St. Jackanapes
2009-05-20 09:58:28 UTC
Jesus especially hates the poor Irish little children...
http://www.childabusecommission.com/rpt/ExecSummary.php
May 20, 5:00 PM EDT
Thousands beaten, raped in Irish reform schools
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
Associated Press Writer
DUBLIN (AP) -- A fiercely debated, long-delayed investigation into
Ireland's Roman Catholic-run institutions says priests and nuns
terrorized thousands of boys and girls in workhouse-style schools for
decades - and government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings,
rapes and humiliation.
Nine years in the making, Wednesday's 2,600-page report sides almost
completely with the horrific reports of abuse from former students sent
to more than 250 church-run, mostly residential institutions. But
victims' leaders said it didn't go far enough - particularly because
none of their abusers were identified by name.
The report concluded that church officials always shielded their
orders' pedophiles from arrest to protect their own reputations and,
according to documents uncovered in the Vatican, knew that many
pedophiles were serial attackers.
The investigators said overwhelming, consistent testimony from still-
traumatized men and women, now in their 50s to 80s, had demonstrated
beyond a doubt that the entire system treated children more like prison
inmates and slaves than people with legal rights and human potential.
"A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary
punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for
boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next
beating was coming from," the final report of Ireland's Commission to
Inquire Into Child Abuse concluded.
The leader of Ireland's 4 million Catholics, Cardinal Sean Brady, and
religious orders at the center of the scandal offered immediate
apologies.
"I am profoundly sorry and deeply ashamed that children suffered in such
awful ways in these institutions. Children deserved better and
especially from those caring for them in the name of Jesus Christ,"
Brady said.
The Sisters of Mercy, which ran several refuges for girls where the
report documented chronic brutality, said in a statement its nuns
"accept that many who spent their childhoods in our orphanages or
industrial schools were hurt and damaged while in our care."
"There is a great sadness in all of our hearts at this time and our
deepest desire is to continue the healing process for all involved," the
Sisters of Mercy said.
And the Rev. Edmund Garvey, spokesman for the Christian Brothers order
that once ran dozens of boys' schools, said that reading the report's
"presentation of the history of our institutions, it is hard to avoid
feeling shame."
More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from
dysfunctional families - a category that often included unmarried
mothers - were sent to Ireland's austere network of industrial schools,
reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last
church-run facilities shut in the 1990s.
The report, unveiled by High Court Justice Sean Ryan, found that
molestation and rape were "endemic" in boys' facilities, chiefly run by
the Christian Brothers, and supervisors pursued policies that increased
the danger. Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of
Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and
humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.
"In some schools a high level of ritualized beating was routine. ...
Girls were struck with implements designed to maximize pain and were
struck on all parts of the body," the report said. "Personal and family
denigration was widespread."
Victims of the system have long demanded that the truth of their
experiences be documented and made public.
But several victims - who were prevented from attending Wednesday's
report launch and scuffled with police outside a central Dublin hotel -
said the report didn't go far enough and rejected the church leaders'
apologies as insincere.
"Victims will feel a small degree of comfort that they've been
vindicated. But the findings do not go far enough," said John Kelly, a
former inmate of a Dublin industrial school who fled to London and today
leads a pressure group called Irish Survivors of Child Abuse.
Kelly said the report should have examined how children like himself
were taken away from parents without just cause, and demanded more
answers from Irish governments that ceded control over their lives to
the church. He said any apologies offered now were "hollow, shallow and
have no substance or merit at all. We feel betrayed and cheated today."
The report proposed 21 ways the government could recognize past wrongs,
including building a permanent memorial, providing counseling and
education to victims and improving Ireland's current child protection
services.
But its findings will not be used for criminal prosecutions - in part
because the Christian Brothers successfully sued the commission in 2004
to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in
the report. No real names, whether of victims or perpetrators, appear in
the final document.
Irish church leaders and religious orders all declined to comment
Wednesday, citing the need to read the massive document first. The
Vatican also declined to comment.
The Irish government already has funded a parallel compensation system
that has paid 12,000 abuse victims an average of euro65,000 ($90,000).
About 2,000 claims remain outstanding.
Victims receive the payouts only if they waive their rights to sue the
state and the church. Hundreds have rejected that condition and taken
their abusers and those church employers to court.
Wednesday's report said children had no safe way to tell authorities
about the assaults they were suffering, particularly the sexual
aggression from church officials and older inmates in boys'
institutions.
"The management did not listen to or believe children when they
complained of the activities of some of the men who had responsibility
for their care," the commission found. "At best, the abusers were moved,
but nothing was done about the harm done to the child. At worst, the
child was blamed and seen as corrupted by the sexual activity, and was
punished severely."
The commission dismissed as implausible a central defense of the
religious orders - that, in bygone days, people did not recognize the
sexual abuse of a child as a criminal offense, but rather as a sin that
required repentance.
In their testimony, religious orders typically cited this as the
principal reason why sex-predator priests and brothers were sheltered
within the system and moved to new posts where they could still maintain
daily contact with children.
But the commission said its fact-finding - which included unearthing
decades-old church files, chiefly stored in the Vatican, on scores of
unreported abuse cases from Ireland's industrial schools - demonstrated
that officials understood exactly what was at stake: their own
reputations.
It cited numerous examples where school managers told police about child
abusers who were not church officials - but never did when one of their
own had committed the crime.
"Contrary to the congregations' claims that the recidivist nature of
sexual offending was not understood, it is clear from the documented
cases that they were aware of the propensity for abusers to re-abuse,"
it said.
