HCH photo by Anna Weaver
At a Safe Environment training class at St. John Vianney School on Nov. 12, attendee Kyle Klapatauskas and class facilitator Kathy Lee are seen watching a video on child abuse prevention.
By Anna Weaver
Hawaii Catholic Herald
Room eight at St. John Vianney School in Kailua was filled with 28 atypical students on a recent Sunday.
The “students” were parish volunteers, religious education teachers, diocesan employees, and Catholic school faculty and staff attending a Safe Environment class — training the Diocese of Honolulu requires of all its employees and volunteers who have contact with minors.
“For us to walk into a situation and say, ‘That can’t happen here,’ is totally misguided because I think [abuse] can happen anywhere,” said Kathy Lee, coordinator of religious education for St. John Vianney and the leader of the Nov. 12 class, to the group.
The class followed a format used by all Safe Environment classes in Hawaii. Lee reviewed a “code of conduct” for adults and a booklet on the sex abuse crisis published by the diocese called “To Offer Healing, to Restore Trust.”
Physical, emotional and sexual abuse was discussed, as well as ways to spot and report abuse. Segments of a video on child abuse, “Hear Their Cries: Religious Responses to Abuse,” were shown during the session.
“I think it’s good for all the people involved with kids to know,” said Kyle Klapatauskas, a new third grade Sunday school teacher at St. Anthony in Kailua. “I think [Lee] did a really good job of bringing to attention our general responsibilities.”
Safe Environment programs evolved from the “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People” that the U.S. bishops created in June 2002 in response to public concern over child sexual abuse by clergy. At the same time, the bishops created the Office of Child and Youth Protection, which oversees Safe Environment programs across the country.
In addition to requiring training for people who work with kids, classes have also been developed for children enrolled in Catholic schools and parish religious education programs, and for their parents.
“I think more and more children are understanding that they have the right to be safe, that no one should hurt them inappropriately,” said Lisa Gomes, the diocese’s Safe Environment coordinator.
“And to be able to do [the training] in a religious context is really good. We tell them they’re created in God’s image, their bodies are made special,” she said.
Jayne Mondoy, the diocesan director of the Office of Religious Education which oversees Safe Environment training, feels that one marker of the program’s success is the number of people trained — 5,137 adults — since 2003 when classes began in Hawaii. Her office has also trained 36 class facilitators throughout the state.
“We’ve captured a spirit of what this program was intended to be,” Mondoy said, “to the extent that people trust us enough to come forward with their own stories.”
Recounting a recent training session in which a volunteer shared his story of abuse as child, Mondoy said, “He said how he wished he had a program like this [back then] because he didn’t know how to respond.”
Gomes and Mondoy say some of the biggest challenges are staying current with changing Hawaii state laws, keeping materials fresh and relevant, and sustaining the true spirit of the program.
“The depth of the issues can be so overwhelming,” Mondoy said. “We just think of the implication for the children and how it carries on well into adulthood.”
She added that “it is not easy to implement a program that is so sensitive in nature” but that people “are doing this courageously because they understand that this is all about creating and maintaining safe environments for the children.”