People Attempting to Undermine Safe Sport

[EADoug]

It still baffles me that there is so much push back.

I have worked for several Universities - YEARLY online harassment / workplace conduct raining through HR for ALL employees.

I have worked for several Hospitals - YEARLY online harassment / workplace conduct training through HR for ALL employees.

Always non-negotiable, just part of employment. I don’t recall ever hearing watercooler talk about how difficult this makes people’s lives…

I really do think part of this is a product of people that have never held a ‘traditional’ job through larger HR departments. I would not blink if someone was disciplined or fired for harassment in the workplace.

I don’t understand the outcry of people losing their ability to coach… That seems like an appropriate and natural consequence of one’s own poor behaviour.

[trubandloki]

@EADoug

Always non-negotiable, just part of employment. I don’t recall ever hearing watercooler talk about how difficult this makes people’s lives…

This made me laugh.
I am thinking you are not listening, though I admit I have never heard anyone use the word difficult except for the part about fitting into their already over extended day.
I don’t know of anyone who has not complained about how annoying it is and how the examples are stupid, at least in the office I work in that is how it is. We all do it. We are required to do it. Pretty much everyone complains.

@EADoug

I really do think part of this is a product of people that have never held a ‘traditional’ job through larger HR departments. I would not blink if someone was disciplined or fired for harassment in the workplace.

I don’t understand the outcry of people losing their ability to coach… That seems like an appropriate and natural consequence of one’s own poor behaviour.

Do not take this wrong. I am all for bad people not being able to be around kids.

But a person losing their job because they are disciplined for harassments in the workplace almost never means they can not turn around and get another job somewhere else do the same type of job.
A person whose job it is to coach, losing their ability to ever coach again is a life hurdle. (again, I think people who hurt kids should be punished, I am only disputing your analogy.)

[EADoug]

@trubandloki

@EADoug

Always non-negotiable, just part of employment. I don’t recall ever hearing watercooler talk about how difficult this makes people’s lives…

This made me laugh.
I am thinking you are not listening, though I admit I have never heard anyone use the word difficult except for the part about fitting into their already over extended day.
I don’t know of anyone who has not complained about how annoying it is and how the examples are stupid, at least in the office I work in that is how it is. We all do it. We are required to do it. Pretty much everyone complains.

@EADoug

I really do think part of this is a product of people that have never held a ‘traditional’ job through larger HR departments. I would not blink if someone was disciplined or fired for harassment in the workplace.

I don’t understand the outcry of people losing their ability to coach… That seems like an appropriate and natural consequence of one’s own poor behaviour.

Do not take this wrong. I am all for bad people not being able to be around kids.

But a person losing their job because they are disciplined for harassments in the workplace almost never means they can not turn around and get another job somewhere else do the same type of job.
A person whose job it is to coach, losing their ability to ever coach again is a life hurdle. (again, I think people who hurt kids should be punished, I am only disputing your analogy.)

I appreciate this. I guess it’s not to say people don’t complain about the yearly training in essence… it’s a ‘waste of a morning’ or what have you - but I haven’t heard people complain that they shouldn’t have to do it because they should be able to have whatever relationship they wish, or because what is so bad about the way they treat their female coworkers, or the similar type of push back we see here. I guess I’m thinking more along the lines of my male coworkers aren’t griping that they should be allowed to bang the secretary because she’s a hot new number and she obviously want’s to get a promotion. That is now accepted as unacceptable. But yet I hear pushback about the young new riders that need the blue ribbons and so they are asking for it…

As for the consequences, you bet your ass a teacher that has lost their job for sleeping with a student makes the local paper and will have a VERY difficult time finding a new teaching job, if they ever can again. Their licence is suspended or plain lost. Same for a health care professional, or any other type of professional. I’m an OT - I would 100% lose my licence for unethical conduct with a client. That means I can never practice as an OT again and I would have a life hurdle. Natural consequence for bad behaviour.

[hut-ho78]

The SafeSport training includes topics people don’t think about. For example, what is considered bullying. If you are a certain age and have been involved in certain activities then motivational speeches from the 1960s and 1970s are a far cry from what is acceptable today.

Also, in the case of child abuse, children are found to not make that stuff up and abusers are found to groom the child’s responsible adult, to ingratiate themselves and slide right in to a close relationship to gain trusted private proximity. The training also gives acting out signs such as a child changing their habits and personalities and suddenly not liking to do something they formerly liked. So, in the past and maybe now, the child was not believed but with the training, adults may recognize the signs, believe the child, learn where to go to get help, and know who are the mandatory reporters.

