Training in trust: the educational experience of our Foundation

Abuse happens in every place, context or situation. Being alert to it is, therefore, a responsibility of everyone, but this responsibility has not been internalised by society, however much we would like it to be. For this reason, raising awareness and providing training on abuse is a task the Fundación para la Confianza has made part of its mission: making visible that we must be alert, and also training people so that they can not only understand the dynamics of abuse, but also be active agents in identifying it, intervening and preventing it.

Below, we present three testimonies that show different settings in which the Foundation has made available ways to learn, raise awareness and prevent abuse in different spaces and contexts.

• AlliancesInterventions with institutions to improve their protocols for responding to and preventing abuse.
• Diploma programmesProgrammes for professionals on abusive dynamics, legislation, social and emotional well-being, prevention and early detection.
• Courses for institutionsTraining for teachers and staff to prevent abuse before it happens.

Alliances

Cases of abuse cut across settings, places, situations and people, and although it has been shown that the largest number of cases of sexual abuse occur within the home, greater care is needed in spaces where there is an asymmetry of power, and where there is even a minimal risk that someone could take advantage of that power. That is why the prevention and education programme of the Fundación para la Confianza includes, as part of its work, forming alliances with institutions in order to carry out interventions and improve their practices regarding protocols for responding to and preventing abuse.

Carolina

Carolina Reyes had been head of the Jardín Castorcitos nursery school for three months, and she was already dealing with a complex and delicate situation. Weeks before she took up the post, an alleged case of abuse within the nursery, by an external teacher, had been disclosed. The alarms went off, and a hard but necessary process began immediately.

Jardín Castorcitos, as its head explains, is an institution of the Ministry of Public Works (MOP), and so, when the situation came to light, it was the ministry’s administration that quickly felt the need to bring in outside help, and that was how the relationship with the Foundation began.

“From the start, once it had been decided to begin an alliance with the Foundation, they were very realistic about what we were going through. Not once did they play it down, or tell us: “don’t worry, look, this happens everywhere”, I never heard a comment like that, they always told us: “this is serious, we have to support each other””, Carolina recalls of her first interactions with the alliances team at Para la Confianza.

At that time, as she tells it, “we were all a bit lost, and the Foundation helped us get ourselves in order. They started giving training sessions and talks to the nursery’s parents and guardians, explaining to them what sexual abuse is, because deep down it’s something you never, at any point in your life, expect to come across, but unfortunately it’s something that is very close. We see it in the news every day, but of course, you’d like it never to happen, for children never to suffer like that, but it’s a real issue, and that’s how the Foundation presented it, as a real issue, a tangible issue, an issue that can happen anywhere, even inside the home”.

And when she recalls the beginning of this alliance, it started with a clear objective: “we always wanted the Foundation, and the alliance, to support us in improving our protocol for responding to violations of children’s rights which, although we had one, had several shortcomings. We started having meetings, first with my line managers, getting to know the Foundation a bit, and then we started holding working groups, together with parents and guardians and MOP managers, and representatives of the educators and the support staff of my nursery. They gave us guidelines, they also took our protocol, reviewed it and gave us a first report on the improvements we had to make, or that they suggested we make”.

Having an alliance with the Foundation, as she explains, does not mean they write a protocol and hand it over; quite the opposite: “deep down they’re never going to tell you, OK, write this, instead they guide you along, they supported us loads every time I sent them emails, or asked them to come with us to meetings with the parents, they were there. Deep down they were our companions, our little walking stick in a critical and difficult period. I remember at one point they told me: “this is going to pass, and it’s going to help you so much that you won’t be able to imagine it, you won’t be able to grasp it”, and that’s how it has been”, Carolina recalls.

However, as she explains, it was not at all an easy process, and while this new protocol was being drawn up, Carolina had several conversations with the Foundation’s team in which she told them: “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to cope with this thing, because I didn’t feel prepared to face something like this, which isn’t right. I feel that when you lead a place you should have all the tools to be able to act in the best way. In this case I followed my instincts, and I had a document, I acted according to what the paper said, but I also took decisions that were well regarded, like accompanying people and not staying sitting at my desk”.

“I knew I always had to face things head on. When you’ve acted properly, you have to stay at your post, whatever happens, you’ll cry at home afterwards, I cried a lot, I cried in my bed, in the shower, with my husband, and I let it all out, but at the same time I knew I always had to go to the nursery, because I couldn’t leave my team alone. My vocation is strong, and above all I’m with my team and with my children, I feel it’s an enormous family and that’s also what led me to be strong and to confirm once again that I’m capable, and that I can do it”.

