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Call for papers: Women of Faith, Women of Strength: A Safeguarding Conference

Call for Papers: Women of Faith, Women of Strength: A Safeguarding Conference

The International Safeguarding Conference (ISC) is an annual event that has been designed to help people work together to protect children and vulnerable adults from abuse. The conference is attended by individuals from a range of backgrounds, including church leaders, safeguarding professionals, trauma specialists, academics, researchers, and others who are dedicated to the prevention and tackling of abuse.


The aim of the ISC is to provide a platform for learning, networking, and sharing best practices in safeguarding. Attendees have the opportunity to participate in a range of workshops, presentations, and discussions led by experts in the field. 


The 2025 ISC edition will focus on the topic of Women of Faith, Women of Strength: A Safeguarding Conference. Since the 2023 edition, the conference includes a final day fully dedicated to academic research, with the main goal, unlike other scientific conferences, of creating a platform of exchange of experiences and expertise between researchers and practitioners, in a language accessible also to non-academics. 


The conference will be held on June 17-20, 2025 in Rome, Italy. We invite researchers, academicians, scholars, professors working in the field to submit abstracts for papers and presentations on topics related to the field of Safeguarding and Women and related various subtopics.
The aim of the conference is to explore the challenges and opportunities for safeguarding girls and women but also to strengthen the understanding of gender-related aspects in safeguarding. Here below there is a non-exhaustive list of proposed subtopics:


•    Abuse of women within society and church
•    Women as perpetrators and bystanders of abuse (in institutional context/church) 
•    The role of women in the development of safeguarding measures
•    Consideration of gender-related aspects in safeguarding

We welcome abstracts from various disciplines and perspectives that address these sub-topics or other relevant themes related to safeguarding and women. Abstracts should be no more than 400 words and should include the following information:


•    Title of the presentation
•    Name(s) and affiliation(s) of the author(s)
•    Contact email address of the corresponding author
•    Preferred presentation format (oral or poster)
•    Keywords (3-5)
•    Summary of the main objectives, methods, results, and implications of the study or project.


Abstracts should be submitted online to Ms. Isabella Greco at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 31st January 2025. All abstracts will be peer-reviewed by the ISC scientific committee and authors will be notified of acceptance by 20th March 2025. Accepted papers can be published online on the website of the IADC. We are exploring other possibilities for publication.

For more information about the conference, please visit https://thesafeguardingconference.org  or contact the ISC Administrator at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
We look forward to receiving your abstracts and seeing you at the conference!

Conference background:
The International Safeguarding Conference (formerly called the Anglophone/Anglophone Conference) has been hosted by the Centre for Child Protection/Institute of Anthropology (IADC) of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 2015-2018, in a hybrid format in 2021, and in 2022, 2023 and 2024. 
In recent years the Conference has approached the sensitive and multifaceted subject of safeguarding from abuse first as Prevention post Pandemic (2021), then with the Obligations, Dilemmas and Reality of Reporting Abuse (2022), in June 2023 by discussing the issue of Sustaining organisational accountability, and in June 2024 with Safeguarding and disability.