Barriers to Youth Abuse in AHG

Over the last few years, youth organizations have adopted a lot of new and novel practices for interacting between leaders/counselors and youth participants safely.

If youth are going to stay involved in the community and the ones thereafter, introducing some of these barriers to youth abuse would be in the best interests of everyone involved.

The meat of these policies involve avoiding any one on one contact between a youth and an adult. In scouting, a recent policy that’s been adopted and become a big player in preventing abuse is having at least two qualified adults in any email or text with a youth participant. There’s a few good videos on this theory, but that presence alone helps deter any bad activity. If discord is still going to be a focal point of interaction, this super easy to incorporate and use to keep both the youth and the adult safe. Ideally, this would happen between any sort of community related dms (staff to player, staff to staff, player to player), but it should really be considered from the staffing aspect at least, since a position of power can lead to issues.

Another aspect to consider is how minors are involved in content policing lewd sprays on the staff team right now. Expecting a minor to issue corrective action on gore/porn is something that can spark issues whether it’s allowed or not. That’s more of a grey area turning into a red flag with how our culture is adapting. It’s straight up illegal however when you consider that the youth are expected to store the images as evidence on their computer/cloud and access them again if needed

Evaluating and thinking about how everyone can be safe and have fun should be a priority. Our community’s rich history of conduct should be reason enough to make history harder to repeat

 

ayo he not wrong though like there aint no reason some kid and some adult need to be in a private discord call like ever. Like yeah just doing that alone don't mean shit but obviously we can't trust the degenerates that pass through here.

also fuck needing to post evidence for shit like that just ban people and say "fuck off your banned" if they try to appeal don't type some like 18 paragraph response to somebody who's clearly just trying to waste your time

 

Anyone younger than the age of 18 is what’s legally consistent for mandatory reporting. Age Verification can be done via the forums when you link your discord and assign a role meant for underaged users, that gets removed whenever they turn 18

I like it here

 

That's better than what it has been, but all that content would still be accessible to a child staff member and is hosted on your servers, which have historically been removing such images and links from the platforms to keep it inaccessible from children, so they may participate in the community. If sprays are going to be part of the deal, having a staff reivewed system where a player submits a spray, and waits for approval (by an adult) before it can be used or a store of buyable "curated" sprays that don't involve user upload are both options that might make it more "safe" for children to participate in staffing the servers

Outside of the servers, having a child police porn/gore/NSFW goodies on discord/forums is also asking for trouble, since they would still need to store evidence in some capacity, unless they have the ability to see deleted content, which one again leads us into the same issue of "hosting NSFW" content for children. Unless you had some age role on the forums and discord server that would prevent children from seeing said things that is

 

What qualifies a staff member?

 

Unless you make them take any form of youth abuse preventative training, nothing. However, having two adults involved in any private communications lessens the likelihood a situation where abuse can occur, we can point to a few former situations where this would of helped a ton. For staff related matters, the best practice would to be include two adults on the staff team.

 

I don't see how you're going to enforce adults to only DM underage alongside another adult
Unless every minor reports instances of it occuring, there's really no way to enforce it

 

If w

Using a forum integrated system for determining one's self reported age (whether its private or publicly set, staff should be able to see it) to determine when and how to handle one on one related staffing matters (reports, appeals, staffing interviews). If three people in a dm is deemed too much of a hassle, uploading a self reported chatlog to some staff thread/database to keep track of what was said to whom might be a more realistic approach. Think something admin extension requests, but just a copy and paste of a discord chat.

 

I don't think most of the cases evolve from "oh hey why did you do this ingame" rather than them just dming on their own time, what you're essentially asking staff to do is have 0 privacy which won't happen

 

That's a decent point about report interactions @Cash . Let's think about where we've went wrong in the past before, and correct from there. A good number of the youth protection violations that have surfaced in recent years have involved staff on staff/staff on former staff. @Mr. Rogers point on discord calls is something that might help inspire a better staff policy and avoiding 1 on 1 minor on adult actions when possible, that or require them to be in a public/moderator accessible channel. I still think a hard copy on dms between a minor and an adult staff member would be a good thing to have to help prevent further abuse. Could just be one of those things that go to a forum thread for leads and never looked at again, but it's a barrier.

 

Server population would be too hard to control as a variable there, would be more or less seen as "public grounds", especially as there is no way to confirm age in that setting. As I said to Cash, the scope I proposed to start off with may of been a bit too broad for it's own good, we should hone in on where we have fucked up in the past and find ways to make it more secure. That said, there should already be a barrier to abuse present with a new server, as the server admin should have a hard copy text chat in the event something does go awry. The points on logging and all of that is interesting enough.

Yeah, this is out of the question.

This is encouraging.

Yeah, it's an issue across every youth community in america, its encouraging to hear we have been happen to neuter recent happenings. I know we could of done a little more in the past to put more barriers to abuse up. In my personal life with my program, my volunteers have gotten really good about two deep communication leadership with our youth (even under the limited carpooling availability due to covid) and our materials have all been recently updated due to help us prevent further scenarios in our nationwide program. Honestly, the whole heavy handed approach to this was to hopefully construct a dialogue here of what real life youth organizations are doing, and what might be beneficial to consider. I can offer some materials/resources for Youth Protection Training if anyone is interested. I might even be able to modify down the IRL bits, and just communicate the online aspect of everything, if we think it's something that would be beneficial to have even if only one or two people look at it.

 

pokeben clearly dislikes this suggestion maybe you guys should keep an eye out on him just in case

 

I've copied the staff team list and made GREEN names "safe" and RED names "caution"
I have no data on the names left white.

Lordyhgm
Nuno
Fear
My Dime Is Up
Fiz
Reda-Lex
Pokeben10
Shadow
Cathal
Hosi (if this is acno, safe)
Titan
littlememe
MONKMAN
Night
Pierogi
Salem
SavannahBanana
FrogDoggo
Chewie
roy
JesstheMess
Jabba the Slut
j3kawesome
Moleman
Orion
PwnageKO
Kamoflajh
Sable
Ashes Relandi
Panda With a Gun
Heli12345
Floof
Scotty
Cole
Voca
ori with a gun
danstorm
Aquast
Klutch
RyanHighmen
Kythol
Espurr
Wubby

 

it means you're a p-p-p-p-p-p