Safeguarding Without a Baseline: A Crosswalk from the IASC Six Core Principles to United States Domestic Legal and Regulatory Anchors

Abstract

Module 1 of the U.S. Nonprofit Safeguarding Crosswalk Project. This working paper decomposes the IASC Six Core Principles Relating to Sexual Exploitation and Abuse into thirteen discrete obligation elements and maps each to its closest United States legal or regulatory anchor. Each element is coded for anchor strength, population covered, population not covered, and gap type. The central finding: of thirteen obligation elements, none is anchored by a United States requirement of general application that both reaches the nonprofit sector and protects program participants. U.S. safeguarding obligations are fragmented across sectors, conditioned on specific federal funding, narrow in the populations they protect, directed at individuals rather than organizations, and never integrated into a whole-of-organization system. The paper converts these documented gaps into six design requirements for an operational domestic baseline — cross-sectoral, beneficiary-facing, portable across sub-sectors, preventive, specified at the operational level, and organizational, with board and executive accountability — and shows that the design problem is already solved in one sub-sector of federal regulation; the scope problem is not. It is written for nonprofit practitioners, for funders and policymakers considering safeguarding conditions, and for researchers who need a citable baseline against which to measure sector practice. Companion implementation tools are published separately under the same open license.