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Supporting Best Practice
Introduction
Through the course of our work on the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church in Ireland (NBSCCCI) we hear about some of the safe and welcoming activities being run with children across the Church in Ireland today.
In the aftermath of our poor history of child safeguarding a promise of non reccurance may contribute to supporting healing and these examples displayed might reassure that firm safeguarding structures are now in place.
Through this section of our website we want share some of the examples we hear and see across the Church today. These examples emphasis a strong ethos of child protection in place and remind us that safeguarding today is about nurturing a culture of safeguarding through:
- Protecting children from abuse and maltreatment.
- Preventing harm to children’s health or development.
- Ensuring children grow up with the provision of safe and effective care.
- Taking action to enable all children and young people to have the best outcomes.
If you would like to share examples of activities you have arranged with strong child safeguarding practices at their heart please feel free to email lyn.mcdermott@safeguarding.ie
Creating safe environments
The Catholic Church emphasizes the creation and maintenance of a culture of safety, including a safe church environment that is welcoming of children.
Keeping children safe from harm is an imperative but, more than that, the Church will promote the well-being of children through their participation in the ministry
of the Church. The Church will create and maintain environments that uphold children’s rights and that create nurturing, caring conditions where children will
flourish in faith and love. Through fostering a culture of care, children feel safe and looked after and, in turn, they will be supportive of and respectful to their
peers.
Go to the link below which will take you to examples of the creation of safe environments.
A Welcoming Church
This quote from Pope Francis focuses on our role of welcoming and supporting children in the life of the Church.
"Our generation must show that it can rise to the promise found in each [child and] young person when we know how to give them space. This means that we have to create the material and spiritual conditions for their full development, to give them a solid basis on which to build their lives; to guarantee their safety and their education to be everything they can be; to pass on to them lasting values that make life worth living; to give them a transcendent horizon for their thirst for authentic happiness and their creativity for the good; to give them the legacy of a world worthy of human life; and to awaken in them their greatest potential as builders of their own destiny, sharing responsibility for the future of everyone. If we can do all this today, we anticipate the future that enters the world through the window of the young"
Towards Transitional Model of Justice for Victims/Survivors of Abuse
David Mark Smolin is a professor of law at Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama where he is the Harwell G. Davis Chair in Constitutional Law, director for The Center for Children, Law, and Ethics, former director of the Center for Biotechnology, Law, and Ethics,[2] and faculty advisor for the Law, Science and Technology Society.
David has granted permission for NBSCCCI to share two papers he presented on to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.
In David's own words to us when we began discussing transitional justice the first of his papers is more tentative in proposing Transitional Justice as a framework for supporting survivors of abuse within the Church, while the second is more extensive.
How and why The Church should adopt a Transitional Justice Framework to abuse in Catholic contexts