Our Reach
Participants of Kuibuka workshops are powerful ambassadors of the mission of Kuibuka, sharing their new knowledge and resources with their communities in many different ways. You can learn more about some of this work here, as well as other media about our workshops.
Missio Aachen
From the 13th to the 16th of June 2025, Missio Aachen and its partners gathered in Rome for the second international meeting dedicated to the safeguarding of women religious. The theme of this year’s gathering was: “Culturally Sensitive Approaches to Safeguarding Women Religious.”
Drawing on testimonies and experiences from various Missio-supported projects in Asia, Africa, and Oceania, we reaffirmed a painful and persistent reality: the sexual, spiritual, psychological, and financial abuse of religious sisters. These abuses remain an urgent and under-addressed issue in many regions of the world.
Rocio presented Kuibuka and the workshops we have been conducting since 2023, along with the first results of our qualitative study involving thirteen African religious sisters from diverse countries and congregations. With funding from Missio, we undertook this research to explore how spiritual abuse is experienced and expressed in their own words.
International Safeguarding Conference
The International Safeguarding Conference (ISC) 2025, themed “Women of Faith, Women of Strength”, was held June 17–20, 2025, at the Pontifical Gregorian University, in Rome. Organized by the Centre for Child Protection (Institute of Anthropology) at the Pontifical Gregorian University the Conference aimed to improve safeguarding practices for children and vulnerable adults through multi-disciplinary collaboration.
The final day offered a dedicated platform for researchers and practitioners to exchange expertise in accessible language. Rocio Figueroa presented the project Kuibuka with the title: a A Collaborative Interdisciplinary Research Approach to Building and
Evaluating Effective Safeguarding Practices in Church Communities.
Behind The Veil:
Analyzing the Hidden Patterns of Spiritual
and Sexual Abuse among Catholic Women Religious
University of Regensburg, 26-29 June 2025
At the end of June a team from Kuibuka presented at Behind The Veil, a conference hosted by the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Regensburg. Dr Rocio Figuero, Lisa Spriggens, and Sr Dr Catherine Shirima delivered a paper titled “From Silence to Voice: African Sisters Confront the Abuse of Religious Vows”. This paper is the first report of the research being undertaken by a team within Kuibuka and begins to outline the stories of abuse experienced by Catholic women religious across Africa.
This paper joined a collection of others presented from all over the world. These papers focused on the lived experiences of women religious and the efforts being undertaken to reveal their stories and create change for these women.