Safeguarding for all

Starting in the 2023-2024 academic year, the Pontifical Gregorian University will offer a Safeguarding course, which is compulsory for the attainment of the Baccalaureate, Licentiate and Doctoral degree. Students who have already completed equivalent studies and can provide evidence of this are considered exempt. The purpose of the course is to provide students with the basic notions of Safeguarding, with an emphasis on the university environment, to raise awareness on this issue and how it affects them. Fr Mark Lewis S.J., Rector of the University, explained: “Through this initiative we want to reaffirm our concern for the care and dignity of the human person. Such care cannot be limited to the protection of the most vulnerable; it requires a commitment on the part of the University to provide students with the tools for their own formation in this field, and to encourage them to be authentic protagonists of their own lifestyle in the social and ecclesial spheres.”

The Safeguarding course was therefore born out of these considerations: caring for others, even in an academic environment, concerns everyone, not just experts, and is therefore part of the academic formation of students who, regardless of the faculty they will graduate from, will be called to make a constructive contribution to the communities in which they are trained and where they will work. Indeed, in the words of the Rector, with this initiative, “the University intends to promote an education based on the intrinsic relationship between faith, reason and culture, ensuring that students acquire, through their studies, the tools that will enable them to be responsible and mature protagonists of their personal formation.”

The course, offered by the Gregoriana's Institute of Anthropology (IADC), have a duration of three academic hours. It consists of two hours of online study and one hour of in-person teaching. The first part - online - provides an introduction to the concept of Safeguarding, which is not only a strategy for the protection of vulnerable persons, but is more generally concerned with the creation of safe spaces and relationships that respect the dignity, freedom and development of the human person, in order to reduce opportunities for abuse in interpersonal relationships. Starting from the students’ perspective, the online part of the course engages them with some fundamental questions, which will be discussed in the corresponding sections:

• 1) Why start every academic programme with a course on safeguarding? Students will be encouraged to reflect on the role that Safeguarding, the protection of relationships and respect for otherness play in the conscious and integral development of their personalities as they embark on a crucial path of growth at university.
• 2) How do academic disciplines relate to Safeguarding? Far from being a subject for experts only, Safeguarding intersects with academic disciplines at various levels: each field of research can and should raise specific and fundamental questions about Safeguarding, and students will be helped to discover some of these surprising connections.
• 3) What to read and how to deepen the subject? Specific readings for those who wish to delve into the topic of Safeguardingin this course - or in their studies - will be highlighted with a multidisciplinary approach. 
• 4) What can I do as a student? Precisely because it concerns the student in his or her academic and university life, Safeguarding is not only an issue to be discussed, but above all a set of practices to implement: are there signs and weaknesses that each of us needs to be aware of? What is the responsibility of students as such? Who can be contacted in a critical situation or to report abuse? The answers to these questions will be the starting point for personal reflection on the subject.
   

In the second part of the course - in person, according to a timetable that will be communicated at a later date - students are invited to meet with the professors of the Institute of Anthropology. Together, they discuss the themes that have emerged, ask questions and seek clarifications in order to enrich the shared reflections and lay the foundations for a genuine and responsible commitment. Both online and face-to-face, the course will be enriched with data and statistical information, readings and exercises to encourage personal reflection.