Our commitment to child safety:

• Our organisation is committed to child safety.
• We want children to be safe, happy and empowered. We support and respect all children, as well as our staff and volunteers.
• We are committed to the safety, participation and empowerment of all children.
• We have zero tolerance of child abuse, and all allegations and safety concerns will be treated very seriously and consistently with our robust policies and procedures.
• We have legal and moral obligations to contact authorities when we are worried about a child’s safety, which we follow rigorously.
• Our organisation is committed to preventing child abuse and identifying risks early, and removing and reducing these risks.
• Our organisation has robust human resources and recruitment practices for all staff and volunteers.
• Our organisation is committed to regularly training and educating our staff and volunteers on child abuse risks.
• We support and respect all children, as well as our staff and volunteers. We are committed to the cultural safety of Aboriginal children, the cultural safety of children from a culturally and/or linguistically diverse backgrounds, and to providing a safe environment for children with a disability.
• We have specific policies, procedures and training in place that support our leadership team, staff and volunteers to achieve these commitments.

Legislative responsibilities

Our organisation takes our legal responsibilities seriously, including:

• Failure to disclose: Reporting child sexual abuse is a community-wide responsibility. All adults in Victoria who have a reasonable belief that an adult has committed a sexual offence against a child under 16 have an obligation to report that information to the police.
• Failure to protect: People of authority in our organisation will commit an offence if they know of a substantial risk of child sexual abuse and have the power or responsibility to reduce or remove the risk, but negligently fail to do so.

Any personnel who are mandatory reporters must comply with their duties.

If you believe a child is at immediate risk of abuse phone 000.