Priests should take heart. You wouldn’t guess it from the New York Times and other media coverage, but the startling story is that authoritative studies are showing that the safest place for children is actually in the Church
By Peter Rosengren
FOR anyone who doubts that the Catholic Church is the safest place in the world for children and minors, the 2006 United Nations Study on Violence against Children makes illuminating reading.
Compiled over several years of research between 2002 and 2006 by independent expert Paolo Sergio Pinheiro, the Study found that as many as 150 million girls and 73 million boys are raped or subject to sexual violence each year, while between 133-275 million children annually experience domestic violence.
The figures are staggering, and help to put into some perspective the scale of the problem so widely reported in the Catholic Church; Italian sociologist Massimo Savigne writing on March 13 pointed out that in the US case 4392 priests out of more than 109,000 were accused over a 52 year period from 1950 to 2002 of sexual relationships with minors, with civil tribunals finding more than 100 guilty.
Cases involving paedophilia appear to have run at about one per year over that period.
The Ryan Report produced in Ireland in 2009 and which uses harsh language to describe the handling by bishops of known cases of abuse and allegations, refers to 253 allegations of abuse against boys and 128 cases against girls over several decades. However what the UN and other studies reveal is that sexual abuse of children and minors is a global pandemic rarely reported in the media of affluent nations such as the US and Australia.
A closer examination of the reasons for the media’s short-sightedness on this issue can be found in the main article of this special report by Sydney-based journalist Tim Wallace.
The report noted that the World Health Organisation estimates between 100 and 140 million girls and women in the world have undergone some form of female genital mutilation and/or cutting.
UNICEF estimates published in 2005 suggest that in sub-Sharan Africa, Egypt and Sudan, three million girls and women are subjected to genital mutilation and/or cutting every year.
International Labour Organisation estimates indicated in 2000 that 1.8 million children were trapped in prostitution and pornography and 1.2 million were victims of human trafficking.
For several years the world’s media attention has been glued to the Catholic Church on the issue of sexual abuse, effectively increasing the pressure on the Church to come to grips with the issue.
What has not appeared in the media, however, is a contextualisation of the problem.
Quoting a multi-country study, the 2006 UN report indicated that sexual violence and/or abuse against children within the home is, at least, being increasingly acknowledged. Figures are not precise because of the sensitive nature of the problem and because victims are often dependent on perpetrators for economic support and stability. What is clear is that the numbers are staggering.
The overview of studies conducted in mainly developed countries found that between 7-26 per cent of women and 3-29 per cent of men reported sexual victimisation during childhood, with girls being abused an estimated 1.5-3 times the rate for males. Most abuse, the overview found, occurred within the family circle.
Another WHO study of both developed and undeveloped studies showed that between 1-21 per cent of women reported being sexually abused before the age of 15 by male family members other than the father or stepfather.
In March this year, Marta Santos Pais from the office of the Special Representative of the UN’s Secretary General on Violence Against Children returned to the subject issuing a statement on a follow up study to the 2006 report.
She described a study “on sexual, physical and emotional violence against girls between 13 and 24 years of age” in Swaziland as an important development because its findings corroborated the 2006 UN report.
“According to this survey,” she said, “one in three girls experienced some form of sexual violence as a child; and approximately nine per cent experienced coercive sexual intercourse before they reached 18 years old.”
“The study also revealed that violence is perpetrated by people children know and trust. In the case of sexual violence, 75 per cent of the perpetrators were well known to the victims, including husbands and boyfriends, male relatives and neighbours. Often occurring within the home, sexual violence remains hidden and largely kept as a family secret. Many victims depend on the perpetrators for social and economic support; these in turn, make use of their status to intimidate children and coerce them to keep silent.”
Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s Permanent Observer to the UN summarised some of the relevant statistics which rarely get a hearing in competition with the sensational reports to do with such alluring figures for journalists as the head of the Catholic Church.
Delivered at the UN in 2009 in reply to an attack by the International Humanists Union, Archbishop Tomasi pointed out:
l While the problem in the Church is described as pedophilia, an estimated 80-90 per cent of the problem is same-sex attracted men predating on adolescent boys and youth aged 11-17.
l It is estimated that over the last 50 years somewhere between 1.5 per cent and 5 per cent of Catholic clergy has been involved in sexual abuse cases. The Christian Science Monitor reported on the results of a national survey by Christian Ministry Resources in the US in 2002 and concluded: “Despite headlines focusing on the priest pedophile problem in the Roman Catholic Church, most American churches being hit with child sexual-abuse allegations are Protestant, and most of the alleged abusers are not clergy or staff, but church volunteers”. Sexual abuses within the Jewish communities approximate that found among the Protestant clergy, according to Rabbi Arthur Gross Schaefer, professor of law and ethics at Loyola Marymount University.
l According to Dr Garth A Rattray 85 per cent of the offend ers of child sexual abuse are family members, babysitters, neighbours, family friends or relatives.
About one in six child molesters are other children, while most of the offenders are male. According to a major 2004 study commissioned by the US Department of Education, nearly 10 per cent of US Public school students have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention by school employees. The author of the study concluded that the scope of the school sex problem appears to far exceed the clergy abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church and concluded in an interview with Education Week that the physical abuse of students in schools is 100 times more likely to occur than abuse by priests.
Meanwhile, he added, the Church is conscious of the problem. The Code of Canon Law says in Canon 1395.2: “The cleric who commits any offence against the sixth precept of the Decalogue, if the offence was committed with violence or threats, or publicly or with a minor who is under 18 years must be punished with just punishments, not excluding expulsion from clerical state”.
The Weekend Australian Magazine of 3-4 April was one of the few voices questioning the hysteria of a global media onslaught against the Church and Pope Benedict over the issue of abuse.
“… when Vatican officials express indignation that their Church is being singled out as a corrupt institution when paedophilia and under-age sex are part of a larger social problem, they may have a point,” it noted. “A large scale survey by Dr Thomas Plante of Stanford University suggests that 2-5 per cent of priests have had sexual experience with a minor, far lower than the figure for the general adult male population, estimated at 8 per cent. And the Catholic Church may not be as bad as others: in a survey in the mid 1990s, 14 per cent of Southern Baptist ministers admitted in engaging in “inappropriate sexual behaviour.” “Nor is the sexual abuse problem just a problem of the Christian Church: the sleeping giant may be Islam, with reports leaking out of systematic sexual abuse of boys in Pakistani madrassas.”
However, as a barrage of studies show, the likely problem is not any particular faith or denomination, but a global disease cutting across borders and governments which sees children everywhere being preyed on by the very individuals who are meant to protect them.
Surprisingly, one can read the statistics as showing that it’s the Catholic Church’s own powerful ethical system that is the most effective and which has offered the most protection to children – hence the shock, pain and justified anger when Catholics or their representatives transgress and compound the evil of it all by covering it up.
The statistics also appear to indicate that one of the safest – if not the safest – groups of individuals in the world for children to be around are Roman Catholic priests.