“You question loads of things, I mean even your own job, but deep down when we started working on the protocol, it was like being reborn, because that’s when I realised we were going to create something together with the mums, with the team we formed, which maybe started out a bit tense, but we all ended up very united. For me, always, in every respect, the most important thing in my work is the children, more than anything else, and that’s why we have to be able to get to know them one by one, to see them, to understand them, also to become a bit of an ally to them and build these bonds of trust in which they feel that you are a person they can trust 100% and that, if something happens to them, nobody is going to doubt them”.

“At one point you see it as something you really won’t be able to escape, but the truth is it was a very great learning experience and today I feel much better prepared to face the different difficulties that may come with this post. I feel empowered in my position, and there was also a change in perception at the MOP, which has been wonderful and is much appreciated, I feel there is a lot of trust in me, and I also trust my work completely, I mean I feel really sure of what I do, of the decisions I make”.

“Together with the Foundation we managed to produce a protocol that was complete, with appropriate wording, and that was a document anyone who reads it can understand, because that was a shortcoming the previous one had. And in the end that’s how it turned out”.

“Nobody would want a child to go through a situation like this, not a boy, not a girl, not anyone, but these things exist and you have to open your eyes and understand that it’s not something so far removed from reality, and that those of us who have children, nephews and nieces, cousins, have to take responsibility for our children, we have to always be very attentive, which doesn’t mean putting them in a bubble, but it does mean having our antennae very alert to the changes in them”.

“Now, more than ever, I’m very clear that we must be the guarantors of these children’s rights, look after them, and give them every security, and if that meant working intensely for two or three months to get a protocol out, it had to be done, and it was the number one priority”.

Finally, as she explains, she hopes they will never have to apply the protocol, obviously, “but the most important thing now is that we have to find a strategy so that, in the future, the parents and staff know what it is about, so that if at some point we have to apply it, they know what to do, and it doesn’t stay shut away in a drawer. We want that, if it happens to us again, whoever you ask at the nursery says:

“this is what you have to do, quickly. That there’s no doubt at all, that you don’t have to grab the paper and read it, but that it flows, that’s the idea”.

The support the Foundation gave them, as Carolina explains, can be described as a “rebuilding of trust”, because “they gave us the right words, they also gave us personal tools for how to face people who may get upset and whose upset is understandable. I mean, we’re talking about children, we’re talking about insecure parents, who were afraid of what was happening, parents who didn’t know whether things had been done properly or not, so they say it to you in a bad way, but that doesn’t invalidate what they think. I have a son too and maybe I’d have reacted the same way, and that’s where bringing things down to earth comes in, understanding that these things happen, that it’s not something far away, and that you have to be prepared”.

“I feel that the objective I have, and our nursery has, today is the same as the Foundation’s: to give children security, to give them spaces of trust, and to make an effort day after day to build those spaces for them, and that’s the work we are now doing, with pride”.

Diploma programmes

Training active agents against abuse is a responsibility the Fundación para la Confianza has understood as urgent and very necessary. That is why, through a growing range of programmes offered to different professionals, it seeks to provide training in subjects that teach abusive dynamics, legislation on cases of sexual abuse, social and emotional well-being and, above all, the prevention and early detection of abuse.

Macarena

“Well, how about we quickly introduce ourselves?”

First class of the legal diploma programme, 2017

It was one of the phrases heard in the first class of the Fundación para la Confianza’s legal diploma programme, in 2017. In the room, the great majority of participants were lawyers, close to work with children and with victims of sexual abuse, which makes sense, of course, since that was the course’s target audience.

Macarena Martínez did not fit any of these characteristics. She was in the room too, but she came “from the other side of the moon”, as she describes it. Macarena is a psychologist and, unlike her classmates, she works at Gendarmería (Chile’s prison service), with sex offenders.

Yes, it aroused curiosity, “because it’s as if you’re working with the bad guys”, Macarena explains, “but I also emphasised that the victim was present in my work. For example, when an ancillary measure isn’t complied with (for example, a restraining order), I, as the legal figure from Gendarmería, have a leading role in which I can help to protect the victim; with ideas like these I tried to explain to the group what my work consists of”.

