Comment Australian Media's Contempt for Abuse Report, The Cathnews, May 30, 2011

Comment Australian Media's Contempt for Abuse Report

The Cathnews
May 30, 2011

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=26627

I suppose I should no longer be surprised by the self-righteous cynicism and seemingly wilful ignorance of the media when it comes to reporting on Catholic affairs, writes Scott Stephens (pictured) in The Drum, on ABC Online.

But it was the way that the Australian press allowed the findings of the recent US study into the causes of sexual abuse by the church to sail past with little more than a perfunctory acknowledgement of its existence, much less a serious engagement with its substance and implications, that has left me bristling.

The study, released late last week, was the product of a five-year investigation conducted by a team of researchers from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York - the second such investigation carried out by CUNY researchers since the appalling magnitude of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church first became clear in Boston and then Ireland in 2002.

Like the first study, on the nature and scope of the abuse, released in 2004, this one was commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Department of Justice. The researchers were granted unprecedented access to diocesan records, the testimony of abuse victims, advocates and treatment centres, as well as the Office of Child and Youth Protection.

Taken together, these studies represent the most probing, thorough examination of the incidence, character and potential causes of sexual deviance in an organisation ever conducted.

I would have thought that, by any reckoning, the Causes and Context study in particular merited more attention than the short shrift it received from the media. Or at very least, that the study would have tempered somewhat the language used by the media in reporting on and analysing the incidence of sexual abuse in the Church.

But instead, as if to add insult to injury, what coverage the study did receive - especially in Australia and the UK - was haughtily dismissive. It was brushed aside as somehow tainted, inherently flawed, or otherwise implicated in some malign Catholic apologetic.

All this because the Causes and Context study was neither as salacious nor as simplistic as the media's own favoured cadre of disaffected priests - each one a variation on the preposterous Hans Kung - and anti-Catholic jingoists.