Clerical child sex abuse

The article below appears in yesterday's Irish Times. It highlights many interesting points and certainly deserves comment.

A question! Had a priest written this article, a, would his diocese/congregation have 'allowed' him publish it, and b, what would have been the response from the public?


Church must not persecute abusers to protect public
Marie Keenan

MUCH OF the focus of Pope Benedict's highly publicised visit to the US has been on his references to the need for healing in the wake of clerical sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church.

Yet a series of interviews with clerical sex offenders which I undertook at UCD, details of which were published recently in this newspaper, reveal that work remains to be done on this issue in Ireland.

As part of my nine-year research project, which began in September 1998, I conducted 30 hours of group interviews, as well as other follow-up interviews, with nine members of the clergy who had abused children.

While in Ireland and elsewhere a great deal of the public discussion has concentrated on the protection of children, the criminality of perpetrators and the systemic "cover-up", during my research it became clear to me that clergy perpetrators had important stories to tell - stories that might enlighten those of us who were asking "why". The media template, "the paedophile priest", with all that it implies, does not come close to describing the diversity of men that I met.

One key part of my overall research, which received funding from the Irish Bishops Conference and two religious orders, was to look at what issues the men faced when the sexual offending was exposed. A number of questions emerge from this. Can there be a life worth living for clergymen who have abused minors and why should anyone care, given that they have broken such a sacred trust?

There are a number of reasons why we should be concerned about what happens to clergymen who have abused minors, on child protection, humanitarian, justice and Christian grounds. Past and potential future victims are the concern of all - treating clergy offenders and allowing them to live meaningful lives are essential steps in reducing future offending. We owe it to victims of abuse to do all in our power to prevent further offending.

One of the most respected researchers on sexual offenders, Dr Karl Hanson (Canada), has previously reported that, based on the available studies, the re-offence rate is much lower for clergy offenders than it is for other child sexual offenders. He also reported that treatment reduces offending, that the risk of offending is cut in half if the offender remains offence-free for five years and that it declines with advanced age. Many clergy offenders have been offence-free for at least 20 years and many of them are of an advanced age.

The problem for sexual offenders, as Tom O'Malley, a law lecturer from Galway, has often pointed out elsewhere, is that as soon as a person is formally or informally judged to be a "sex offender" or "child abuser", he is socially classified under that heading only, his entire social and personal profile is obliterated and his earlier achievements and social contributions are deemed irrelevant. The individual is now no longer seen in individual terms, but rather as a certain "type". What matters now is the very sexual nature of his offending, and not only is his offending behaviour disapproved of, but his very personhood is construed as evil.

I believe this to be the context in which church leaders in Ireland are trying to make decisions about what to do with clergymen who have abused and why some of the systems and procedures applied to clergy offenders are maybe unnecessarily rigid - such as lists of "dos" and "don'ts". My research indicates that when it comes to helping clergy offenders, church leaders respond in many different ways. While some church leaders take a pastoral approach, informed by a Christian ethic, others can take an overly legalistic approach, sometimes tinged with anger. While anger may well be understandable, given the sense of betrayal that clergy sexual abuse has brought to the Catholic Church, the potential for a different kind of abuse in such situations must always be borne in mind. In my experience, systems and protocols set up to control abuse can of themselves become abusive. My fear is that this is happening in some quarters of the Catholic Church - as others have put it, "control of abuse becomes abuse of control".

Fear is endemic in clerical and religious life and fear on the part of church leaders regarding clergy offenders is often indicative of not knowing what to do, especially under the watchful eye of a hurt public, an ever-vigilant press and a context in which clergy perpetrators are wrongly portrayed as a homogeneous mass - the worst of all possible offenders. Arising out my research, my concern is not that the current regimes in place for supervising clergy offenders are lax. On the contrary, I am concerned that, in many cases, they are unnecessarily harsh, leading to emotional loneliness, isolation and anger - factors that contributed to sexual offending in the first instance.

So what can church leaders do? They must be courageous. They must recover from the criticism that they endured for their mishandling of the abuse issue and not let these memories colour their judgment and decision-making. They must be discerning in their acceptance of protocols and procedures that may be contrary to natural justice and they must stay close to the Gospel messages. At some time in the future they may even give leadership on forgiveness.

For all the rhetoric of supervision and monitoring, even were it possible to supervise and monitor clergymen 24 hours a day, it is not this that will ultimately prevent further offending. Rather, future offending will be prevented by a softening of the heart and a new way of thinking, and we all have a role to play in this.

Marie Keenan is a lecturer at the school of applied social science in UCD and a psychotherapist.© 2008 The Irish Times