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Professor Daryl Higgins, Dr Gabrielle Hunt, Douglas Russell, and Shayini Rattambige from Institute of Child Protection Studies
Gallup Inc., a global analytics and advisory firm known for its public opinion survey research expertise.
The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors (PCPM), within its mandate to produce an Annual Report on Church Policies and Procedures for Safeguarding.
Funding from three separate donors supports the Data for a Safer Church project. This is the largest ever philanthropically funded research project in ACU's history.
To provide local Church authorities with data that measures the inculturation and saturation of their safeguarding efforts and identify gaps in creating safe environments.
The data will provide the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors (PCPM) key data, which will feed its analysis and subsequent Annual Report on Church Policies and Procedures for Safeguarding.
We have partnered with Gallup and the PCPM to conduct a global study that measures progress towards child safeguarding. The study involves conducting surveys across the population to understand their views about and experience of safeguarding in key Catholic Church contexts, including schools, health care facilities, lay groups, as well as parish life in a range of countries. The survey has been designed to be applicable and implemented across any country.
Parties to the Safer Church Survey project have designed and tested a survey instrument on child safeguarding. For implementation of the anonymous survey, Gallup has put in place safeguarding protocols, training for local partners collecting the anonymous data, as well as undertaking cognitive testing in multiple countries. These are all to ensure that the final 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, national population.
The survey has been piloted in the Philippines. Given that the questions cover sensitive topics, and that they need to be applicable in a range of countries and contexts, piloting the survey was a critical step to having a robust survey that can be used to measure implementation of safeguarding in the Catholic Church and its ministries.
Of the 2000 participants, half are a representative sample of the population, and half are targeted to those who regularly attend one or more catholic ministry contexts: churches, schools, healthcare facilities, and other lay-ministries. The model used to collect data is now being deployed in an additional five countries across the globe, to get a population-level understanding of the typical experience of safeguarding in the given countries, across all types of ministries. The survey includes items about how safe children are in different settings, what behaviours are acceptable, whether people know how to report concerns, and views on leadership and accountability.
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.
The project has been funded by a range of international philanthropic organisations, including Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and Aid to the Church in Need.
We have completed data collection from approximately 2000 participants in the Philippines. Another five countries have been secured to be part of the global survey.
The first set of findings from the survey in the Philippines will be published in the Pontifical Commission’s Third Annual Report, in October of 2026.
ACU is responsible for providing independent analysis of the findings from the survey to the PCPM and subsequently to the wider academic community. We will release a report, with that analysis of the findings from the Philippines in January 2027.
If you are an academic researcher and would like access to the data set, details will be available for how to apply for access to the data in January 2027.
This project will provide local Church authorities with data that measures the effectiveness of their safeguarding efforts and identify gaps in creating safe environments. This aims to provide an evidence-based mapping of areas to improve local safeguarding measures.
Ethics clearance has been provided by Gallup's Institutional Review Board and the Australian Catholic University's Human Research Ethics Committee.
July 2025 - October 2028
For more information contact: icps@acu.edu.au
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