Sexual Misconduct Response Team procedures
(revised June 2025)
Outline for the person reporting the incident
This is a brief outline. Please feel free to ask questions as they arise.
Guiding Values
- We are a religious society. In the work of the Sexual Misconduct Response Team (hereafter called Response Team), we aim to maintain worshipful attitudes and to hold all parties in the light of Love and Truth.
- Our aim is not to lay blame, but to address harm, establish safety, and restore healthy and respectful relationships whenever possible.
- At every meeting with the Response Team, you are invited to be accompanied by a trusted F/friend who will serve as a grounded and sympathetic listener and support. Often, a spouse or other intimate partner will be emotionally charged, and another person will fill this role with greater ease and effectiveness.
- The Response Team will keep the matter confidential, and we ask you to do so, too. You may choose someone from outside your family with whom to talk and share feelings. Outside of that, we do not want either party spreading gossip, rumors, or accusations. Participants may be asked to sign a confidentiality agreement.
Stage 1
An incident is reported.
Stage 2
A person from the Sexual Misconduct Response Team will talk with you about what happened and offer some possible options to deal with the incident, depending on its impact on you. If trauma has been caused, fact-gathering will be undertaken, including separate meetings with the person reported.
Stage 3
We want to restore safety and prevent further harm to you as well as to the community. We will talk together about how to do this. In the case of trauma, restoring safety might involve anything from asking the person reported to sign a behavioral agreement to having them leave the Yearly Meeting event and not attend future ones.
Stage 4
Communication with you will continue after the Yearly Meeting event in ways and with timing that we will decide together.
Stage 5
The healing of all concerned—you, the person reported, and the community—is tended to.
Stage 6
Records are kept throughout the process. At the conclusion, they will be secured in a confidential, locked file.
