BELGIUM
Crux
March 20, 2020
By Joke Heikens
Karlijn Demasure taught religion at a secondary school for girls in Belgium when she first came across child abuse. It turned out a girl was sexually abused at home and no one at the school knew exactly what to do.
“The psychiatrist associated with the school was also unable to help us,” said Demasure. “Should we address the father that we knew about it and that it shouldn’t be happening? Should we send the girl to therapy? Nobody knew. This episode made me decide to go back to university for further study, and to specialize as a theologian in this field. We must help these children.”
A short time after the episode at the girls school, the first reports started to pour in from the United States about child abuse in the Church, and in 2010 the bomb went off in Belgium. In her homeland, Demasure was a theologian on the committee which investigated abuse within the Belgian Church. In 2014, she was appointed a professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where she also headed the Center for Child Protection.
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