NEW ZEALAND
Scoop
Friday, 18 March 2016, 2:22 pm
Press Release: Clan NZ
Shining the Light on New Zealand’s Historic Institutional Child Abuse
Comment by CLAN NZ (a branch of Care Leavers Australasia Network)
The Oscar winning film Spotlight is easily one of the most important, powerful films of the last few years.
Spotlight is the factual drama of how in 2002 a Boston Globe team of investigative reporters exposed more than 200 paedophile clergy in that city alone. It was the first major newspaper reporting on clerical abuse worldwide. It shocked the USA, indeed the world, and brought to public attention the protection of abusers by senior clerics and the silencing of victims and their families by the church and its lawyers.
The Spotlight epic has worldwide implications, including within New Zealand.
For many viewers the most disturbing and shocking moment of the film is when the list of cities from around the world, where this kind of clerical abuse had occurred, is screened. Numerous Australian and New Zealand cities are featured. To the uninitiated that list of cities is horrifying.
Pope Francis has been quoted as saying that reliable data indicates that “about 2%” of clergy in the Catholic Church are paedophiles. Without quibbling over the exact number of paedophile priests involved, any reasonable person would have to agree that even one is too many.
A 2014 study commissioned by the U.S. Catholic Church showed that more than 4,000 U.S. priests have faced sexual abuse allegations in the last 50 years. Bearing in mind that most research suggests that only a third of abuse cases are ever reported, it is patently obvious that this is a problem of gigantic and worldwide proportions.
Unbelievably no official N.Z. Catholic Church figures have been kept on the total number of clergy to have faced abuse allegations here. The Church has acknowledged only “38 substantiated” cases of clerical abuse in the past 50 years. (That is men against whom they believe abuse has been proven). So it seems in N.Z. that we have so far only seen “the tip of the iceberg”.
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