Youth Safeguarding

Mozillians
#1

Something I’m hearing a lot of lately is around why we should integrate more young people into Mozilla as volunteers, and how we can facilitate that.

We already have young people at Mozilla, and as demonstrated by this very site that you’re using (created mostly by people who started at Mozilla in their early teens), they can be highly effective. We should definetely facilitate that.

A major concern I have here is safeguarding. As an organisation, if we want to facilitate young people, we should lay out some basic safeguarding, and general guidance for working with young people. The reason behind this being that it’s just the right thing to do, and we could potentially face legal penalities if we don’t.

Here’s some things I’m interested in doing/taking lead on:

  • Developing a safeguarding policy for Mozilla
  • Identifying functional team leaders that can act as youth facilitators, who would be trained in basic safeguarding, and be able to support and work with our young people
  • Working with the “Youth Mozilla” initiative on building tracks for their young people to work with the wider Mozilla
  • Take on the role of safeguarding/youth participation lead

If we look more closely at what exactly our safeguarding strategy would look like, under my current ideas

  • Basic guidelines for working with young people published
  • A team of youth facilitators developed to support our young people, with safeguarding training. These people would be trusted points of call
  • Criminal Record Checks for people who have a key function that involves working with young people that volunteer with us (and we should probably look at this for webmaker too!)
  • A trained safeguarding officer (me?) to proactively train members of staff, answer concerns, and deal with any issues that arise with young people

And this is what I need to do it

  • Funding to take a safeguarding course. Not cheap, but way cheaper than hiring a consultant. This can come after I’ve developed a draft plan, but before we put everything into implementation
  • Support from the participation team in approving/pushing out guidelines
  • Support from legal on ensuring we don’t break laws anywhere
  • Approval from somebody to say “yes! go do it!”

This is pretty vauge. But I’m interesting in hearing people’s thoughts.

4 Likes
#2

Hi

An important and complex topic, especially when you consider the different jurisdictions that Mozilla operates in. Personally, I am surprised that this has not come up before.

I think it would be a good idea for Mozilla to have robust policies that could form part of an “event toolkit”, but this needs to be done carefully and may be difficult to do in an open environment. This may have to be set up and managed outside of an open forum.

Part of the issue is making sure that parents who could/should come with children to events are aware of what they should do, not only at the event but also in respect of any online activities. Is this something that Webmaker could help with?

1 Like
#3

The law on child protection is very strict in the UK and as we are becoming more youth inclusive as a group of people in the tech industry we have a responsibility to do our due diligence and lead on good practice when working with young people. Hopefully having a frank and open discussion will help inform the wider conversation as to what is good practice, where we don’t just focus on the letter of the law but consider its spirit too, together as a community protecting our children. This is not just a problem for our group but for ALL groups working with kids/youths in tech, if Mozilla can’t be open source about this who can?

#4

A point based on law being strict in the UK:

We operate globally. My plan is to use UK law as a baseline for what we do, with implementations under US law as well. The reason being that UK law has possibly the strongest child protection law in the world. We do have some US implications to consider, since that’s where our primary registration is. We could, in theory, use Denmark law, but that opens a whole new range of legal issues, since our Denmark registration isn’t even called Mozilla.

I completely agree though, this should be about much more than compliance. We should be aiming for protection, and trust here. Not compliance.

#6

Hey Just a short note

to allow this to continue affectively we are slowing down the building possess for Youth Mozilla,

this is so we are able to use out time as a team more effectively

–
thanks

#7

¡Hola!

I think @gioyik might have something to say on this being a young gentleman himself…