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).
Keywords: Abuse and violence; Catholic; Child maltreatment; Child sexual abuse; Children & young people; Public health; Religious.
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