August 29, 2004
‘40,000 eyes’ looking out for God’s children

Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin talks with Jan Slattery.

When Jan Slattery was asked to head up the new archdiocesan Office for the Protection of Children and Young People more than a year ago, she knew she had a huge task. The office, established in response to Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People first approved by the bishops in June 2002, coordinates the administrative requirements of the charter: training to prevent child abuse, criminal background checks for clergy, employees and volunteers; and the establishment of a uniform code of conduct to be signed by everyone who comes in contact with children. The goal, Slattery said, is to make all children safer.

 

The Catholic New World: First the numbers. How many adults have been trained to spot potential child abuse or situations that could lead to it? How many background checks have been conducted?

Jan Slattery: In the Protecting God’s Children program? As of this morning, we have trained 16,193 people who have registered online. But we know there are probably another 4,000 who are not registered online. We are confident we have trained over 20,000. That would be priests, it would be deacons, it would be all paid archdiocesan employees, many religious who are involved in our parishes and some who are not and all volunteers who work with children. Ultimately, the goal is to train them all. We probably will train close to 50,000 people.

Now the background check data, which is probably a good barometer for the training, we have done 28,375 background checks.

 

TCNW: How many of the checks have turned up a problem?

JS: Very few.

 

TCNW: Less than a hundred?

JS: A handful.

 

TCNW: What are you looking for when you do a background check?

JS: If we have an employee in a parish or a school who has a history of possession or selling of drugs, that would be a concern to us. These are all convictions—we don’t act on anything other than convictions. We would be concerned if we had anyone who was convicted of an assault crime, manslaughter, things of that nature. Clearly those things we can’t deal with. We would be looking at battery, assault, any of those types of things—anything where if you were in the presence of children and had trouble controlling your anger, or it’s evident that you are possibly a liability in terms of safety to children.

We’re not looking at speeding tickets or credit reports. Some people think we’re doing credit checks on them. We’re not; that’s not our concern.

 

TCNW: How has the response been when you tell people they need to do the training or have a background check?

JS: When you go into a training session, sometimes you can just sense there are some people who are unhappy they have to be there. It is very rare—and we know this from the evaluations—that we have people leaving without having learned something new or being grateful for having been a part of it.

At times, we’ve had people stand up and say to us, “We’re here because of the priests.” We don’t deny that. We say, “That’s right. But there’s a bigger issue in our society, and our eyes have been opened to it. That is the abuse—really an epidemic of abuse—that’s being perpetrated on children. That’s physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse. And we can make a difference in the lives of children through this program. So get on with it.” That’s what I say. It’s not about you; it’s about children.

 

TCNW: Do you feel that children in the archdiocese are safer than they were two or three years ago?

JS: We will never totally prevent abuse. I would say, in any of the parishes in which we have trained, and hopefully the schools—we have trained more than 7,000 teachers—children are safer. The reason I say that is because people leave saying, “Oh my gosh, what did I miss? I never realized I had to be aware of these places where people could go. I never thought that this thought in the back of my head that something was unusual, I should have pursued it.”

 

TCNW: When I left the training, I went back to my office and said I’m never letting my children out of my sight.

JS: And I went home and said to my 13-year-old, “You’re never leaving the house again.” … The important thing here is that we have to be clear, especially with the priests, that they cannot stop responding to children and being present to them. It’s a matter of how we conduct ourselves. ... If a child comes up and hugs you, you don’t stand there with your arms at your sides. In the priests’ training, we went through some of those examples, telling them that it is important, and you can’t be afraid, even though we know you are.

 

TCNW: You have six children, and you had a position in another archdiocesan office before this office was launched. When they asked you to take this job, what did you think?

JS: I was in Dallas when all of this was being discussed and put forth, and there was a pall, an absolute pall, over that whole place. You couldn’t help but feel that, and I left with that, and when they asked me about this position, the first thing I felt was that pall that was among all of those bishops, everyone who was there. It took me a while to really respond.

The reason I finally said yes was because, first of all, I believe in working from within. I don’t think criticizing from the outside is productive. Then, we had as a foster family fostered children who had been abused. Having had our own children—our children cover a span of years; we have children from 30 down to 13—I think there’s a big difference now in safety for children. I’ve seen that as a parent between our older children and the younger ones. As I began to think about all my parenting with foster children and everything else, it began to dawn on me, for children I can do this.

Somebody needs to do this. We are a large church. We can make a significant difference here. We can have an impact. And that’s what really just catapulted me forward. It’s working. It is working.

 

TCNW: How do you know it’s working?

JS: We know it’s working because we get phone calls from people—it could be priests, it could be principals, it could be parishioners—letting us know things. They’re not on witch-hunts, but there’s something that has come up, there’s something in their community, there’s something that happened, they’ve had an experience they want to report, and they’re trying to be very, very clear about it. So it is taking effect; we’re getting responses. We’re getting responses from principals incredibly, telling us the difference it’s made in terms of how they do things in their schools, how they are watching doors and spaces and how they’re educating children. … It’s 40,000 eyes out there watching and observing.

 

TCNW: You also plan to start offering some abuse prevention training for children. Tell me about that.

JS: We will talk with the Catholic schools about how best to do this. There are a number of programs on the market about how best to inform children about how to protect themselves. My struggle is that we selected the Virtus (Protecting God’s Children) training program because we really wanted adults to be responsible for protecting children. We’re not naïve, and we know it’s good for children to have information, but we don’t want to have to put the onus on them to have to protect themselves. We want to use a model that can be informative to them about how to be wise or smart, but we’re not going to push it off on them.

 

TCNW: Will this be offered to Catholic schools, to parishes?

JS: Both. I see this as a program that can be used in CCD, that can be used in parishes as a whole, can be used in youth groups, in classrooms, all of those components. And across a large age range. That’s the other challenge. We go from preschool all the way up, and no one 17 or younger is engaged in any of the training we have been doing. We are in conversation with a couple of other dioceses that are considering developing what we would call a young adult, a high school component, distinct from the younger kids

 

TCNW: Are people aware of how much the archdiocese is doing to protect kids?

JS: No. I just had a conversation with the Victim Assistance Office, and what we’re doing is a mailing going out to all of the parishes. There’s going to be a package of material in there they can start to get out to the people in the pews, and also, in the bulletin batch (information sent to parishes for their bulletins), we’re going to start to give some statistics about how many people have been trained. We have scheduled 60 training sessions between now and Oct. 15, and in those training sessions, we can accommodate 7,000 people. … Things are just smoothly running, but we’ve been so busy here in the trenches we haven’t done a good job of communicating all of that.

 

TCNW: What’s been hardest?

JS: We’ve had to do one step at a time. We had to put in place a database, for example, before we started the background check process. We had to do a lot of due diligence about how to best do this in a diocese of our size. With a diocese of 2,000, we could do it on paper, but there’s no way we could do it that way. We’re looking at potentially 50,000 people.

 

To register for the Protecting God’s Children training or a criminal background check, visit www.archchicago.org and click on the “Keeping Children Safe” link. For more information on Protecting God’s Children, call Eileen Sargis at (312) 751-5388. For information on completing a criminal background check, call Santa Garcia at (312) 751-5251.

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