|
creating
change |
understanding
disability |
understanding
deaf culture |
addressing
accessibility |
understanding
violence |
responding
to violence |
You are here: home>responding to violence>
Understanding Your Responsibilities
All organizations who are working with people experiencing violence and abuse should maintain stringent confidentiality policies and ethics and be aware of the relevant mandatory reporting laws so you can effectively protect the individual with whom you work. In preparation of that work, your organization should:
- Review your confidentiality policies and make any changes necessary to protect the needs of victims/survivors;
- Educate your staff and the people you serve about the mandatory reporting laws in your state;
- Make procedural changes to effectively respond to issues of mandatory reporting, while protecting the integrity of the relationship you have established with a victim/ survivor;
- If you are a mandatory reporter, or if the people who work directly with clients are, put safeguards in place that allow people to make informed decisions about disclosing and create places where they can disclose to someone who is not a mandatory reporter;
- Consider the complicated nature of mandatory reporting and how it affects your work;
- Make a plan to incorporate this information into organizational procedures, policies, trainings and the office’s culture.
In This Section
We discuss numerous issues around confidentiality and mandatory reporting:
- tips on how to best protect confidentiality in your organization, and
- the various ways to work with mandatory reporting laws and their complicated nature.
Note: Some of the resources listed in this section are available as PDF files. In order to view PDFs you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. If you do not have this software installed, you can download Acrobat Reader 
for free on Adobe's web site.
