But activists and sexual abuse survivors continue to ask that the protection of minors and vulnerable adults in the Catholic Church and elsewhere remain a priority despite losing momentum, as risks of online and domestic abuse grow globally.

"It became pretty clear to us very early on that the attention given to safeguarding and protecting the dignity and safety of children, and vulnerable people in general, moved out of the center of attention for many people and for many institutions," said Hans Zollner S.J., a Vatican official spearheading the fight against sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, in an interview with Religion News Service on Wednesday (Aug. 26).

Zollner heads the Pontifical Gregorian University's Centre for Child Protection and is a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, created by Pope Francis in 2014. (Also see Interview with Hans Zollner SJ on "Flashes of Insight" YouTube.)

As the pandemic triggered global lockdowns, forcing citizens to stay at home and avoid crowded events, many young people and vulnerable adults found themselves at a heightened risk of suffering physical and psychological abuse.

The largest nonprofit anti-sexual assault organization in the United States, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, or RAINN, announced in a July news release that it received an unprecedented number of reports by minors of sexual abuse this year during the pandemic.

Throughout Europe, countries have recorded a worrying spike in domestic violence just as "corona divorces" grow in Japan and China after months of lockdown, with many women citing domestic violence as the main cause.

For young people, more time at home also means more access to the internet and social media, where global watchdog organizations have found an increase in sexual predators and grooming efforts. The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, called Europol, warned of a "sharp increase" in the exchange of abusive material online in a news release issued in June.

Despite these concerning trends, child protection agencies and survivors told RNS they feel set aside in the global discourse as donations dwindle and media attention is focused on health and financial questions posed by the pandemic.

The head of the largest clergy abuse survivor network in Italy, Rete L'Abuso, said he saw a "massive drop" in attention and action on child protection since the beginning of the lockdown in the peninsula.

"There was a sense of abandonment for many victims," clergy abuse survivor Francesco Zanardi told RNS on Thursday, adding that many centres for reporting abuse and providing services to victims were shut down at the height of the pandemic.

Sexual abuse trials, both lay and canonical, have been stopped or postponed for several months, Zanardi said. He also said many victims in Italy are now seeking to settle deals with dioceses in order to avoid costly fees and receive immediate cash amid a struggling financial outlook.

Meanwhile, donations for the survivor network have "dropped to zero," with many donors withdrawing their monthly subscription, Zanardi said.

"It's too soon to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the sexual abuse by clergy," Zanardi said, especially since reports tend to emerge years — even decades — after the offense, but continued media attention "gives victims the courage to come forward, as well as providing a better awareness for citizens."

Zanardi highlighted the island of Sicily, located at the tip of the Italian boot-shaped peninsula, as a high-risk region for abuse that lacks adequate safeguards for minors. One such example is the case of the family of an underage girl who authorities say was raped over a four-year period by the head of a lay Catholic association.

The trial for the lay head of the Catholic association, Piero Alfio Capuana, has been postponed numerous times during the pandemic and even the local diocese has fallen silent on the case, which had acquired significant media scrutiny in the past.

"We didn't hear anything from the Curia," said the mother of the victim, who wishes to remain anonymous to protect her underage daughter's identity, in a phone interview with RNS on Thursday.

"We are now forgotten," she added.

Even the church struggled in the early months of the pandemic to continue monitoring and instructing on abuse safety measures as the global attention shifted to health and policy concerns. Zollner said the first two to three months of lockdown showed a drop in communication and collaboration requests from the numerous institutions and dioceses around the world.

"Before (the pandemic) there was much interest in sexual abuse committed by priests even in the past. There was a rise of interest in many media outlets across the globe," he said. "All of a sudden it stopped."

The Swiss priest said that even in conversations with policymakers and activists in several countries, sexual abuse scrolled down the international agendas to benefit concerns over the pandemic's impact on the economy, travel restrictions and public health.

"People got interested in their own well-being, which is understandable, of course, not looking at the dangers for others, in this case for young people, while at the same time those dangers were bigger than before," he said.

He called for a renewed interest by the media in covering cases of sexual abuse, while encouraging reporters to also focus on positive stories of how survivors have found justice and reconciliation.

Current setbacks have also fueled creativity and ingenuity in the Centre for Child Protection, Zollner said, especially through the use of social media and online news conferences that were able to bring together larger numbers than was possible with in-person meetings.

"We learn from different experiences and we come up with new pedagogical insights," he said, adding that the online presence of the centre has "intensified" in recent months, creating the framework for future steps forward.

Over the next few months, Zollner hopes to unveil a concrete new approach that builds on the lessons learned during the pandemic: namely, networking.

"Financial means will be restricted as public attention is decreased," he said. "To come up with something that will bring us back to the previous stage of attention we will necessarily need to come together and work together because this is something that no one can do for themselves or an institution alone."

• Claire Giangravé - Vatican Correspondent RNS. First published in RNS. Republished with permission.
• The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of CathNews.

He says the increased screen time and isolation due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is putting young people at greater risk than usual.

As a result of the pandemic, almost every nation has had young people spending a lot more time at home, "alone, online with no supervision or being checked on," he says.

At the same time, "pornographic material also becomes more accessible" to predators and from them, to children who have no limits on what they can access and no guidance on what they should do to protect themselves from people contacting them online.

"We have to educate about protecting the dignity and respect of vulnerable people, especially young people," Zollner says.

