Why Jigsaw
Every organization that discovers abuse is shocked. They had the will and the controls: background checks run, training completed, policies in place. What they didn’t have was a way to see that their protection had stopped working while there was still time to act.
Jigsaw is a sexual abuse protection system that an organization builds and runs itself. It shows them whether the protection is working. Seeing is key: protection you can see is protection you can fix before harm. And what you can see, you can show. This page explains why it’s built the way it is.
What the tools of the last twenty years can’t show you
The tools most organizations rely on arrived together, about twenty years ago, to answer the question: how do we show we’re taking sexual abuse seriously? Background checks, training, policies, and codes of conduct answer that question well; they are important, and you’ll continue using them. But they weren’t built to answer the follow-up question: is our protection working?
Three things flow from that.
- Current tools do their work before harm (implementing controls intended to prevent abuse) or after it (managing the consequences of harm), but not enough in between.
- Nothing in the current tools checks whether anything is working while there’s still time to act.
- The actions that keep people safe day to day, such as someone noticing something is off and saying so early, can’t be required. Those actions are properties of voluntary behavior, and a system made only of requirements can’t reach them.
Those are the gaps. Filling them takes a specific kind of system, and every serious safety field that filled it built theirs on the same four foundations.
The four foundations
Enterprise risk management. Protection is anchored to what your organization is here to do. The question stops being “are we compliant?” and becomes “are we managing the uncertainties that threaten what we’re here to do?” That makes every control explainable to a board, a parent, or a court, and it makes the work worth sustaining, because it serves the mission instead of sitting beside or even conflicting with it.
A living system. Sexual abuse risk is dynamic. Programs and people change, and routines drift. A system that can’t sense can’t learn from it, and a system that can’t learn can’t manage uncertainty, which is where sexual abuse risk lives. Jigsaw’s controls are built with tests written into them, checked on a rhythm, reviewed on a schedule, and improved from what’s noticed. That’s what keeps a control working after the week it was written.
Facilitation. People don’t like talking about sexual abuse, and people don’t like talking about uncertainty. Both are understandable. So Jigsaw never asks anyone to talk about abuse directly. It asks about drift in routines, unclear moments, and “I’m not sure” situations, which is exactly where sexual abuse risk forms. And it asks the people closest to the risk, because when they build the response, they own it. That’s the difference between a system people run and a set of controls people comply with.
A platform. One organization learns from its own worst week. Connected, organizations learn from each other every week. Anonymized, aggregated analysis across the platform shows where risk concentrates, which controls work, and where attention is needed, and that insight goes back to every organization via the SAM Risk Body of Knowledge. Nobody manages this risk in the dark.
What that gives you
At any time, the next step is never a guess. Something feels off, and instead of one good person carrying the burden alone, there’s a path: raise it, and the people who know the organization decide what happens next.
Over time, protection you can see working. Which controls are running, which are slipping, which concerns are moving, in one picture and one rating, while there’s still time to act.
A contemporaneous record. When a board, an insurer, or a court asks what you did, the evidence was created by the system doing its job, dated, rather than assembled after the event.