Protecting Yourself Too

While the primary purpose of rules, regulations, security, and contingency plans is to protect the children at your meetings and events, those same processes can also help protect the meeting planner and other staff in the event that there is a problem or an accusation of negligence or sexual impropriety.

One thing planners should take a look at is their general liability insurance policy to see if it includes claims involving “sex abuse and molestation.”

“The general liability policy could be written to specifically include that, specifically exclude that, or be silent on that issue,” says Lou Novick, president of Novick Group, a Rockville, Maryland insurance company that deals exclusively with non-profit organizations. “If there’s no reference to it, you could take that to mean that it’s covered-but you can’t count on that,” says Novick. “If you haven’t disclosed that you’ve got this exposure-by having children at events-and you haven’t disclosed what you do to safeguard at the event, it’s a good bet that you don’t actually have the coverage.”

He advises organizations to check what their insurance policy does actually cover and notes that to have such coverage included typically would require “a tremendous amount of due diligence to have the underwriter put such coverage in place. The underwriter will want to get information on whether you do background checks and what other protective measures are in place.”