ministry and Counsel or the clerk of the Meeting.  They will convene a Response Committee, which will be responsible for any follow up actions.

Concord Friends Meeting considers any abuse or neglect of a child to be a serious concern, which requires action of the part of Meeting participants.  In pursuing understanding of what has taken place, we do not pass judgment or condemn any person.  It is possible that an observation can be put into a different light with more information.  It is not our job, however, to do this.

Any of us may be required to make a report and allow the process to unfold.  Our only goals are to ensure the safety of all members of our community and to heal any injury to the Meeting itself or of its members and attenders.  Any sexual involvement of an adult with a child or physical assault of a child by an adult is abuse of the child by the adult.  The causation of a non-accidental injury of a child by an adult is abuse.  Neglect is the failure by a caretaker to take those actions necessary to provide a child with minimally adequate care, including food, shelter and supervision.

There may be occasions in which you are unsure whether you have witnessed abuse or neglect.  These are difficult situations, in which you ought not struggle alone.   Please bring your concerns to a member of Ministry and Counsel or the Clerk of the Meeting.

These are also very delicate and sensitive family matters.  If there has in fact been abuse or neglect, the events involved may occasion pain, shame, anger and/or grief.  The rights to privacy of all involved must be respected.  If there are those who have deliberately or involuntarily committed abuse or neglect, their spiritual healing will be fostered by a sense of trust and respect towards their privacy as well.  Those whose actions have been examined and been found without fault are especially to be guarded from public commentary.  We are all ministers in a Friends Meeting, and in such situations, we are obliged both to disclose abuse to the proper authorities and to maintain confidences, as would a minister or priest in another denomination.  The response committee are the ones who report.