Events calendar

Dublin Ecclesiastical Provincial Area Meeting

Renehan Hall, St Patricks College Maynooth

THIS MEETING IS ONLY FOR CHURCH LEADERS AND SAFEGUARDING PERSONNEL.  IT IS NOT A PUBLIC MEETING.

Beyond the Screen: Understanding Digital Risk, Grooming and Safeguarding in Faith Communities - Session 1

Beyond the Screen is a bespoke four-part safeguarding programme designed for clergy, religious, safeguarding personnel, youth workers, volunteers and others working within faith and community settings.

Children and young people increasingly experience relationships, communication, identity and belonging across both physical and digital environments. Safeguarding practice must therefore extend beyond traditional understandings of physical access and recognise how grooming, coercion, exploitation, sexual harm and boundary violations can also develop online.

The programme goes beyond conventional internet-safety training by taking a forensic, trauma-informed, relational and safeguarding approach to digital risk.

Rather than focusing primarily on individual platforms or technologies, which will continue to change, the programme focuses on the more enduring safeguarding issues of:

Behaviour • Relationships • Vulnerability • Grooming • Sexual Scripts • Power • Boundaries • Escalation • Accountability • Prevention

Across four connected sessions, participants will move from understanding the digital environment, to recognising emerging and escalating risk, understanding grooming and predatory behaviour, and finally considering how safer organisational and digital cultures can prevent harm. A central principle throughout the programme is:

The screen may change the environment in which harm occurs. It does not remove the safeguarding responsibility.