In the 2000s, various faith-based groups recognized an urgent need to create better child safeguarding policies and response procedures to allegations of child abuse and misconduct. Organizations sought competent investigators to assist with their internal inquiries. In 2014, Samantha Miller founded Voices Heard LLC in response to this need.
Voices Heard traveled the world to interview those who had been harmed, witnesses, and those accused of the harm — including culpable organizational leaders. Over a decade as a global investigative consultant, Samantha and her colleagues recognized that an organization’s desire to do the right or moral thing was often overshadowed by the need to mitigate legal risk.
Due to the dynamics of secrecy and shame, disclosure of child abuse often came years after the incident occurred. Law enforcement frequently declined cases on statute-of-limitations or jurisdictional grounds. Even the lower “more likely than not” burden of proof was difficult to satisfy decades later. Those who had been harmed went through internal inquiry processes and were not satisfied with the outcome.
There are limits to traditional internal misconduct inquiries: a punitive approach does not encourage those responsible to be accountable and does not offer responses that are centered on the person who has been harmed or survivor-led. In historic harm situations where the person responsible is deceased or otherwise unable to participate, an internal inquiry can offer little to the harmed party.
Voices Heard offers an alternative grounded in restorative justice — a high-support, high-accountability approach that centers the needs of people who have been harmed. The resulting outcomes are trauma-informed, have higher satisfaction among people who have been harmed, encourage responsibility, lead to a reduction in recidivism, and offer significant cost savings compared to traditional punitive approaches.
Indigenous land acknowledgement
We acknowledge that Kent Academy stands on land that has long been home to the Irigwe people of the Miango area in Plateau State, Nigeria. We honor their enduring stewardship of that land and the wider Indigenous communities of the region. We commit to listening, to remembering, and to ensuring that the histories of the people of this place are treated with the same care we ask for any story shared with us.