Explain the Definitions of Abuse

All staff are aware of indicators of abuse and neglect and understand that students can be at risk of harm in various environments, including school, home, and online. Exercising professional curiosity and knowing what to look for is crucial for the early identification of abuse and neglect, enabling staff to identify students who may need help or protection.

All staff are prepared to identify students who may benefit from early help. Early help means providing support as soon as a problem emerges at any point in a student's life, from early childhood through the teenage years.

All staff are aware that abuse, neglect, and safeguarding issues are rarely standalone events and cannot be covered by one definition or label alone. In most cases, multiple issues will overlap with one another.

Knowing what to look for is vital for the early identification of abuse and neglect. All staff are trained to recognize indicators of abuse and neglect through their experience and ongoing training, enabling them to identify cases where students may need help or protection. If staff are unsure, they understand they should always speak to the Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL) or deputy.

All staff are aware that students may not feel ready or know how to tell someone that they are being abused, exploited, or neglected, and/or they may not recognize their experiences as harmful. For example, students may feel embarrassed, humiliated, or face threats not to report what is happening to them. This could be due to their vulnerability, disability, sexual orientation, or language barriers. This should not prevent staff from having professional curiosity and speaking to the DSL or deputy if they have concerns about a student. It is also important that staff build trusted relationships with students to facilitate communication.

All staff are aware that technology plays a significant role in many safeguarding and wellbeing issues, and that students are at risk of abuse and other risks both online and face-to-face. Abuse and other risks often occur concurrently both online and offline. Students can also abuse other students online, which can take the form of abusive, harassing, and misogynistic/misandrist messages, the non-consensual sharing of indecent images, especially around chat groups, and the sharing of abusive images and pornography with those who do not want to receive such content.

All staff have an awareness of broader safeguarding issues that can put students at risk of harm. Behaviors linked to issues such as drug use, alcohol misuse, truancy, serious violence (including gang violence), radicalization, and the consensual and non-consensual sharing of nude and semi-nude images and/or videos (also known as youth-produced sexual imagery) put students in danger.

Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people includes:

• Protecting children from maltreatment.
• Preventing impairment of children’s mental and physical health or development.
• Ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care.
• Taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes.

The term ‘children’ refers to any person under the age of 18.

(Laws and guidelines based on the Child Welfare Information Gateway, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Canadian Centre for Child Protection)

While all children should be protected, My Tutor Studio recognizes that some groups of students are potentially at greater risk of harm than others (both online and offline). The list below is not exhaustive but highlights some of those groups:

• Children who need a social worker
• Children who are absent from education - At My Tutor Studio, all program leads (teachers who run the program for their school) have access to their My Tutor Studio teacher account. On this portal, they can view their students' attendance and:
• Live lesson view - so at the time of the lesson they can check if students are attending.
• Attendance reports - inputting a date range and downloading a lesson report showing on a per-student basis a breakdown of their attendance per potential lesson they could attend, and an overall figure.
• Authorized absences - teachers can mark students as authorized absences on their teacher account if they believe there's a valid reason for the student's absence.

• In addition, each school has a dedicated Education Partnerships Manager at My Tutor Studio. Where overall program attendance is a concern, the Education Partnerships Manager reaches out to the program lead, and if they aren't available, will call through to speak to another representative at the school, to understand reasons for absence and see where we can support. Tutors also can log any concerns regarding changes in attendance patterns via our internal safeguarding reporting system, which the My Tutor Studio safeguarding team will follow up on.
• Electively Home Educated (EHE) children
• Children requiring mental health support
• Foster children and those in foster care
• Children with Special Educational Needs or Disabilities (SEND) or with health issues - children with SEND or certain medical or physical health conditions can face additional safeguarding challenges both online and offline. These can include:
• Assumptions that indicators of possible abuse such as behavior, mood, and injury relate to the child's condition without further exploration
• These children being more prone to peer group isolation or bullying (including prejudice-based bullying) than other children
• The potential for children with SEND or certain medical conditions being disproportionately impacted by behaviors such as bullying, without outwardly showing any signs
• Communication barriers and difficulties in managing or reporting these challenges
• Cognitive understanding - being unable to understand the difference between fact and fiction in online content and then repeating the content/behaviors in schools or other settings or the consequences of doing so.

My Tutor Studio requires all schools to send a redacted summary of a child's Individualized Education Program (IEP) or similar plans so that this can be shared with the tutor to enable them to understand the individual needs of the child and any safeguarding concerns in relation to their disability or learning difficulty. 

Abuse

Abuse is a form of maltreatment of a child. Someone may abuse or neglect a child by inflicting harm or by failing to act to prevent harm. Harm can include ill-treatment that is not physical as well as the impact of witnessing ill-treatment of others. This can be particularly relevant, for example, in relation to the impact on children of all forms of domestic abuse. Children may be abused in a family, institutional, or community setting by those known to them or, more rarely, by others. Abuse can take place wholly online, or technology may be used to facilitate offline abuse. Children may be abused by an adult or adults, or by another child or children.

If abuse of a child is reported, My Tutor Studio’s Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL) will follow the procedures as outlined in relevant Canadian and USA child protection laws and regulations.

For Canada: This includes adhering to provincial and territorial child protection legislation, which generally mandates that if a child is or may be in need of protection, the appropriate child protection authority must be notified immediately. This can involve a referral to Child and Family Services or a similar authority, and/or the police, depending on the severity of the risk posed.