The training is not useless. It is valuable. It consists of a pretest, a short video with written transcripts, and a follow on test. Passing the pretest does not get one out of the training and there is sufficient depth to the training to always supplement pre-existing knowledge.

[Sticky_Situation]

Thinking having to do online modules over and over is fairly useless does not mean one is okay with child abuse or bullying or inappropriate relationships, or that those things aren’t a concern.

I’ve worked in hospitals. I’m don’t think I’ve met anyone that works in a hospital and is not in a purely management role that doesn’t complain about the Joint-Commission-mandated modules and think the majority of them are useless … but it’s just generally not a hill that’s worth dying on, so we complain a bit, roll our eyes, and then get them done. The fact that we do them so we can keep our jobs does not mean they actually do anything to improve patient care or prevent harassment in the workplace.

[Fiesta01]

@EADoug

I have worked for several Universities - YEARLY online harassment / workplace conduct raining through HR for ALL employees.

I have worked for several Hospitals - YEARLY online harassment / workplace conduct training through HR for ALL employees.

Same for the military, along with sundry other annual briefings (anti-subversion and espionage training, Operations Security, Information Security, etc.).

[Fiesta01]

@trubandloki

I don’t know of anyone who has not complained about how annoying it is and how the examples are stupid, at least in the office I work in that is how it is.

Ha! In the Army, our annual SAEDA (Subversion and Espionage Directed Against the Army) briefing always started with a film with the following type of scene:

Soldier (always male in the old days) all alone in a smoky bar. Slinky, sexy woman sidles up to him to ply him with more drinks and ask questions. Etc. Great memories.

[Indy]

@trubandloki

I am thinking you are not listening, though I admit I have never heard anyone use the word difficult except for the part about fitting into their already over extended day.
I don’t know of anyone who has not complained about how annoying it is and how the examples are stupid, at least in the office I work in that is how it is. We all do it. We are required to do it. Pretty much everyone complains.

When my last job decided that maybe they should teach us not to behave inappropriately around each other (which was desperately needed…), they brought in a troop of actors to do live-action portrayals of examples. It was ridiculous. But the skeevy people did get a little less skeevy so maybe it helped?

[vxf111]

Oof, that seems… destined to cause even more issues…

[Knights_Mom]

@Sticky_Situation

You have much more faith in the bureaucracy than I do!

As a healthcare professional I’ve had to do the state Child Abuse training every 2 years to renew my license and it’s a painfully boring 4 hours of my own time during which I can’t say I’ve learned anything I hadn’t already been taught elsewhere.

That is, of course, in addition to the dozens and dozens of online modules required by your employer every single year if you work at a hospital, including at least one on recognizing and reporting child abuse.

As far as having everybody involved with USEF (and other sports) do annual SafeSport “training,” I just don’t think making childless amateur ladies in barns that have few or no kids do online modules over and over in order to be allowed to show their horse is going to really change anything. Especially when many of us are already being online module’d to death at our day jobs. Requiring everyone to do initial training seems reasonable enough and not a huge burden, but after that it seems be more about the appearance of doing something than because it’s been demonstrated to be useful.

Amen! I’d look at the dynamic of the type of person who most often abuses and target them.

[hut-ho78]

The point of the training is that it is the person that one would least expect and the only way to try to stop them is to give adults information they don’t have.

[Scribbler]

Honestly I’ve never had any kind of in-house corporate/institutional training that wasn’t redundant and poorly put together. I think in the case of issues with legal repercussions like harrassment, safety, etc, taking the training and signing off on it is tantamount to signing something that says “I acknowledge that I now know what bad behavior is, and if I do it, I can’t claim ignorance.” I had to click through some kind of diversity training in the past year, can’t remember why, and I just did it without even reading the bumpf as it was all so obvious.

[Sticky_Situation]

Is it really the person one would least expect, though?

Because the overwhelming majority of SafeSport cases I’m aware of have been male trainers that work with kids and are in a position of power and influence over them, and many in the past have seemingly had rumors swirling among those “in the know” for years before any action was taken. Not female trainers that work mostly with adults, not random middle-aged female amateurs who undoubtedly make up the largest sector of USEF membership and yet comprise only a tiny percent of the SafeSport complaints.

Sure, I guess if we’re talking generic “bullying” that is pretty well spread across demographics. But we all know that SafeSport wasn’t created to address bullying, it was created to address sexual abuse in sports … and that’s what almost all of the suspensions (at least in equestrian sports) have involved.

