April - Child Abuse Prevention Month

Hello. This is father Scott Euvrard, and I'm the pastor of Saint Anthony of Padua Parish in Cohasset, Massachusetts, and Saint Mary of the Assumption Parish in Hull, Massachusetts.

We are 2 parishes in a collaborative, which we call Christ by the Sea.

We are here on the South Shore of Boston, parishes in a collaborative within the Archdiocese of Boston, and I'd like to welcome you to this 9th episode of our podcast.

April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, And so for this episode of our podcast, I've invited Mary Ann Baker to be with us to talk about our efforts to create safe parishes for all of our parishioners, especially the most vulnerable among us, to create safe parishes for children, young people, and vulnerable adults.

And as we do so, we do so during this month of April, National Child Abuse Prevention Month.

And so one of the things that Mary Anne does for us, one of the many things that she does for us, is she serves as our safe environment coordinator. So, Mary Anne, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the podcast.

This is such an important topic for us, National Child Abuse Prevention Month. Of course, our efforts to focus on preventing child abuse can't be confined to 1 month.

We this is, an ongoing effort and, an effort that requires all of us to work together. Would you just introduce yourself a little bit to our listeners and, tell them about your experience?

I know you have some experience in another organization. Your experience in this, field of child protection. Hi. So I have, a couple of different places where I have had experience.

I've worked for children's friends and family services as a in home therapist to working with families that have children that are struggling with with behavior issues. And some of the children that I dealt with had been abused.

So that gave me some experience with that. I'm also the vice president of health and safety for the spirit of a venture council, and so I do, similar training for, protecting scouts.

And then here, I'm going I do protecting God's children, a training that we do for all all people in the parish that might interact with children.

And I am coordinating getting all the CORIs together because we want to make sure that everyone who is interacting with, children or vulnerable people in our parish have been CORIed.

We also are giving them a code of conduct because we do have a code of conduct that we expect people to follow. And we just wanna make sure that we're doing all we can to prevent child abuse from occurring.

Thank you so much, Mary Anne. You bring a wealth of experience to, your work here at the parishes, helping us to create safe parishes for children, young people, and vulnerable adults.

You mentioned one aspect of our commitment to this is to conduct an annual CORI, on all volunteers who work with either children, young people, or a vulnerable adult.

And in that, just for an explanation, it might be different in your state.

If you're listening from outside of the Archdiocese of Boston, outside of Massachusetts, I am certain that your diocese, your parish has similar efforts, and so this is important information for you too.

This CORI, it's an acronym. I believe it send, stands for criminal offender record information.

And this is, something that a volunteer who is going to work with a vulnerable population, who's going to work with a child, a young person, or a vulnerable adult completes that allows us to get, access to any criminal activity.

And so this is a very important piece. I know that many people do not like doing this.

I know that many people do this for many different organizations, and that in part is because we're not allowed to share the results of our core recheck with other, organizations that you have to do this for each organization.

This is confidential information and will be handled confidentially, and so we can't, share your CORI result with another organization for whom you also might volunteer, to work with a child or a young person or a vulnerable adult.

And I know, Mary Anne, just this past weekend, we had kind of a CORI weekend.

We made a big effort, to have as many of our volunteers as possible, get the CORI done this weekend. And somebody told me I don't know if this is right, but somebody told me that we got over 50 CORIes.

We actually got 70. Oh, 70. Yes. This is even better news. Yes. So after every mass, we, had peep we stopped people who were had some ministry that work that they did with the parish and had them fill out the CORI.

And it it just fills you fill out some information about yourself, and then you have to show an ID so that we know that it's really you.

And then we submit it to Braintree, and they will check the queries, and then they'll get back to us and let us know if anything shows up.

And sometimes things that you wouldn't think about, like driving offenses, maybe if you have people that are driving for field trips or driving a parishioner somewhere.

You know, it's important to check that information also. So that's why it's important to have everybody do a CORI. Exactly. And when she says everybody, she means everybody.

And that includes the clergy, the bishops, priests, and deacons who serve you and the clergy. We have, coordinated by the archdiocese, we have an annual CORI check that we have to complete also.

So this is one pillar of our effort to create safe parishes for children, young people, and vulnerable adults. Another of the pillars that Mary Anne mentioned is a safe environment training called Protecting God's Children.

This would be for adults, anyone 18 years or older who works with, children, young people, or vulnerable adults through our parishes. Mary Anne, could you tell us a little bit about the Protecting God's Children, training?

Yes. So it's a training that shows some videos of of experts in the field and also some videos about people that were offenders who talk about how they were able to get to children.

And what's important about this? I know it's difficult sometimes to watch videos like that, but it's important for people to learn to recognize what a offender would look like.

Unfortunately, a lot of people think it's, you know, the man in the trench coat and the stranger, and we teach children a lot about stranger danger. But over 90% of abuses are really done by someone the children know.

