” “Bishops’ vicars and delegates from the religious communities of Switzerland took part in the last few days in a "Study Day" (25-26 April) about a very topical subject: "sex abuse from a pastoral viewpoint". The meeting reads a note from the Swiss Bishops Conference had been prepared over a long time by the members of an expert committee that some time ago the Bishops Conference had set up to handle cases of sex abuse. One of the priorities of the Swiss Episcopate is actually to "timely acknowledge the problem" and the "study day" was designed just to help the persons in charge within the dioceses and the religious communities to "timely recognise the signs of the problems so that they can start preventing and taking measures to counter this type of attacks". With the aid of experts, during the two study days, they tried to give the participants "the skills required to handle this type of problems" in legal and psychological terms. Then, they spoke of the state of a victim of sexual exploitation and studied the attacker’s profile and motivation. All this was presented by psychologists, therapists and jurists. The subject was also addressed in terms of canonical law. ” “
