The safeguarding capability of adults in Catholic Church ministries: A global perspective.

BACKGROUND: In the wake of historical sexual abuse across the Catholic Church globally, the Church continues to develop policies and processes to prevent and respond to child sexual abuse, including supporting the skills, knowledge, and confidence of members of the Church. OBJECTIVE: We investigated the safeguarding capabilities of a range of people with different roles within Catholic Church ministries in various countries. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: Our 184 participants included lay people, religious men and women, school staff, safeguarding officers and tertiary students associated with the Catholic Church. Data were collected across seven different countries. METHODS: We measured the awareness, confidence, attitudes, and knowledge of participants and examined differences between participants in different roles within the Church and different countries through General Linear Models. RESULTS: We found varying levels of awareness, confidence, attitudes, and knowledge regarding sexual abuse prevention and safeguarding. We pinpointed the significant differences in three of these domains (confidence, attitudes, and knowledge) both between people with different roles in the church worldwide, but also between the countries from which participants came from. CONCLUSIONS: We found that people in various countries and roles within the Church are at different stages of their safeguarding journey. Some are still understanding their roles (attitudes), some are still learning about how it is operationalised (awareness), and others are acquiring skills that will prepare them for enacting safeguarding policies and practices (confidence).

Child sexual abuse in the context of the Roman Catholic Church: a review of literature from 1981-2013.

Child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has been increasingly recognized as a problem not limited to individual institutions. Recent inquiry commission reports provide substantial information on offense dynamics, but their conclusions have not been synthesized with empirical research to date. The aim of this systematic literature review was to bring together key findings and identify gaps in the evidence base. The three main focus points were (a) types of publications and methodology used, (b) frequency information on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, (c) individual factors in offending, and (d) institutional factors in offending. It was found that reports, legal assessments, and research on child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church provide extensive descriptive and qualitative information for five different countries. This includes individual psychological factors (static risk predictors, multiple trajectories) and institutional factors (opportunity, social dynamics) as well as prevalence rates illustrating a high "dark figure" of child sexual abuse.

Prevention of sexual abuse: improved information is crucial.

Sexual abuse can lead to long-lasting, even life-long, consequences and is a serious problem on an individual, familial and societal level. Therefore, prevention measures on different levels are a public health issue. Minors as well as adults should be involved in prevention work in order to prevent sexual abuse of minors in a sustainable way. Besides norms, structures and values in society, the respective laws as well as attitudes and structures should be changed and amended in such a way that abusers and the abuse are clearly confronted everywhere. In the last decades, numerous prevention programs for victims have been developed for various target groups (e.g. parenting education classes, home-visiting programs, public education, training sessions for teachers, E-Learning Programs of the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research and the Centre for Child Protection). Many of these programs have proven partially effective. Nevertheless, until now there is no consensus in the scientific community on what constitutes effectiveness in this context. Reasons for this are the discrepancies in definitions or the scarcity of attention which the evaluation of prevention measures has received.