[IPEsq]

I think on this board, we tend to have more people proportionately who have spent time in corporate America with some kind of training that overlaps with the concepts here. But among the USEF members at large, there are a lot of people who have only worked in horses or maybe not had any stint in the workforce at all where they would have gotten some of this training. And you can see that some people think that culturally some of the prohibited behavior is ok. So, I think it’s a really good thing that these large populations of people, many of which carry the power in the sport, are asked to learn about these issues not only as to what they shouldn’t be doing themselves but how to take steps to intervene or recognize bad behavior of others, since they are around the same barns/people all the time at the shows in their area, and they are supervising their grooms and managing their farriers and other service providers. I do think that some of the rules and guidelines can be easier applied to and followed in team sport situations and gym like training facilities than to other sports, but Congress is all about making rules that apply as broadly as possible.

[Bristol_Bay]

I get the point about mandated corporate training, but the SS training is different in that everyone taking it is a USEF member whose failure to meet those standards could get them suspended or banned.

I think there should be a member class for grooms, training specifically for them, and that they should likewise be held accountable if they bother little girls.

I’ve seen chumminess between grooms and teenagers that became abuse, and seen these same guys working at horse shows after being fired. We all know how little supervision kids get at shows. I mean, how long did it take to ban 12 year olds from driving golf carts all over the show grounds?

[Poll_Alias]

Does it really matter what nationality grooms are??? IMO ALL persons employed by a trainer/rider/coach/owner, at the minimum the people that are on showgrounds - in a perfect world the farm employees also, should be licensed and need to take safe sport training.

[Scribbler]

@Poll_Alias

Does it really matter what nationality grooms are??? IMO ALL persons employed by a trainer/rider/coach/owner, at the minimum the people that are on showgrounds - in a perfect world the farm employees also, should be licensed and need to take safe sport training.

The issue is that these are low stakes low pay high turnover jobs. Even trainers aren’t licensed or regulated. It would be pretty hard to apply this to barn help. Would the trainer have to buy memberships for all their minimum wage workers?

However barn help is under the control of a barn manager or trainer who presumably now fully understands their responsibilities to keep young people safe. I would say it is the employers job to make it very clear to employees that there is a no tolerance policy for sexual harassment of clients or even consensual stuff with minors. And that trainer will take complaints from minors and clients seriously.

We did have one poster here who’d had an incident with a groom several years back that left her really traumatized, but couldn’t get barn manager to take it seriously at the time. And now it was too late for a police report. I think in that case a SS complaint would be totally justified. I expect that in other sports there is no comparable category to grooms.

[Poll_Alias]

I disagree - I think it is VERY important that any and all people that come in regular contact with minors be subject to Safe Sport sanctions.
As an alternative to membership they could have a license or registration number that can be tracked, have them take safe sport training and sign the acknowledgement. Is it a pain in the a**? Yes - would I have supported a trainer that ran their barn this way? Absolutely, and it is sad that they don’t.
USEF can charge $25 for the record keeping. Grooms can be “ruled off” if necessary with the ability of employers to be aware of past history or in the case of those that don’t care as long as a warm body shows up for work USEF can do the policing.

[Rhythm_Pace_Impulsion]

I’m surprised at this point that the insurance companies for farms and trainers aren’t requiring some sort of SS training for all workers and employees under policyholders. It might be smart or at least proactive to start having all barn employees complete training as then it gives an added layer of informed notice as to appropriate behaviors. I’m sure it would be aggravating but I’d rather be aggravated than to allow more abuse to continue.

[Paint_Party]

@Sticky_Situation

Because the overwhelming majority of SafeSport cases I’m aware of have been male trainers that work with kids and are in a position of power and influence over them, and many in the past have seemingly had rumors swirling among those “in the know” for years before any action was taken.

I have to say, once I got involved with a SS case, I was gobsmacked by the revelations that came forward about the subject being investigated. How close to home it hit was… startling. Literally right before me and I didn’t see it.

But that was before the era of Safe Sport. And holding someone accountable for what occurred in the past can be incredibly challenging.

I’m left wondering if some of these guys had been required to take SS training, would it have made a difference? Would they still have acted the way they did? Would the threat of possible lifetime suspensions been enough to curtail their behavior? Moreover, would adult ammies in the barn, who’d also taken SS training, have better recognized aspects of grooming and manipulative behavior?

I can only hope, going forward, we’re entering a new era.