...The publication last week of the Irish government's McAleese Report on the Magdalene laundries has proved kind of awkward for Catholic-bashers. For if McAleese's thorough, 1,000-page study is to be believed, then it would appear that those laundries were not as evil and foul as they had been depicted over the past decade. Specifically the image of the laundries promoted by the popular, much-lauded film The Magdalene Sisters – which showed them as places where women were stripped, slapped, sexually abused and more – has been called into question by McAleese. This has led even The Irish Times, which never turns down an opportunity to wring its hands over Catholic wickedness, to say: "There is no escaping the fact that the [McAleese] report jars with popular perceptions."
In the Irish mind, and in the minds of everyone else who has seen or read one of the many films, plays and books about the Magdalene laundries, these were horrific institutions brimming with violence and overseen by sadistic, pervy nuns. Yet the McAleese Report found not a single incident of sexual abuse by a nun in a Magdalene laundry. Not one. Also, the vast majority of its interviewees said they were never physically punished in the laundries. As one woman said, "It has shocked me to read in papers that we were beat and our heads shaved and that we were badly treated by the nuns… I was not touched by any nun and I never saw anyone touched." The small number of cases of corporal punishment reported to McAleese consisted of the kind of thing that happened in many normal schools in the 1960s, 70s and 80s: being caned on the legs or rapped on the knuckles. The authors of the McAleese Report, having like the rest of us imbibed the popular image of the Magdalene laundries as nun-run concentration camps, seem to have been taken aback by "the number of women who spoke positively about the nuns".
And yet, despite the fact that the McAleese Report has utterly exploded the popular view of these laundries, some are wondering out loud if it was nonetheless legitimate and good to have produced so many embellished stories about evil nuns in recent years, as a way of highlighting the broader culture of abuse in the Catholic Church. As The Irish Times ponders: "Are factual inaccuracies in movies justified by role in highlighting issues?" The Times cites campaigners for justice who believe that "the role such [movies and books] played in highlighting the issue justified any artistic embellishment". A playwright told the paper that even if these portrayals of laundry life were exaggerated, they "served an important function at the time" – that is, to raise awareness about the problem of abuse in Catholic life more broadly.
This sounds dangerously like a Noble Lie defence – the idea that it is okay to make things up, to spread fibs, if one is doing it in the service of some greater good. The idea of the "good lie", the lie which helps open people's eyes to the existence of wickedness, should be anathema to anyone who cares about getting history right and establishing the truth. Yet there seem to be many in Ireland who believe that telling "good lies" about the extent of abuse in Catholic institutions is an okay thing to do since it might prove cathartic for a nation allegedly in denial about its dark past...
...Priests may appear more likely to molest children because cases of abuse come to light in huge waves.
However, in fact, family members are the ones most guilty of sexually abusing children.
Experts disagree on the rate of sexual abuse among the general American male population, but Allen says a conservative estimate is one in ten. Margaret Leland Smith, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says her review of the numbers indicates it’s closer to one in five. But in either case, the rate of abuse by Catholic priests is not higher than these national estimates. The public also doesn’t realize how “profoundly prevalent” child sexual abuse is, adds Smith. Even those numbers may be low.
Most child abusers have one thing in common, and it’s not piety—it’s pre-existing relationships with their victims. That includes priests and ministers and rabbis, of course, but also family members, friends, neighbours, teachers, coaches, scout leaders and doctors. According to federal studies, most abuse occurs at the hands of family members or others in the victim’s “circle of trust”.
The National Child Abuse and Neglect Data Systems, developed by the Children’s Bureau of the US Department of Human Services, found that of the approximately 903,000 children who were victims of child maltreatment, 10 per cent (or 90,000) were sexually abused. The breakdown of perpetrators is:
family friends and acquaintances (28 per cent)
stepfathers and boyfriends of the child’s mother (21 per cent)
uncles and cousins (18 per cent)
brothers (10 per cent)
biological fathers (10 per cent)
grandfathers and step-grandfathers (7 per cent)
strangers (4 per cent)
But, if we are to believe the media, none of this matters. What is important is to get those damn pervert Catholic priests.
Paul Loveday, on the ABC website Religion and Ethics, said this:
figures from around the world tend to indicate that approximately 5 per cent of the Catholic clergy are child molesters; that means that 95 per cent are not. I am immediately reminded of the oft quoted, “All that is necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing”. And there is the problem, the good men in the Church have been doing nothing.
Why are so many good men and women, priests, and the majority of everyday Catholics, many of whom have their own children in Catholic schools, doing nothing to loudly and publicly refute this distortion of reality?
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