I have shared briefly in a different post about the conference that I am planning for the organization I co-founded in Iceland.
Education + Discussion = Prevention: the best way!
Reykjavík,
Iceland – May 24 – 25, 2007 The objective of the conference is to look at the ways the community can prevent the sexual abuse of children. When faced with the discussion of sexual abuse, people are often limited to their emotional responses of outrage, fear, anger and denial. We have a great responsibility as spokespeople to set a good example and discuss it openly. We do that by drawing attention to the many ways we can learn about and prevent the sexual abuse of children.
I applied for support and funds for this conference from a number of organizations, institutions and ministries in Iceland. I have also shared that we did get funding from the Ministry of Justice in Iceland. Actually since then we also got a reply from the Ministry of Health. The Ministry of Justice had replied to our letter to support this conference with a donation from a fund dedicated to human rights issues. It was very generous and important for this event.
I decided to email the Minister of Justice and thank him personally and ask him to speak at our conference. There have been important changes in Iceland recently on the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse crimes. It has been removed all together on the worst offences. Just fyi – The main role of the Ministry of Justice and Ecclesiastical Affairs (in Iceland ) is to uphold law and order and ensure that civil rights are respected.
Anyway, the Minister did reply to my email. I was thrilled! There are elections around the corner and so he did not feel that he could commit to speaking at the conference at this time, but thanked me for the email. His name is Björn Bjarnason and he has been the Minister of Justice in Iceland since 2003. He is known for being very active and in touch with the people of Iceland, by personally responding to all the emails he gets. I guess that is the advantage of serving a country where the population is just over 300 thousand people. I think it is a wonderful thing! Can you imagine if you got a personal reply from your senator or president? That would be a great thing!
