Restoring Faith: Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church
By Patrick Parkinson
There are comparatively few allegations of child sexual abuse by ministers of religion in other churches. There are some, as there are in all other organizations involved in work with children and young people. With colleagues I have done a study of the prevalence of abuse in the Anglican Church across Australia. I have some knowledge also of what has happened in other churches. Reliable statistics are not available, but in my opinion, and based on the available data, there has been around six times as much child sexual abuse by clergy and religious in the Catholic Church as there is by ministers of religion in all the other churches in Australia combined - and I would regard that as a conservative figure. Admittedly, the Catholic Church is the largest denomination in Australia, and it is also one in which priests and religious have been involved in schools and orphanages, unlike ministers of other churches. Even still, the reality is that the levels of abuse in the Catholic Church are strikingly out of proportion with any other church - and, from what I have seen, this is an international pattern. That makes it inevitable that a great deal of the focus of the national royal commission, so far as it concerns churches and faith-based organisations, is bound to be on the Catholic Church. This is also so because of the very serious allegations raised first by the Victorian Police and then echoed from the experience of a long-serving senior detective in NSW. The allegations that some people in leadership within the Catholic Church have in comparatively recent times dissuaded victims from going to the police, failed to report known criminal misconduct where it had been admitted, or otherwise made more difficult the work of the police and the criminal justice system in bringing offenders to justice, are matters of immense seriousness. The Church's protocol on dealing with complaints of abuse, Towards Healing, provides a form of victims' compensation process; but it is not intended as some kind of alternative to the criminal justice system as a way of dealing with offenders. Towards Healing is clear that victims should be strongly encouraged to go to the police and, where appropriate, assisted to do so. Nothing should be done to interfere with a police investigation and full cooperation with civil authorities is required. Since I last reviewed it in 2009, there has also been a formal requirement to notify the police of the complaint concerning the alleged offender even if the complainant declines to go to the police. Section 37.4 of Towards Healing, states very clearly: "In the case of an alleged criminal offence, if the complainant does not want to take the matter to the police, all church personnel should nonetheless pass details of the complaint to the Director of Professional Standards, who should provide information to the police other than giving those details that could lead to the identification of the complainant." This is both to ensure transparency and to enable the police to use the intelligence gained if other complaints emerge against the same alleged offender. The law in NSW also imposes an obligation to report the complaint to the Ombudsman in certain circumstances. One of the other obligations in Towards Healing is that no victim should be bound by any pledge of secrecy in relation to the abuse. The only requirement of confidentiality that can be imposed is about the scale of any financial settlement. The allegations made by the police and others that some church leaders have failed to abide by these standards must be investigated very thoroughly, and the truth must come out fully. It is important not to prejudge any issues that will be dealt with in this royal commission. There have been many leaders in the Catholic Church who have been doing their best to deal with these issues appropriately and to offer a compassionate and caring response to victims. I have certainly had the impression that most church leaders have handled these issues appropriately and in accordance with the Towards Healing protocol. Having said this, negotiations about money are usually difficult, and sometimes what is intended as a restorative process can descend into little more than a negotiation between lawyers and insurers. This will often leave people feeling dissatisfied and hurt. The way in which some Church administrators and lawyers go about dealing with these issues also needs a searchlight. It is also important to put the issues in this royal commission into perspective. All the Churches, and indeed all organisations working with children across Australia, have come a long way in the last fifteen years or so. In 1997 my book, called Child Sexual Abuse and the Churches, I was particularly anxious to explain the problems across the whole Christian community, and not just the Catholic Church. I wrote at that stage that children were less likely to be protected in churches than almost any other group in society. By this I did not mean that children were more likely to be abused in churches than anywhere else, but that they were less likely to be protected if they disclosed abuse. I also identified a whole range of reasons: the tendency to trust adults, especially people that have been known for a long time; the importance of forgiveness in Christian teaching; and the desire to protect the institution. Much has happened to change this since 1997. The Wood Royal Commission in New South Wales played a major role, as did the growing awareness that abuse was not just a problem for the Catholic Church. All churches now are much safer places than they were. Denominations take child protection seriously as an issue in the design and implementation of programs and the training of volunteers. That is true of other organisations working with children such as the Scouts. However, the issues regarding the Catholic Church in particular, remain a festering wound affecting the Australian community as a whole. There are undoubtedly issues in relation to other churches, faiths and organisations working with children as well, that will also need to be uncovered and explored. Responses to child sexual abuse Eventually the royal commission will need to move beyond truth-telling to recommendations. In so doing, it is important to keep in mind the four different kinds of response that are needed to the problem