4800+ Children Abused by the Catholic Church in Portugal by This is Our Memorial

Announced in November 2022, The Independent Commission for the Study of Sexual Abuse in the Portuguese Catholic Church was set up to investigate various claims made throughout the years.

On February 13, 2023, the commission issued its final report. Containing 512 testimonies from victims, with the youngest testimonials coming from children born in 2011, 2013 and 2016, the report (available in Portuguese only) explicitly states that these testimonies "put us on the trail of at least 4300 others, and if we consider that in the overwhelming majority of cases, the abuses happened much more than once to the same child, they lead us to many thousands of abuses committed."
Thus, it is estimated that there are over 4800 victims of abuse over the course of several decades.
Since the report was published there has been little or no movement from the Catholic institutions.

And on the eve of the World Youth Day (WYD), the Portuguese Catholic Church seems content to pretend that this report does not exist. So we decided to act.

The initial concept was posted on Twitter by @tarantelma. It was 2 posters, on with the phrase "4800+ Children Abused by the Catholic Church in Portugal" and the other with 4815 points, each one representing a victim. The art was available for anyone to print, make t-shirts, stickers and spread it on the city during the World Youth Day in Portugal.
Shortly after, another user on the platform suggested making a billboard funded through a crowdfunding campaign.
The initial goal, for a single billboard, was reached in 3 hours, and in the next morning we had enough funds to print 2 billboards. We opened a second crowdfunding campaign which also achieved its goal, enabling us to print a third billboard.
We installed these billboards in Lisbon, Oeiras and Loures.

The billboard installed in Oeiras was removed by the Portuguese municipality of Oeiras, an “illegal censorship", because it was denouncing sexual abuse by clergy in the Catholic Church just as Pope Francis arrived in the country to celebrate World Youth Day. It appeared in all the portuguese newspapers and tv, and in some foreign newspapers.

The billboards memorial is on the streets until the end of august 2023.