Dame Janet Smith’s report on the BBC reminds us that there is no monopoly on child abuse. But eradicating it may be more difficult for the Churches than for secular institutions
Last week, as a lawyer for victims of Jimmy Savile, I was reacting in the media to Dame Janet Smith’s report on the culture and practices at the BBC that allowed his abuse to carry on unchecked for decades. The previous week, I had been to see Spotlight, the Oscar-winning film that recounts The Boston Globe’s battle to expose a child-abuse scandal in one of the world’s most powerful Catholic dioceses. It prompts the reflection: are the abuse scandals in the Church and the BBC essentially two sides of the same coin? Do they have the same causes and characteristics? Or, to put it another way
03 March 2016, The Tablet
Church will find it harder than BBC to eradicate child abuse
A specialist lawyer examines the common threads in institutional child abuse
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User Comments (1)
That same night, in California, the Oscar for best picture was awarded to Spotlight.
On Thursday evening, The Tablet published this article whose cool balance is admirable from an emotional distance; though I imagine that the victims of clerical abuse might very well not share my objectivity.
In his final comment, the author writes: "But aspects of the abuse scandals in the Churches present particularly acute challenges, and honesty about these is essential to change."
On Friday morning in a live interview on Australian television, Cardinal Pell asserted that he will not resign "because to do so would be “an admission of guilt” that he failed to respond to child sexual abuse.
It is therefore clear beyond peradventure that even in the very highest echelons of the newly created Council of Cardinals there remain those who have "learned nothing and forgotten nothing."
Is it terminally naive to hope that, if only through building from his bitter personal experience of Argentina's dirty war, the Bishop of Rome might yet act decisively and thereby prove himself wiser than all the Vatican bourbons put together?