of child sexual abuse. There are prevention processes. These are measures taken to ensure as far as possible that people working with children are suitable to do so. So, for instance, in New South Wales we have "working-with-children" checks against a register, not only of criminal convictions, but of all disciplinary procedures in organisations where there has been substantiated abuse of children and where the organisation has disciplined or sacked somebody for child abuse. There are child protection processes, by which I mean situations where a child now discloses abuse or makes statements which might indicate the child has been abused. There are good models around the country for how teachers and others should be trained to deal with such disclosures. I call these child protection processes because they are about contemporary events, where ordinarily one would expect the police to be involved, child protection services to be informed and then for events to take their course. Then there is the response I call restorative justice processes. Child protection processes and prevention strategies are about today's problems and today's children. The vast majority of what has been in the press of late is about yesterday's problems - that is, children who were abused sometimes three to five decades ago, and have often not disclosed that abuse for many years. In our Anglican Church study we found that the average length of time between boys being abused and disclosing that abuse was 25 years. For girls the time-lag was 18 years on average. When adults come forward to disclose what has happened to them as children, there may well be compensatory issues that need to be addressed because some of these adults report a history of shattered lives since the time of the abuse. In terms of restorative justice processes, it is important to give the Catholic Church in this country credit. In 1996 with Towards Healing, the Catholic Church did make a genuine attempt to try to do something significant to help these adults, coming forward 25 to 30 years later, who had suffered terrible things as children. It sought to make amends. This response was led by people of enormous courage and integrity such as Bishop Geoffrey Robinson. Then there are disciplinary processes. In any organisation there needs to be disciplinary processes which determine whether a person is fit to remain in that employment in a situation where the complainant has not gone to the police, the police have not pressed charges, the police do not consider there is enough evidence, or the DPP has dropped the case. Such alleged offenders cannot simply be left in ministry, and they certainly cannot be left with access to children. This disciplinary aspect is critical to child protection, and ought to be a major focus of the royal commission. Bad faith - my rift with the Catholic Church This brings me to the falling-out I had with the Catholic Church over precisely this issue. When I was asked to review Towards Healing in 2009, I came across some cases with one religious order, which worried me deeply. These cases had all arisen since 1996 - that is, after Towards Healing was promulgated. Towards Healing contains significant promises to the Australian people about how the Church will respond to sexual abuse, one such being that those who have abused their power will have that power taken away. From what I had read in submissions given to me in the course of the review, I could see that there were priests who never had that power taken away from them. Settlements had been made with victims, but in two cases they continued in ministry in Samoa. In a third case, a prominent leader of the Order concerned remained in Rome and was not ordered back to cooperate with a police investigation, despite the efforts made by the Australian leader of the Order at the time to have him return. For two years, I sought to get the Church to address these issues fully, preferably by a judicial inquiry. Indeed I wrote a report based on documents that this religious Order made available to me. The report, which was intended to be made public, was never released. In my submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry in Victoria, I have provided details of the unsuccessful efforts I made to hold the Church leadership accountable for the promises they had made to the Australian people in Towards Healing. Eventually, I wrote to the Attorney-General for Victoria asking the Victorian government to establish a formal Inquiry. That was one of the many calls for such an Inquiry that led eventually to its establishment in Victoria, and now to a national royal commission. Time for cleansing The royal commission will have a very large and difficult task. It will no doubt cast light into some dark corners. In the long-term though, I believe this inquiry offers the promise for victims and for the organisations concerned, of being able to move on from the past. It is unavoidable that the Catholic Church will be a major focus. However, I do not believe that the Catholic Church can recover from this crisis unless there is a clean slate. The future of the Church is a matter for itself, and advice from those of us from other Christian traditions may not be welcome. No church or organization, after all, is free from reproach. Nonetheless, it may be that the royal commission will be the catalyst for a new approach to leadership and governance within the Catholic Church, in which it is able to mobilise the enormous talent, experience, faith and commitment of its lay people (and particularly its women). Among them are some of the finest and most capable leaders in this country, and people of the highest integrity. The royal commission will no doubt lead to some invasive surgery. At the same time, it will be important for it to keep the issues in perspective, and to acknowledge the dedication of so many and, comparatively speaking, the wrongdoing of so few. However, to the extent that those few remain in leadership, there needs to be a cleansing. Perhaps those who know what they have done ought to resign now, and let a new generation of leaders begin the process of rebuilding and renewal. Professor Patrick Parkinson AM is Professor of Law at the University of Sydney, and a specialist in family law and child protection. You can listen to him in conversation on the Religion and Ethics Report on Radio National.
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