Working towards healing, protection and prevention
(Vatican Radio) How is the Catholic Church across the world responding to the problems
of sex abuse and child protection? That was the subject of a conference at Rome’s
Gregorian University on Tuesday evening – exactly a year after the first ever Vatican
sponsored symposium for church leaders dealing with the clerical abuse crisis. Participants
presented the full proceedings of the 2012 three day symposium which was attended
by bishops from a hundred countries around the globe. They also outlined the work
of an online child protection and awareness programme being rolled out across Europe,
Asia, Africa and Latin America, especially in countries with scarce resources to tackle
this crucial training work. Philippa Hitchen spoke about this e-learning programme
with Jesuit Fr Hans Zollner, Dean of the Gregorian’s Institute of Psychology and head
of the steering committee at the Centre for Child Protection…..
Listen:
"First
of all we're happy we can present 12 language editions of the proceedings of the Symposium....we
have 6 major West European languages and 6 East European languages and I'm happy especially
that we can offer a resource for countries where the discussion about abuse will start
or has only started recently....
Secondly, we present the results of the visits
of our co-workers in different countries with project partners of our Centre for Child
Protection, which we founded here at the Gregorian one year ago - it's an e-learning
platform which is still in the experimental phase...already we have many requests
from countries, dioceses, institutions which want to participate....
Certainly
we have very encouraging signs......we work with various people, for example in East
Europe with people at state level also who look forward to having an instrument which
could be a very helpful tool for preventing abuse...