STA, 19 February 2019 - A civil initiative has been formed to fight sexual abuse by members of the Slovenian Catholic Church, and to provide comprehensive assistance to victims of such abuse, including psychosocial and legal assistance in criminal and church proceedings.
The initiative Dovolj.je (It's Enough), which was presented to the press on Tuesday, calls for full protection of victims of sexual abuse and urges the Slovenian Catholic Church to show zero tolerance to such acts.
It connects active Catholics of various professions who have indirectly or directly faced sexual abuse in the Slovenian Catholic Church.
Its member Igor Vovk said at today's press conference in Ljubljana that the initiative had been launched because its members believed that the Catholic Church did too little to protect victims of sexual abuse.
Vovk, who heads the Catholic portal Iskreni.net, added that the Catholic Church should also take more concrete, quicker and more determinate measures against perpetrators.
"It's hard to hear testimonies by victims of sexual abuse, and it's even harder to hear they haven't been taken seriously by those in charge," he said.
"Many perpetrators have faced no consequences, and when measures were taken, they were too mild. We won't tolerate this any longer, regardless of how high the position the Church dignitary involved in such acts," added Vovk.
Members of the initiative and experts in various fields may as of today be contacted at the website dovolj.je, which is a "safe space" for the victims to report and testify about sexual abuse by Church representatives.
All Slovenian bishops are expected to take every reported case of abuse by any priest or religion teacher seriously and remove the perpetrator from the position where they can repeat the act.
Tomaž Pisk, who represented several sexual abuse victims in church proceedings, noted that the guidelines for what measures to take in case of sexual abuse, whose latest version was adopted in 2014, were not being fully implemented.
Pisk added that the initiative encouraged everybody to report sexual abuse by clerics at the website, even if the abuse had been experienced a long time ago and even if the perpetrator had already died.
The initiative was presented last week to Ljubljana Archbishop Stanislav Zore, the head of the Slovenian Bishops' Conference, which said in a press release today that the Slovenian Catholic Church had zero tolerance for any case of sexual abuse.
The conference said a series of measures had been taken in that department, including the establishment in 2009 of a task force for resolving sexual abuse cases. According to its statistics, the group dealt with two reports of sexual abuse in 2017.
So far, the task force looked into 12 cases of alleged sexual abuse. Only four of the cases were also investigated by the police, according to a report by public broadcaster TV Slovenija.
The perpetrators in all 12 cases were men, clerics, while the victims were all minors, five girls and seven boys.
The task force also told TV Slovenija that a total of 18 priests exited the clergy since 1993 in Slovenia. Some did so of their own volition, some were stripped of their function as a punishment.
All our stories about the Catholic Church in Slovenia can be found here
