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Professor Daryl Higgins and Gabrielle Hunt, Institute of Child Protection Studies; Gallup
Stichting Benevolentia represented by Porticus
The data will assist the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors in its annual reporting obligations on Church policies and procedures for safeguarding.
We have partnered with Gallup to conduct a pilot study focused on designing, testing and piloting a survey to measure progress towards child safeguarding in Catholic Church ministries, including schools, health care, lay ministries, as well as parish life. The survey is intended to be applicable and implementable across all countries. As part of the pilot, Gallup will lead the survey design, testing and piloting in the Philippines, and potentially other countries.
Gallup with support from the Institute of Child Protection Studies will design and test a survey instrument on child safeguarding and conduct an initial round of quantitative data collection in the Philippines. Gallup will create the safeguarding protocols and survey training materials, and design cognitive testing and pre-testing – this stage is necessary to ensure that the draft safeguarding questionnaire performs consistently across languages, levels of education and cultures. The survey is designed to capture specifically the experiences of those with direct experience of different Catholic Church ministries, as well as the general population.
We will collect data from approximately 2,000 participants for the pilot study in the Philippines.
The pilot test is necessary due to the high sensitivity of some of the questions tested, particularly around the topic of clergy and child sexual abuse. The knowledge and learnings will inform how the technical approach might be implemented in additional countries at a subsequent stage.
Participants will be asked questions about their knowledge of safeguarding and prevention activities they have encountered, and their knowledge of child safety in different environments, such as schools, churches, and healthcare facilities. Some of the questions ask about things that could make children safer and prevent child abuse, including preventing child sexual abuse, assisting in reporting and ensuring safety for children if they are harmed, and holding perpetrators to account.
ACU will be responsible for providing independent analysis of the findings from the survey.
Once piloting is complete, Professor Higgins and the team are hopeful that the methods can be used in other countries to help understand progress towards the implementation of safeguarding policies and procedures in the local churches. Such a tool can provide local Church authorities with data that measures the effectiveness of their safeguarding efforts and identify gaps in creating safe environments. Data from the pilot will be provided not only to the local church authorities, but also to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, to support its annual reporting obligations on Church policies and procedures for safeguarding.
Ethics clearance to administer the pilot in the Philippines has been provided by Gallup’s Institutional Review Board. To receive the anonymous dataset for independent analysis, an application will be made to the Australian Catholic University’s Human Research Ethics Committee
July 2025 – December 2026
For more information contact: icps@acu.edu.au
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