UAE guide to help faith leaders support crime victims
dubai — The UAE team for the Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities (IASC) will be releasing a toolkit for global faith leaders to help them combat and prevent crimes through spreading the message of tolerance among vulnerable communities around the world.
During the final day of World Government Summit 2019, Reem Al Falasi, member of the national team for the IASC and secretarygeneral of the Supreme Council for Women and Children, told Khaleej
the toolkit will be released “very soon, within months”.
Following the panel session ‘Tolerance as an effective way of combatting crimes impacting the safety of our communities’, she revealed that the toolkit will act as a “guidebook to support faith leaders” and guide them on how they can help people in communities at risk.
“The government of the UAE is working on raising awareness throughout the Year of Tolerance on the importance of interfaith discussions and involvement in supporting their community. This toolkit is a guide for faith leaders, where they can learn how to deal with a situation involving a person, particularly a child, who has been identified as a victim in a crime.
“It will outline whom they can speak to, how to deal with the child and the family directly, and how to provide emotional support to them. It is basically a step-by-step toolkit for all the support needed to reintegrate these victims back into a safe society,” Al Falasi said.
Speaking during the session, Ernie Allen, chair of the WeProtect Global Alliance (and former president of the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children), touched on how technology and tolerance can become the “crime-fighter”.
“In 2017, there was a world congress on ‘child dignity in a digital world’. From that we produced the Declaration of Rome. One part of that was to bring together faith leaders. Eighty-five per cent of people in the world belong to a faith, so the concept was about how we can integrate faith to keep children safe.”
Today, global society is failing its children, he said. Technology’s exponential advancement and integration into our daily lives are changing what we do and who we are.