As a general rule, a defendant owes no duty to protect another against harm that the defendant’s own act or omission has not caused. In particular, a defendant generally owes no duty of care to protect another from a third party’s wrongful acts. In deciding whether an exception to that general rule applies to a particular case, the court should engage in a two-step analysis. First, it should consider whether the defendant owes a duty of care due to the defendant’s having a special relationship to the victim or the perpetrator. Second, if such a special relationship exists, the court should apply the Rowland v. Christian (1968) 69 Cal.2d 108 factors to decide whether the defendant should nevertheless not be held to owe a duty of care. The Rowland factors cannot be used to impose a duty of care where no special relationship is found to exist at the first step of the analysis. Here, the Court of Appeal correctly determined that USA Taekwando had a special relationship with the taekwando coaches who were registered with it. USAT required athletes competing in its events to have USAT-registered coaches, and it could implement policies and procedures to protect athletes from sexual abuse by the coaches, as it later did. Accordingly, USAT owed the athletes a duty of care to protect them from foreseeable sexual abuse by their coaches. The USOC, however, had no special relationship with the coaches or athletes and so owed no duty of care to the athletes.