The Problem Is Not the Children: Adult Formation and the Future of Child Protection in Religious Communities

Many religious communities have adopted formal child protection policies in recent decades, often in response to legal and insurance pressures rather than sustained ethical reflection.  Despite the proliferation of such policies, communities frequently struggle to respond well when harm occurs. Drawing on over a decade of experience as both a scholar of sexual violence in religious contexts and a practitioner advocating for survivors and consulting with faith communities, this paper examines the gap between policy adoption and meaningful safeguarding practice. It argues that dominant frameworks often position competent adults as protectors of incompetent children, allowing communities to imagine harm as external to their own moral life and implicitly setting up children's voices to be dismissed. This orientation encourages defensive responses and obscures systemic inequalities that shape harm. The paper proposes an alternative vision of safeguarding grounded in communal ethical formation, in which children are recognized as full members whose wellbeing is integral to the health and accountability of the entire community.