Non-violent education as a children's right - a human-rights based response to child sexual abuse in educational institutions

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dc.check.date2025-12-31
dc.contributor.advisorO'Mahony, Conor
dc.contributor.advisorKilkelly, Ursula
dc.contributor.advisorexternalMcAleese, Maryen
dc.contributor.authorWittmann, Franz M.en
dc.date.accessioned2024-09-24T15:28:36Z
dc.date.available2024-09-24T15:28:36Z
dc.date.issued2023en
dc.date.submitted2023
dc.description.abstractThis thesis looks into an area of the law where international human rights and the canon law of the Catholic Church and Ireland’s internal legal order intersect and partially overlap. Its focus is on children’s rights as they were stipulated in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) to which Ireland as well as the Holy See became a State Party; the earlier without any reservations added and the latter attaching an interpretive declaration as well as reservations to its formal act of ratification. My analysis was likewise inspired by four major contemporary child abuse reports from Ireland captioned as ‘Ferns’ (2005), ‘Ryan’ (2009), ’Murphy’ (2009) and ‘Cloyne’ (2010) respectively. These reports document institutional and structural features of child care and education deemed gravely abusive, in the State or in the Church. This work demonstrates from CRC provisions such as Article 19 CRC (right to protection from violence) and Articles 28, 29 CRC (educational rights) that the right to non-violent education must be synthesized in order to secure for States Parties to the Convention to come under an international obligation to undertake all necessary measures for protecting schoolchildren from violence and abuse, and from sexual abuse in particular. In this respect schoolchildren in educational settings owned and managed by Catholic institutions co-regulated by canon law provisions must not be left behind, just because their schools are not under immediate State control; as fully documented by the reports Catholic schools may become places where children are severely threatened by risks of violence and sexual abuse. Since the Convention was put into force making reality of children’s rights requires an act of implementation starting from rights provisions to be transposed into state duties and obligations with the help of a tripartite typology of ‘Respect’, ‘Protect’ and ‘Fulfil’ (RPF) which has become an accepted framework for analysis; these methodological aspects are fully explained and elaborated in the thesis with application to the right to non-violent education. Accordingly, what had to follow was an examination of the extent to which the Holy See and Ireland have discharged their protective obligations emanating from the RPF scheme. Thus, an obligation of implementation falls on the Holy See as a State Party to the Convention, and some initial steps of legal reform in the interest of children and their rights were undertaken, in the domain of criminalization, mandatory reporting and investigation. In response to revelations about child abuse by clerics and Catholic run institutions the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors was set up, but its institutional independence is not secured. As a jurisdiction Ireland became highly active initiating a wealth of legislative, administrative, social and educational measures for the implementation of children’s rights and some core aspects of criminalization, mandatory reporting, investigation and inspection are discussed in this study as well as comprehensive sexuality education which is shown to be an educational measure appropriate for protecting schoolchildren from sexual abuse in schools. Although this was not always done in a fully coordinated and consistent manner, over time a multitude of single steps were taken by organs of the State for child protection in Ireland. Consequently, in order to avoid dangerous fragmentation of services it proved necessary to streamline the statutory regime under which child protection agencies and crime prevention organs presently co-operate, in the education sector, among others. As my analysis demonstrates, it might be helpful to consider an orientation for legislators, administrators and the judiciary along the lines of the right to non-violent education so as to prioritise children as independent right-holders and their actual needs.en
dc.description.statusNot peer revieweden
dc.description.versionAccepted Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationWittmann, F. M. 2023. Non-violent education as a children's right - a human-rights based response to child sexual abuse in educational institutions. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.
dc.identifier.endpage308
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/16439
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherUniversity College Corken
dc.rights© 2023, Franz M. Wittmannn.
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
dc.subjectChildren's rights
dc.subjectNon-violent education
dc.subjectChild sexual abuse
dc.subjectCatholic schools
dc.titleNon-violent education as a children's right - a human-rights based response to child sexual abuse in educational institutions
dc.typeDoctoral thesisen
dc.type.qualificationlevelDoctoralen
dc.type.qualificationnamePhD - Doctor of Philosophyen
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