At the institution, her job is to work with first-time offenders who have to serve alternative, non-custodial sentences (penas sustitutivas). Macarena’s task is to talk with them and write reports that can determine whether or not the person could serve a sentence outside prison, and she also has to monitor that those sentences are served.

“Within the work I do at Gendarmería, everything is very divided. There are those who work with offenders and those who work with the victim, and I have always tried to add the victim’s perspective, even though it isn’t so common to do so.

70% of sexual offences occur in the family context, and my job is to oversee compliance by convicted people who are at liberty, where very often the victim is part of the offender’s immediate family system, so taking the victim into account isn’t just a responsibility, it’s an ethical duty”.

Macarena began working at Gendarmería 25 years ago. It was one of her first jobs and a novel option, different from the things she had learned at university, or what she knew from work.

“At that time there were few institutions that were for victims. It wasn’t talked about, and in the legal world the victim was made invisible, so before long I felt there was work that could be done there, I saw there was a professional niche. There was nothing structured, there was no report format for the court, there was nothing. I knew that what I had to do was to recommend, or not, that a sentence be served at liberty, but I didn’t really know how to put it together, and so I started reading reports and old case files, and I realised that the victim was there. It was impossible for me not to put the emphasis on the victim.”

“In the end, the option of recommending liberty or not goes hand in hand with the possibility of reoffending, and of whether or not the victim goes through the same thing again. So it’s sometimes hard, for someone who sees these people as completely separate, to understand how intertwined things are in a specific case. I’ve had to deal with cases of rape of 14-year-old girls, where a child has been born, and while I’m doing assessments or monitoring compliance, a second baby is born, and I realise that in that family there was no restraining order, and they were still living together”.

“And so I found myself ethically obliged to train and understand more about these dynamics”, Macarena recalls, since her own training had not even offered her the chance to learn about it: “The Universidad de Chile had its first course in legal psychology in ’96 (a couple of years after she qualified), so I hadn’t seen anything about this in my degree”.

In 2016, she found the opportunity to do so.

“That year, José Andrés Murillo gave a seminar at the Foundation, and it was open to people who weren’t necessarily professionals.

I didn’t hesitate and I signed up. It was my little personal present, because it started on the fourth of October, my birthday. When I got there, I realised it was a group with musicians, victims, a young guy studying law, very different people, and that’s where I started to learn about the theory of power in relation to sexual abuse”, Macarena recalls.

“Those six sessions I had, those six classes, changed the concept I had of abusive dynamics, forever. After that I was hooked, and I signed up for the diploma programme the following year”.

Arriving at the diploma programme is something she will never forget, “because I feel the other students thought: ‘but what is she doing here, she works with the bad guys’, but the truth is it wasn’t something so foreign to me, it wasn’t as if I was signing up for a NASA course knowing nothing, no, it was something I knew about, and I saw that the teachers were people working in those areas, and that’s something I highlight, because after these diploma programmes I did a master’s degree, and the teachers I had there were from the university, and many know the theory, but not all of them had worked with victims. In the diploma programme I saw people who were working with children, who were working with victims, so if you asked a question they answered it from their experience”.

She does not regret doing it in the slightest. In fact, the following year she took the other diploma programme available at the Foundation, the one in psychosocial support.

As she explains, she believes it helped her a great deal professionally, to improve working practices, and to help educate her colleagues and not perpetuate harmful thinking among them: “you hear a lot of very biased professionals at Gendarmería, who tell you, “come on, it was just a little touch”, “it was only one incident”, “well, the child let it happen that time”, so understanding the dynamics, the concepts, being clear that there is a theory, and that these abusive events don’t happen out of nowhere, helped me a lot not to keep repeating that, and to explain that there is a grooming of the victim, a silencing of the victim, and a very dangerous dynamic”.

“It helped me understand the way the victim behaves. Also why you shouldn’t press for an account, and that has helped me defend the case being able to continue, because many people say that if there’s no account, the case can’t go forward, but in those situations it’s important to say that you shouldn’t pressure the child to speak, because they still can’t put into words what happened to them. However, through the psychological expert assessment you can address the harm, and explain why that child can’t speak at that moment. What I learned in the diploma programmes has been fundamental to understanding all these aspects, as has everything I’ve learned at Gendarmería. It has helped me see the problem as a whole”.

These training experiences have also helped Macarena establish her credentials since, as she explains, one of the first things used to discredit a report is to question the training of the professional who wrote it. When she names the Foundation, however, as she says with a laugh, “they have no way to refute me”.