Zollner, who is also a professor of psychology and president of the Centre for Child Protection at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, spoke of his concerns at a "Safeguarding Webinar Series", focusing on "safeguarding online in times of lockdown" and highlighted the kind of risks facing minors online.

Even children under the age of two are targeted with online grooming, sexting (which often takes place among peers), live streamed sexual abuse, cyber bullying and intimidation, he says.

Zollner says FBI research estimates that "at any one time, as many as 750,000 child predators are online over the internet seeking children to abuse online, and two-thirds of the world has no specific laws to combat online grooming of children for sex exploitation."

"During the lockdown in Australia, downloading images of abuse shot up by 86 percent in the three weeks after 21 March."

In addition, Zollner says the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the U.S. "has registered a 106% increase in reports of suspected (child sexual abuse) - rising from 983,734 reports in March 2019 to 2,027,520 in the very same month in 2020."

The increase may be because of offenders' isolation during lockdown and their inability to travel, which makes them more likely to turn to abuse livestreamed or distributed online, Zollner suggests.

At the same time, places like schools or social services for reporting abuse or harassment have been disrupted or reduced and many enforcement agencies' focus is putting a lower priority on online child sexual exploitation in favour of enforcing regulations for handling the pandemic.

Vulnerable minors can be safeguarded by parents and caregivers by using software that allows for parental controls on what people can do online - even though kids sometimes find ways to circumvent it.

Catholic schools also have an important role to play in educating kids about staying safe online, Zollner says.

Source

• Vatican news
• America Magazine
• Image: ChildSafeNet

The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the risk elements in the Church's sexual abuse response, says Fr Hans Zollner SJ.

Zollner is the leading Rome based specialist in addressing the scourge of sex abuse in Catholic institutions.

With less money in circulation, he is urging civil and church societies not to blur their focus nor cut expenditure on safeguarding.

"I do hope that we in the church will go another way and really keep on investing in safeguarding because this is for the safety of those who need most protection", he told Michael Kelly SJ on Flashes of Insight.

"I think it is quite evident to many who are working in this field of safeguarding of minors and vulnerable adults that safeguarding has been relegated down the line because now the almost single focus is on health and the economy", he said.

Zollner said that we all know that abuse is happening in all quarters of society.

Zollner said that unfortunately during the lockdown, society is seeing an increase in those reporting violent behaviours at home and that we can only presume that these behaviours are not only physical violence but sexual and physical violence too.

The very moment when these vulnerable people need more help the social systems can't intervene and those who have been hurt have no place to go, he said.

Zollner told Michael Kelly that while the response varies from country to country, the most important thing the Church has learned is that in order to bring about justice it is important to listen to victims and that listening to victims helps change their attitude to life and helps people to heal.

"We cannot work in the area of safeguarding if you don't really take seriously the concerns of victims", Zollner said.

However, he says that these days every year the Catholic Church trains hundreds of thousands of people around the globe in safeguarding and that it is something that even in an economic downturn we really need to commit to seriously and persistently.

As Professor of Psychology at the Gregorian University in Rome Zollner is also a member of key Vatican committees and consults to national churches throughout the world.

Zollner has an unmatched body of experience and competence to say how the Church is handling the whole catastrophe of sexual abuse.

The Hans Zollner interview is the first in a new video series, "Flashes of Insight", which features key personalities on issues that matter to Catholics.

Flashes of Insight is a collaboration between La Croix International and CathNews NZ.

Zollner is one of the Church's leading experts in child protection.

There are two sides to this problem, Zollner says.

One is with "the hierarchy not involving the gifts of a wide variety of faithful".

The other is with "laypeople who enable a paternalistic attitude by believing bishops to be omniscient and having the power to affect immediate change."

"What I want to affirm is that every baptized person is co-responsible for the holiness of the Church and needs to be prayerful about that and take action so that the community of the Church is ever more a witness to the Gospel."

Looking at the abuse issue from a theological perspective will help understand what went wrong in terms of the image of the Church and its hierarchy that many had, Zollner says.

It will also deepen the concepts of justice, forgiveness and redemption.

"A 'clericalist attitude' could lead one to believe the Church only has a patriarchal structure or that only priests are important," he says.

"However, I think it is important to affirm that it is also very much matriarchal. In every age, prophetic women have been leaders."

He cites Dorothy Day, Mary MacKillop, Frances of Rome, Hildegard von Bingen, the early church "matriarch" Saint Macrina, and Mary the Mother of God herself as examples of women who "carried out their missions, which were often in tension with what some men in their lives wanted".

In the year since the Vatican's summit on the protection of minors and vulnerable people, Zollner says the Vatican City State adopted new laws and guidelines.

These include Pope Francis's motu proprio Vos Estis Lux Mundi, which he announced last May.

This outlined the responsibilities of bishops, extended the concept of protection of "vulnerable persons," and established the obligation to report any case of abuse to church authorities.

Last December Francis announced the abolition of the Pontifical Secret in cases of sexual violence and abuse of minors by clergy.

He modified the legislation raising the age of minors from 14 to 18 years old in what constitutes a crime of possession of material that sexually exploits children under the "delicta graviora".

He also made it possible for lay canon lawyers to take part in the legal processes.

Most recently, Francis established a task force that will help bishops' conferences and others to prepare and update guidelines for protecting minors and vulnerable persons.

Lay movements are a priority area to tackle in terms of the fight against abuse, Zollner says.

The Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life is taking "a very serious approach in this, and they are in the process of collecting guidelines from the various movements, which are very diverse in size and resources," he says.

Source

• Crux
• Image: America Magazine