UNITED KINGDOM
The Conversation
David Pilgrim
Professor of Health and Social Policy at University of Liverpool
The blame game about child abuse in the Catholic Church continues. While the Vatican are to give due consideration to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s demand to remove offenders and hand them over to the civil authorities, a major sticking point remains. The church puts canon law above civil law; outsiders such as the UN are depicted as “interfering”. At times, the church also argues that these matters are historical and that it was not the responsibility of the Vatican but of local dioceses and their bishops.
The reputation of the church is clearly a central concern for its current defenders, and its public apologies to victims tend to ring hollow. This reflects a central political stand-off of our postmodern times: are we really prepared to accept theocratic authority as superior to the legal rules of a shared civil society?
The institutional abuse of children is certainly not limited to the Catholic Church, but as a case study, the Catholic scandal does highlight the complexity of learning about child protection in any society. There are many nuances here, which might be missed if we focus too narrowly on the problem of “paedophile priests”. The problem at large can be wrongly reduced to an aberration, merely to an unfortunate prevalence of bad apples in the barrel. Instead, the barrel itself must also bear critical examination.
A wider lens
For a start, much of the proven abuse in the church was physical and emotional, and not sexual – though these processes were often intermingled. Regimes of cruelty were fostered by physical isolation, where adults had unbridled power over children. We know that institutional abuse in a wide range of settings is characterised by multiple, not single, forms of isolation. If we think about the creation of isolation and its predictable risks in systems, we can widen our focus beyond the sexual pathology of individuals and begin to see how abuse can arise from the collective policy decisions of those with good intentions.
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