The responsibility she has felt, though, has not only been to train herself, but to train others. That is why she has made her knowledge available in different settings. One of those she highlights most has to do with an experience that arose from some public safety councils, where she proposed the idea of training the teaching staff of the La Cruz municipality. More than 80 teachers attended, and it was so successful that the Quillota Provincial Government (Gobernación de Quillota) has asked for it to be repeated: “even with everyone who works with children, ancillary staff, vets, secretaries, people from the health centres, from Fundación Integra, it was very positive”.

“And there, obviously, the diploma programmes come up in the presentation. That’s where I explain where what I’m going to present comes from, I name the Fundación para la Confianza, and I explain my motivation to learn, and the immense ethical responsibility which, once you understand the phenomenon better, becomes stronger and more lasting”.

Courses for institutions

Education is key in several respects: getting to know new realities, improving skills, and recognising problems that, through education, can be remedied. Abuse can be present in many places in society, but there are some that are, unfortunately, more prone to dynamics of this kind. Schools have been one of the places where cases of abuse have frequently been disclosed.

We must not be fatalistic, though: the existence of a school does not mean there will be abuse, but prevention is always an option that is not just ideal but necessary.

To prevent, you have to learn, educate yourself and recognise that even if abuse has not happened, you still have to keep it from happening. This is exactly what the leadership team of the Colegio San Mateo¹ in Osorno did with the Fundación para la Confianza, through a series of training sessions for its teachers and staff.

1 It should be remembered that, in the past, the Colegio San Mateo in Osorno was a place where the priest Juan Miguel Leturia committed abuse against pupils. The Fundación para la Confianza filed a criminal complaint (querella) against the congregation for cover-up and has accompanied some of the survivors in their search for truth, justice and reparation. We stand in full solidarity with them. Although this testimony has no connection whatsoever with that case, it is important to make clear that our commitment is aimed at ensuring that children can have a healthier, safer and more trustworthy school environment. It is their right, and our obligation is to work in that direction.

Juan Roberto

The end of 2019 was an especially turbulent period for the country. After the social uprising (estallido social) of October there was a great deal of movement, and the desire for a society without abuse became a frequently heard phrase. In those months, the performance “Un violador en tu camino” (“A Rapist in Your Path”) by the collective “Las Tesis” became a banner of the struggle against gender violence, in Chile and in the hundreds of countries where it was recreated.

The period after this performance was very particular, and was marked by a massive wave of “funas” (public call-outs), a form of accusation made most of the time on social media, largely by women against people who had abused them; although they are not new, there was a significant increase in their number, and the way they were made, mostly on Instagram, created the conditions for some of them to be made by adolescents or young people.

The phenomenon, which began weeks after “Las Tesis” appeared, is hard to quantify, since it took place mostly on social media, not on any single one in particular, often on anonymous profiles, and many of them private. However, there is a strong perception that what was experienced from November to January was something we had never experienced on social media before.

“What was going on? Why are there so many cases? What can we do? How can we help?” These were some of the questions that arose at the Colegio San Mateo in Osorno, after a number of “funas” began to be made among the school’s pupils.

“We realised that we had to look at what was happening in the relationships of our pupils, in the emotional and sexual lives of our students, and a phenomenon came to light that spoke to us of toxic, abusive relationships. That was when we said: “we need training in this, we need to do something””, recalls Juan Roberto Rantul, head of formation and pastoral care at the Colegio San Mateo, about the moment when he needed the Foundation.

He thought of the Fundación para la Confianza. Years before, a concern had arisen about addressing cases of sexual abuse, not because of any particular case, but because of the context Osorno has been in for some time now.

Since 2015, the city has been the epicentre of a constant struggle by parishioners against the local bishop, Juan Barros, accused of covering up Karadima’s abuse years earlier. This, together with cases of abuse that began to come to light among the Jesuits (the congregation the school belongs to), awakened an interest in training and in being prepared for any situation.

“The current Provincial of the Society of Jesus, in the light of all the issues of abuse of children and adolescents, was looking for more complete training for our staff, especially our teachers, and that’s when he told us he had some connection with Juan Carlos Cruz, and he made the first contact”, Roberto recalls.

As he explains, the school had previously held a workshop run by the person in charge of the abuse area; it was very general and conceptual, quite theoretical, “we didn’t manage to bring about change, so we needed someone who really understood this problem, and who would bring about real change in us as a community”.

