Compassion International defends child protection record after sponsorship program comes under scrutiny

By Leonardo Blair, Senior Reporter Friday, November 06, 2026

Compassion International is defending its child protection record after a former employee alleged the charity failed to act when an AI tool flagged 25,810 suspected grooming cases in sponsor letters.

The Colorado Springs-based child sponsorship ministry has since sued the whistleblower, former senior business analyst Andrew Vezey, accusing him of breaching a confidentiality agreement by sharing internal documents with the Roys Report.

The lawsuit, filed Nov. 4 in El Paso County District Court, claims Compassion has suffered “severe reputational harm” and lost donors and sponsorships, and is seeking monetary damages. The court granted Compassion a 14-day temporary restraining order barring Vezey from disclosing its confidential information, with a hearing on a preliminary injunction set for Nov. 13.

An internal Compassion International report cited by the Roys Report, called "Sponsor Correspondence: Examined through the lens of child protection and safeguarding," said that from August 2018 to May 2026, the AI tool PATCh, which is short for Protect All The Children, flagged 25,810 cases of suspected grooming among Compassion’s sponsors who wrote letters to children in the charity’s $43 a month program. More than 20,000 of Compassion’s roughly 1.5 million sponsors were flagged, and some were flagged for letters to more than one child.

The internal report recommended that the Christian charity, which serves 2.4 million children in 29 countries, move from “direct correspondence to controlled engagement” to reduce the risk of exposing children to predators and other psychological harm.

Vezey, who helped create PATCh, told the Roys Report that he resigned from Compassion on Oct. 13 after spending months urging the charity to stop allowing unvetted sponsors to write to children. He said he could no longer continue in good conscience.

In a September message cited by the Roys Report, James Hansen, Compassion’s vice president of risk management, told Vezey the ministry “cannot just cut off letter-writing,” warning that doing so could lead some sponsors to stop giving and harm the children who would lose their sponsorship.

In a statement to The Christian Post that was also published on its website, Compassion International called the portrayal of its child protection efforts “misleading” and said the report should be seen as an evolution of the organization's ongoing commitment to protecting children through the use of AI.

“Protecting children is, and will always be, our highest priority. Compassion has and continues to develop an ever-evolving comprehensive safeguarding ecosystem that includes child protection policies, mandatory trainings, screening processes, correspondence reviews, reporting mechanisms, investigations, ongoing monitoring, and dedicated child protection professionals throughout our global ministry,” the statement said.

“Recent articles paint an incomplete and misleading portrayal of Compassion's long-standing child protection and safeguarding efforts. In our commitment to transparency before and after publication, we provided the journalist with detailed information about Compassion’s entire safeguarding and child protection ecosystem, including how every sponsor letter is reviewed before delivery.”

Tim Glenn, Compassion International’s director of global public relations, told CP that the report was generated through a PATCh analysis of “mostly old letters from 2017-2025” to train the ministry’s new AI product, which is “still under development.”

“All of the letters that were flagged by the AI product, called PATCh (Protect All The Children), had already been reviewed by humans trained in child protection and safeguarding. And any concerns that were identified in those letters were dealt with at the time they entered our system,” Glenn explained.

“It would make sense that the PATCh test would result in a lot of flags, because we haven’t finished training the AI to accurately identify real concerns yet. The model needs a lot of work. That was the entire purpose of the test — to help train and build out the AI model based on letters that had already gone through our human review process. As we have said throughout this process, an AI flag is the beginning of a review, not the conclusion,” he added.

He further told CP that Vezey is “an expert in data analytics … not an expert in child protection and safeguarding.”

“That’s important. Because, while he was helping to build the AI product, which is still in development, our child protection and safeguarding experts are the ones evaluating the content that the model flags,” he said.

“We recognize that child protection work requires constant vigilance, humility, and continuous improvement. That is why Compassion continues to invest in dedicated people, robust processes, specialized expertise, and innovative technology designed to strengthen safeguards and respond to emerging risks,” Compassion International added in its formal statement. “In fact, the real story here is of a 75-year-old organization that is thoughtfully exercising due diligence as it invests in, innovates, and pioneers in the child protection and safeguarding space.”

Glenn told the Roys Report that translators and churches stopped nearly 45,000 inappropriate letters from reaching children out of nearly 20 million sent during the eight-year period.

The internal report highlighted multiple examples of suspected cases of grooming between sponsors and children that were flagged by PATCh.

In one example, a 48-year-old man expressed a strong desire to meet with a child before they became an adult.

“l was surprised how affordable it is to come to [redacted]. I will make my plans and I will let you know when I am coming and where I will be staying...My goal will be to find you and meet your family in person,” the sponsor wrote. “[I] promise to find you because you are so special to me...I do want to meet you while you are still a child... I pray it can happen sooner, before your (sic) all grown up...l also applied for a job working with the mission. Hoping they will send me to your city. They did not hire me, but I will still come to see you.”

In another letter, a 37-year-old man asked a Mexican child if they had a boyfriend and said he thought about the child daily.

“So I reach the maximum that I can write you yesterday, but I wanted to let you know that you look absolutely beautiful. More beautiful than the stars and moon at night...if possible try taking some clear pictures with better lighting... do wish I could communicate with you everyday,” the sponsor wrote. “I'm always thinking about you. What can I do to get closer to you? Do you have a boyfriend? Maybe you can be the reason I'll go to Mexico.”

The report made it clear that PATCh was developed to “operationalize Compassion’s digital safeguarding mandate through people screening, content screening, and technology-enabled prevention.”

“This reinforces Compassion’s safeguarding policy commitments by translating its zero-tolerance stance, prevention-and-response obligations, partner accountability, and victim-centered protection principles into practical digital screening controls,” it explains.

The report also shows that Compassion’s terminations of sponsor accounts belonging to registered sex offenders rose from 599 in 2022 to 1,525 in 2025. As of March 2026, some 1,331 had already been identified.

“This trend indicates that the risk is not static. New supporters, prospective supporters, associated accounts, updated offender data, and improved matching capabilities continue to surface additional concerns,” the report said. “Rather than ‘clearing out’ the issue once, PATCh creates a recurring screening capability that continuously identifies accounts requiring review, termination, or escalation.”

It further noted that the “increase in detections should be interpreted as evidence of improved visibility and stronger safeguarding controls, not as evidence that the original screening effort failed.”

In recommending an end to direct letter writing between sponsors and children, the report noted that there are concerns that predators can also make arrangements to connect with children outside the charity’s authorized communication channels to avoid detection. These “out-of-channel communications” have led to unplanned visits to the homes of some children.

“Out-of-channel communication and/or identifying information that makes the participant able to be located is a driver of unplanned visits, of which there have been 125 documented cases since January 1, 2024,” the report states. “Per EINV, some of these resulted in a supporter proposing marriage to a participant, among other harmful practices.”

Vezey told the Roys Report he knew he risked being sued when he went public. “We chose our course of action because we believed in the necessity of taking action to protect children when all other viable means we believe were available to us failed,” he said.