Audit broadens magazine staff’s understanding of safeguarding

NOPS responds to complaints of abuse involving clergy and members of religious congregations, as well as overseeing the Church’s safeguarding policies and practices. It is also responsible for monitoring compliance with national policies and providing formation and training.

Reviewers from NOPS visited the Tui Motu offices in Dunedin last month for an audit. The magazine’s administrator and assistant editor Ann Hassan noted that safeguarding isn’t only about sexual abuse.

“At Tui Motu, we seldom have contact with children. Visitors to the office” are rare.

In the office, safeguarding is “understood broadly, encompassing health and safety, the particular vulnerabilities of the staff and volunteers, the way we interact with people visiting or on the phone, and the safety of information”.

“Before our audit, we’d not thought we had contact with vulnerable adults,” Ms Hassan wrote.

“But the auditors explained that a vulnerable adult is anyone who, due to age, illness, disability or other reasons, may not be able to protect themselves. Some of our volunteers have mobility issues, needing help to get to their cars. We had thought of this as helping the person, but not as the person being vulnerable.”

The ”simple idea of a vulnerable adult is being replaced with an understanding of vulnerability that better reflects all the complexity of being a person: vulnerable in some ways and not in others; vulnerable at some times but not always”.

NOPS will deliver a report to the magazine’s board following the audit – something all Church organisations are undergoing.

Hassan wrote that the visit by the NOPS auditors “has already heightened our awareness and it’s clear that this is the vital shift: making safeguarding a priority in every aspect of our work – in our responsibilities to our volunteers, subscribers and others, and in the way we occupy our workplace”.

“Safeguarding shouldn’t be an ‘add-on’, but an essential contribution to making the wider Church a safer, more inclusive and hospitable place.”

FULL STORY

Developing a Safe, Hospitable Culture (By Ann Hassan/Tui Motu InterIslands)