However, the years went by and the subject was not discussed much more. At the end of last year, he asked for a bit more information about what the Foundation was doing in education, and that was when he realised that they were opening a door in the educational field and, in his view, it was something that could help them.

So, after researching and finding the right contact, the relationship began. A programme was drawn up, and the first activity was scheduled.

“Our first meeting was about getting to know the phenomenon of child sexual abuse: what was it? what did it involve? what was its scope? These were some of the questions we were able to answer. They also gave us statistics at national level, at school level, information the Foundation had and knew very well. We also looked at the causes, the consequences, the ethical and values-based foundations for preventive action or for a support intervention in the event of abuse, and how a school community has to act on this issue, what its approach would be, its methodology for action”; as he recalls, it was a full, complex session that made a great deal of sense to them as a school community.

In this session, moreover, they worked on the funas, what to do, and how “not to put our foot in it”, as Roberto puts it. “It was something relatively very new for us, and although we never agreed with them, we did need to understand them in order to help those who were involved”.

From the very first moment, moreover, he says it was something the community valued highly. As far as he remembers, they had never had a “training” delivered in such a “real” way, without frills or playing things down; it was a dose of reality that, although hard, turned out to be very necessary.

“It had a positive impact in raising awareness and from there we began to break down several taboos, above all because there was a fear of touching on these subjects, because people mistakenly thought you should only talk about it when it happens, and not also in order to prevent it”, Juan Roberto recalls.

“For us, educators or teachers, we’re afraid of tackling this kind of subject, it’s an uncomfortable question that a child or a dad or a mum might ask, so with this workshop, what we did was gradually lose the fear, building good basic conceptual training, and also basic training on how to proceed. This workshop helped us a lot in our efforts to improve our protocols for action”, he explains.

At that point they went on to work collaboratively through many emails and many conversations, in which a joint programme was being developed that would respond to the school’s needs, but would also advance the Foundation’s goals of creating safe spaces for children and adolescents. The programme was presented to the school’s abuse prevention team and also to the leadership team, and in the end they carried it out in March of this year, 2020.

The pandemic, although it did not change the programme’s main objective, did bring modifications and additions, mainly in support for teachers, since their workload, and their emotional load, increased. “That’s when we decided that the programme would include giving teachers tools and resources, so that they would have resources to turn to when they felt overwhelmed, when they needed to get themselves organised, or whatever came up”.

With the programme updated, two more meetings were scheduled, one exploratory and the other a group-work intervention via Zoom, so that they could address the emotional exhaustion that was developing among the school’s staff, whether from the lockdown, from stress, anxieties or the state of permanent tension; this problem had to be addressed, so that they could be well and “in this way pass on this emotional well-being to our boys and girls”.

“And that’s how we gradually lost our fear and saw how to receive a situation, how to refer it, how the school has to take this into the legal framework, and who was going to be responsible. This first workshop clarified a lot for us and took away some of the stress around the situations we have lived through as a local Church, within the Society of Jesus, and around the responsibility that fell to us as a Jesuit school on this issue”, Juan Roberto recalls.

As he explains, they were very keen to do things properly and not make mistakes, and the Foundation helped them a great deal with that, above all in clarifying concepts, “and that guided us in this world that frightened us”.

He is also specific in clearly identifying the fruits of this short but powerful relationship with the Foundation, and he shares them:

“I see three changes, the first in the school’s leadership and management, because abuse started to be considered an issue that needs to be addressed seriously and that, although we have an internal team, we needed a more complete and global view.

“The second is that we now have greater conceptual and procedural clarity. That is, today a classroom assistant, or a member of the school’s ancillary staff, is able to deal with a situation; if a student tells them something, or if they happen to find out about a situation like this, they know what to do. Before, everyone did what they could, what they thought was appropriate, it was left to personal judgement, so thanks to this workshop we created basic criteria for action. We built them, we debated them, and for me that was the long-awaited fruit of this workshop.

“The third was that it left us with conceptual criteria with which we could improve all the procedures and protocols we had had until then, how to address these new situations and what we should do.

1. Leadership and managementAbuse becomes an issue that is addressed seriously and with a more complete view
2. ClarityBasic criteria for action: any assistant or member of the ancillary staff knows what to do if a student tells them something
3. ProtocolsConceptual criteria to improve the school’s procedures and protocols

And finally, “at the level of the staff and the teams who deal with these situations it has done us a lot of good, so we want to keep increasing this good, working on it together, and building a world without abuse”.