IRELAND
The Irish Times
CARL O’BRIEN
CHILD PROTECTION: ONE OF Cardinal Seán Brady’s explanations for his handling of clerical sex abuse cases in the mid-1970s is that priests and society were living in a much different era.
“You see, we were without any guidance at that stage from either church or State,” he said this week. “We were without training; it was a new situation.”
But how much latitude should we give to people who failed to act decisively at time when there was much less emphasis on child sexual abuse?
For most of those who worked in either child protection or social services during the mid-1970s, there is an acknowledgment that guidelines and procedures were not in place for dealing with sexual abuse. But the notion that sexual abuse was something “new” or unprecedented is given short shrift.
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