Our Decent Society Was in Denial about Sex Abuse, by Mary Kenny, Irish Indpendent, May 25, 2009

Our Decent Society Was in Denial about Sex Abuse

By Mary Kenny
Irish Indpendent
May 25, 2009

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/our-decent-society-was-in-denial-about-sex-abuse-1749697.html

It's a question that many people of my generation are asking: how could the Ireland that we grew up in, during the 1950s and 1960s, have been the same Ireland that is recalled in the tragic and disturbing Ryan Report on child abuse?

The Ireland that we remember was, yes, authoritarian, old-fashioned and repressed. But if we remember our parents, families, neighbours and communities, it was also a reasonably kind and decent society. No beggar was turned away from the door unaided; our local doctor treated the poor for nothing; and you could leave your car outside the house, with the key in the ignition, and no one would steal it.

We now know there was a dark side, which, in part, our parents and families knew about and accepted. But if we are to have any understanding of this dark past, we must separate sexual abuse from what we now call "physical" abuse — that is, brutal beatings and physical punishment of children.

It's hard to reconcile the horrors faced by many children in industrial schools with the kind, decent society people of an older age recall the 1950s and 1960s to have been

Some reports have lumped all "abuse" together: but doing so makes it much more bewildering. Unless sexual and physical abuse are separated as categories, this dark past can never be analysed — and thus corrected.

The physical chastisement of children and young people was a wholly normal practice in the 1950s. Our mothers, fathers, uncles and aunts not only accepted it, but advocated it. My own mother, an easy-going liberal in most matters, said about child-raising: "If you don't beat your children, they'll beat you." She thought that a parent who failed to administer chastisement would produce a brattish child, who would eventually ruin himself and everyone else.

I had a very gentle maiden aunt who was a primary school teacher, and the only advice she ever gave me was: "Never show the world you are soft, Mary. Because if you are seen as 'soft', people will walk all over you." She was, God help her, 'soft', and the kids — in Coventry, England — gave her hell.

I grew up in Sandymount with another aunt, Dorothy. Dorothy came from a Tipperary Protestant background, and was kind and charitable. She was devoted to animals and would stop on the road to scold a Traveller for beating a donkey or a dog. Yet she believed, firmly, in beating children and young people, particularly if they showed an inclination to be troublesome. A young bicycle thief, Aunty Dorothy would say, should be beaten, so as to "nip in the bud" the tendency to larceny. Send him off to Artane, that'll larn him!

She often expressed admiration for the Isle of Man custom of birching young offenders (only dropped in the 1980s). Very occasionally, she would read of some particularly thuggish act carried out by a "juvenile delinquent" (as they were known then), and exclaim, "they should be given the cat o' nine tails!" This was a medieval punishment weapon with nine straps of the lash.

Now we know that many of the children committed to Irish institutions were innocent of delinquency, were merely poor, or without families, or had committed some minor misdemeanour. But the principle of what we now call "physical abuse" was not disapproved of, and it is anachronistic to imagine that it was.

It pertained in almost all other societies too. My husband told me he never dared mitch from his posh English public school because the automatic penalty for any act of truancy was six strokes of the cane. In almost every English public school there was some master whose sadistic or perverted nature caused him to administer beatings to a brutal degree. There were hardly any cases of parents complaining.

Sexual abuse, however, certainly would not have been endorsed in any way. Indeed, it would have been regarded with such horror that many Irish people refused to believe that the clergy would do such a thing, when reports first started to leak out.

If physical abuse was carried out with the "permission" of society, sex abuse was an absolute taboo, and in quite a different category. If Irish society in general is blamed for "allowing" this, they certainly did not intend to "allow" it.

What did occur was a massive social — and almost patriotic — denial. For example, over many decades, endless articles appeared in the Irish newspapers denying the reports that Roger Casement was a homosexual with an orientation towards boys of 12 and 13. Such a dreadful idea could only be dreamed up by English infamy! No decent Irishman — let alone a patriotic one — could do such a thing.

To this day, there are persistent deniers of the Roger Casement curriculum. Although virtually all experts now agree that the "black" diaries are authentic, and that Casement's sexuality was fixated on young males, there are still some who say it is all a British plot.

Paradoxically, the Roger Casement story shows that a good man can also be a paedophile: and that breaks a different kind of denial in our modern world.

If we understand the past, can we prevent such cruelties from ever happening again? Correctives, checks and balances there must be: and due process, too, where there is specific evidence. But sometimes the correctives themselves also have a tragic outcome: in the London case of 'Baby P', social workers decided not to take the infant into public care so as to keep the family together. But Baby Peter died, of a broken back and 50 other injuries, inflicted by his mother and her boyfriend (who is also charged with raping a two-year-old).

One thing our elders would have agreed upon: you never get rid of the human stain of wickedness.