For the USA: This includes following the guidelines of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), which requires professionals to report suspected child abuse or neglect to the appropriate child protection agency or law enforcement. This may involve making a referral to Child Protective Services (CPS) or the police, depending on the nature and severity of the abuse or neglect.

The process involves determining whether a child is suffering or at risk of suffering significant harm, and taking appropriate action, which may include:

• Reporting to the relevant child protection authorities.
• Contacting law enforcement if the child is in immediate danger.
• Making referrals to early help services to provide support and intervention as needed.
• Following up with appropriate agencies to ensure the child's safety and well-being.

It is the responsibility of all staff to be familiar with these procedures and to act in accordance with them to ensure the safety and protection of children under My Tutor Studio’s care.

Types of Abuse and NeglectPhysical Abuse

A form of abuse that may involve hitting, shaking, throwing, poisoning, burning or scalding, drowning, suffocating, or otherwise causing physical harm to a child. Physical harm may also be caused when a parent or caregiver fabricates the symptoms of, or deliberately induces, illness in a child.

Emotional Abuse

The persistent emotional maltreatment of a child that causes severe and adverse effects on the child’s emotional development. It may involve conveying to a child that they are worthless, unloved, inadequate, or valued only insofar as they meet the needs of another person. It may include not giving the child opportunities to express their views, deliberately silencing them, or making fun of how they communicate. Emotional abuse may feature age- or developmentally-inappropriate expectations being imposed on children, such as interactions beyond their developmental capability, overprotection, and limitation of exploration and learning, or preventing normal social interaction.

It may involve seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of another. It may involve serious bullying (including cyberbullying), causing children frequently to feel frightened or in danger, or the exploitation or corruption of children. Some level of emotional abuse is involved in all types of maltreatment of a child, although it may occur alone.

Sexual Abuse

Involves forcing or enticing a child or young person to take part in sexual activities, not necessarily involving violence, whether or not the child is aware of what is happening. The activities may involve physical contact, including assault by penetration (e.g., rape or oral sex) or non-penetrative acts such as masturbation, kissing, rubbing, and touching outside of clothing.

They may also include non-contact activities, such as involving children in looking at or producing sexual images, watching sexual activities, encouraging children to behave in sexually inappropriate ways, or grooming a child in preparation for abuse.

Sexual abuse can take place online, and technology can be used to facilitate offline abuse. Sexual abuse is not solely perpetrated by adult males. Women can also commit acts of sexual abuse, as can other children. The sexual abuse of children by other children is a specific safeguarding issue in education, and all staff are aware of it and of their organization’s policy and procedures for dealing with it.

Neglect

The persistent failure to meet a child’s basic physical and/or psychological needs, likely resulting in the serious impairment of the child’s health or development. Neglect may occur during pregnancy as a result of maternal substance abuse. Once a child is born, neglect may involve a parent or caregiver failing to provide adequate food, clothing, and shelter (including exclusion from home or abandonment); protect a child from physical and emotional harm or danger; ensure adequate supervision (including the use of inadequate caregivers); or ensure access to appropriate medical care or treatment. It may also include neglect of or unresponsiveness to a child’s basic emotional needs.

Child Exploitation

All staff are trained to understand that both child sexual exploitation and child criminal exploitation are forms of child abuse. They are trained to recognize the signs and symptoms that may indicate a child could be at risk of exploitation and to report any concerns in line with My Tutor Studio’s safeguarding procedures.

Child-on-Child Abuse

All staff are aware that children can abuse other children at any age (often referred to as child-on-child abuse) and that it can happen both inside and outside of their school or college and online.

All staff are trained to recognize the indicators and signs of abuse and know how to identify and respond to reports, in line with My Tutor Studio’s safeguarding procedures.

Child-on-child abuse is most likely to include, but may not be limited to:

• Bullying (including cyberbullying, prejudice-based, and discriminatory bullying)
• Abuse in intimate personal relationships between children (sometimes known as ‘teenage relationship abuse’)
• Physical abuse, which can include hitting, kicking, shaking, biting, hair pulling, or otherwise causing physical harm
• Sexual violence, referring to sexual offenses under relevant laws, such as rape, assault by penetration, sexual assault, and causing someone to engage in sexual activity without consent
• Sexual harassment, such as sexual comments, remarks, jokes, and online sexual harassment

Child-on-child sexual violence and sexual harassment can happen both inside and outside of educational settings. My Tutor Studio has a zero-tolerance approach to sexual violence and sexual harassment; it is never acceptable and will not be tolerated.

Honor-Based Abuse (HBA)

So-called 'honor'-based abuse (HBA) encompasses incidents or crimes committed to protect or defend the honor of the family and/or the community, including female genital mutilation (FGM), forced marriage, and practices such as breast ironing. Abuse committed in the context of preserving ‘honor’ often involves a wider network of family or community pressure and can include multiple perpetrators.

All forms of HBA are abuse (regardless of the motivation) and should be handled and escalated as such. All staff are trained to spot the signs of HBA and how to report this.

• Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)

All staff have a legal obligation to report to the DSL any cases where it is known that FGM has been carried out on a child, in line with our safeguarding procedures.

• Forced Marriage

A forced marriage is one entered into without the full and free consent of one or both parties and where violence, threats, or any other form of coercion is used to cause a person to enter into marriage. Threats can be physical, emotional, or psychological. A lack of full and free consent can be where a person does not consent or where they cannot consent (if they have learning disabilities, for example). Some perpetrators use perceived cultural practices to coerce a person into marriage.