---
On the Net: http://www.childabusecommission.ie/
http://www.childabusecommission.com/rpt/ExecSummary.php
May 20, 5:00 PM EDT
Thousands beaten, raped in Irish reform schools
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
Associated Press Writer
DUBLIN (AP) -- A fiercely debated, long-delayed investigation into
Ireland's Roman Catholic-run institutions says priests and nuns
terrorized thousands of boys and girls in workhouse-style schools for
decades - and government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings,
rapes and humiliation.
Nine years in the making, Wednesday's 2,600-page report sides almost
completely with the horrific reports of abuse from former students sent
to more than 250 church-run, mostly residential institutions. But
victims' leaders said it didn't go far enough - particularly because
none of their abusers were identified by name.
The report concluded that church officials always shielded their
orders' pedophiles from arrest to protect their own reputations and,
according to documents uncovered in the Vatican, knew that many
pedophiles were serial attackers.
The investigators said overwhelming, consistent testimony from still-
traumatized men and women, now in their 50s to 80s, had demonstrated
beyond a doubt that the entire system treated children more like prison
inmates and slaves than people with legal rights and human potential.
"A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary
punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for
boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next
beating was coming from," the final report of Ireland's Commission to
Inquire Into Child Abuse concluded.
The leader of Ireland's 4 million Catholics, Cardinal Sean Brady, and
religious orders at the center of the scandal offered immediate
apologies.
"I am profoundly sorry and deeply ashamed that children suffered in such
awful ways in these institutions. Children deserved better and
especially from those caring for them in the name of Jesus Christ,"
Brady said.
The Sisters of Mercy, which ran several refuges for girls where the
report documented chronic brutality, said in a statement its nuns
"accept that many who spent their childhoods in our orphanages or
industrial schools were hurt and damaged while in our care."
"There is a great sadness in all of our hearts at this time and our
deepest desire is to continue the healing process for all involved," the
Sisters of Mercy said.
And the Rev. Edmund Garvey, spokesman for the Christian Brothers order
that once ran dozens of boys' schools, said that reading the report's
"presentation of the history of our institutions, it is hard to avoid
feeling shame."
More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from
dysfunctional families - a category that often included unmarried
mothers - were sent to Ireland's austere network of industrial schools,
reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last
church-run facilities shut in the 1990s.
The report, unveiled by High Court Justice Sean Ryan, found that
molestation and rape were "endemic" in boys' facilities, chiefly run by
the Christian Brothers, and supervisors pursued policies that increased
the danger. Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of
Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and
humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.
"In some schools a high level of ritualized beating was routine. ...
Girls were struck with implements designed to maximize pain and were
struck on all parts of the body," the report said. "Personal and family
denigration was widespread."
Victims of the system have long demanded that the truth of their
experiences be documented and made public.
But several victims - who were prevented from attending Wednesday's
report launch and scuffled with police outside a central Dublin hotel -
said the report didn't go far enough and rejected the church leaders'
apologies as insincere.
"Victims will feel a small degree of comfort that they've been
vindicated. But the findings do not go far enough," said John Kelly, a
former inmate of a Dublin industrial school who fled to London and today
leads a pressure group called Irish Survivors of Child Abuse.
Kelly said the report should have examined how children like himself
were taken away from parents without just cause, and demanded more
answers from Irish governments that ceded control over their lives to
the church. He said any apologies offered now were "hollow, shallow and
have no substance or merit at all. We feel betrayed and cheated today."
The report proposed 21 ways the government could recognize past wrongs,
including building a permanent memorial, providing counseling and
education to victims and improving Ireland's current child protection
services.
But its findings will not be used for criminal prosecutions - in part
because the Christian Brothers successfully sued the commission in 2004
to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in
the report. No real names, whether of victims or perpetrators, appear in
the final document.
Irish church leaders and religious orders all declined to comment
Wednesday, citing the need to read the massive document first. The
Vatican also declined to comment.
The Irish government already has funded a parallel compensation system
that has paid 12,000 abuse victims an average of euro65,000 ($90,000).
About 2,000 claims remain outstanding.
Victims receive the payouts only if they waive their rights to sue the
state and the church. Hundreds have rejected that condition and taken
their abusers and those church employers to court.
Wednesday's report said children had no safe way to tell authorities
about the assaults they were suffering, particularly the sexual
aggression from church officials and older inmates in boys'
institutions.
"The management did not listen to or believe children when they
complained of the activities of some of the men who had responsibility
for their care," the commission found. "At best, the abusers were moved,
but nothing was done about the harm done to the child. At worst, the
child was blamed and seen as corrupted by the sexual activity, and was
punished severely."
The commission dismissed as implausible a central defense of the
religious orders - that, in bygone days, people did not recognize the
sexual abuse of a child as a criminal offense, but rather as a sin that
required repentance.
In their testimony, religious orders typically cited this as the
principal reason why sex-predator priests and brothers were sheltered
within the system and moved to new posts where they could still maintain
daily contact with children.
But the commission said its fact-finding - which included unearthing
decades-old church files, chiefly stored in the Vatican, on scores of
unreported abuse cases from Ireland's industrial schools - demonstrated
that officials understood exactly what was at stake: their own
reputations.
It cited numerous examples where school managers told police about child
abusers who were not church officials - but never did when one of their
own had committed the crime.
"Contrary to the congregations' claims that the recidivist nature of
sexual offending was not understood, it is clear from the documented
cases that they were aware of the propensity for abusers to re-abuse,"
it said.
---
On the Net: http://www.childabusecommission.ie/
--
St. Jackanapes
http://www.jackanapes.ws
http://www.voy.com/20630/
St. Jackanapes
http://www.jackanapes.ws
http://www.voy.com/20630/