So a family member, a coach, a teacher. So it's important to recognize who might be the offender and to look for the signs of abuse . There are signs that a child is being abused that you can look for.

So during this training, we teach you what to look for if a child is struggling and what could be causing that, and we also train you on ways to prevent an offender from being able to get to children, things like no one on one contact or no, you know, having windows in all the off the classroom so that people can see what's happening in the classroom.

So it's important that everyone's aware of these things, and so that's why this training is so important.

Yes. And once again, this also includes all of the clergy who are serving you, the bishops, priests, and deacons who serve you as members of the clergy. We too have to participate in the Protecting God's Children, training.

And, also in updates on that training, I know a recent kind of development, the the current updating, of the training for us as members of the clergy includes meeting with small groups of, survivors of clergy, sexual abuse to hear their story and to listen to them and to their experience, and so this is a part of our training, too.

So one pillar, the CORI, the annual CORI.

A second pillar of our commitment to creating safe parishes is the protecting God's children, program, the training. And a third pillar is the code of conduct, and this is something that maybe in the past we just assumed.

Everybody knew what appropriate, conduct was with children and young people, but we now know that that was not sufficient, that we have to be more direct in outlining what is appropriate behavior and what is inappropriate behavior with children.

Mary Anne, would you tell us a little more about the code of conduct?

So the code of conduct outlines the, behaviors that you should be expecting people volunteers to be following, And it gives you, guidance when you see somebody who's not following.

And sometimes it's just an innocent mistake. You know, they a child got dropped off early, so the teacher's there alone with the child, but we wanna make sure that everybody is reporting any signs that they see that could be suspicious.

And so what we wanna do is have this code that outlines the things that we're looking for.

And we find that, someone who's a potential abuser, if they go to an organization that has strict rules in place, they're more apt to leave and go somewhere else.

Because they say, oh, this place is really strict and they're gonna be watching me. I have to do the CORI. And so the more that you follow the guidelines, the more that you're, discouraging people who might wanna be abusing children.

Thank you so much, Mary Anne. And I would say a 4th pillar. So now we've had 3 pillars of our effort to, create safe parishes for for children, young people, vulnerable adults, and really for all people who come to us.

A 4th pillar is teaching the children themselves about appropriate and inappropriate interactions with adults, so they too can be alert. Would you tell us a little more about this, Mary Anne? Yes.

So we wanna, enable children to have boundaries to say what's a safe space for them and what is a safe place for people to be touching you. And it's okay to say no when someone's touching you when you don't feel comfortable with it.

And it's okay to, tell somebody. Sometimes the abusers will, you know, threaten to hurt their family or make some threats, and we want to encourage children to not not be intimidated by these threats and to go and tell a trusted adult.

The more chance that they have to tell a trusted adult, the more chance it is to stop the abuse from happening.

And, usually, abusers, you know, start out with just innocent touching, and then they escalate. They start out with maybe a tap on the shoulder or a hug, and then they might move up to a more inappropriate touching.

So we want children to recognize what's inappropriate so that they can stop it before the abuse gets too far. Mary Anne, thank you so much.

So these four pillars are so important during this National Child Abuse Prevention Month, but also throughout the year, to conduct an annual CORI check to pro provide Protecting God's children training for all adults, to provide safe environment, personal safety training for our children and young people, and to have a very clear direct code of conduct.

These help us to create safe parishes for our children, our young people, our vulnerable adults, and for all people. This is part of a commitment that we have, in our parishes, but throughout the Archdiocese of Boston.

In fact, in over the past 20 years, over 50,000 CORIs, criminal offender record information checks, have been done. In the past 20 plus years, over 100,000 adults have been trained in protecting God's children.

Over the past 20 plus years, over a 130,000 children have been trained each year in personal safety, in religious education or faith formation programs, and Catholic schools, and so this is so very important for us.

I will leave some, information, for you in the links for this episode, and it will include the code of conduct and some other basic information about National Child Abuse Prevention Month.

Mary Anne, I wanna thank you for joining us for this episode of the podcast, but more importantly, I want to thank you for serving as our safe environment coordinator, and this is such an important work, and we are committed to it, and we look forward to carrying through with it.

I wanna thank all of you for joining us on this episode of the podcast during National Child Abuse Prevention Month.

Of course, most of what you heard well, all of what you heard would be applicable throughout the Archdiocese of Boston, if you're a listener from outside the Archdiocese of Boston, if it's not the exact same information, I can assure you there are similar efforts in your parish, in your diocese, to provide for the protection of children, young people, and vulnerable adults.

Thanks again for joining us for this episode of the podcast. Until next time, I am father Scott Euvard, Pastor these parishes in Hull and Cohasset, and look forward to being with you in the next episode.