We, survivors of clerical child abuse in Chile, have founded a support network. Those who have suffered abuse as adults and victims of abuse of conscience and power are also part of it.
We are also meant to be the voice of those who still don´t have one to speak out against clergy members or secular actors in a sphere within which Catholic Church clearly failed to comply with their safety.
We demand the Chilean Catholic Church, and through it, the Vatican itself, to modify their way to operate on these crimes and listen to the urgent exhortations that the UN formally delivered to the Vatican in the year 2014 in order to stop the Church´s sistematic policy of torture worldwide.
We stick together and walk along with each other, legally and psychologically, on our way to healing. The initial step are justice and reparation for the crimes suffered.
We are asking the Chilean society to make this claim stronger, and the Chilean state to take concrete action until we can finally say Never More to these crimes. The Chilean state is the one to investigate all the complaints the survivors are submitting and punish the culprits in order to terminate the structural mechanism of impunity and concealment maintained by the Catholic Church up to now.
We are assertive about the only way to terminate this outrage being a coordinate action of more social actors: the Justice system, politics and lawmakers, citizens and the government.
We publicly denounce that what Pope Francis and Chilean bishops have done so far is clearly insufficient. Just gestures and low impact measures that haven´t even attempted to end impunity.
Active networks of concealment still exist. We are talking about the Catholic Church in the present days. Our complaints are not and will never be water under the bridge.
We will not divert our permanent attention from the movements the Catholic Church and their members make and will be warning the country about the actual consequences of their actions.
We are part of ECA: Ending Clerical Abuse, Global Justice Project, the forst worldwide organization for justice in cases of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
Those willing to be part of this Chilean network are welcome to join in. We guarantee total privacy over the identities of those to contact us. The process for a victim to become a survivor may take each individual different amounts of time. Therefore, some of us appear in public and even on the media, and some remain anonymous. Email us at redsobrevivienteschile@gmail.com.
We are always grateful to those who, not being survivors themselves, keep by our side and assist us from their jobs and day-to-day activities: psychologists, doctors, journalists, lawyers, family, friends and so many aho are turning this cause into a collective fight for a wake up call to the entire community.
Nevermore alone. Nevermore in silence.
All over Chile, July 11 2018.
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