UNITED STATES
WBUR
Fri, Jul 18, 2014
by Rich Barlow
Anyone who paid any attention in the last decade to the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal knows that one of the bishops’ biggest bungles was secrecy in dealing with predator priests. As recently as May, the United Nations condemned surreptitious transfers of molesters to new parishes. The moral? Cover-ups harm the cover-uppers, too .
One might think that universities, those repositories of PhDs, might grasp this lesson of recent history. Yet recent headlines about colleges grappling with sexual assaults on campus suggest that the culture of secrecy that permitted abuse in the rectory may have its counterpart in the Ivory Tower.
Circumstances differ, of course. Pedophile priests used positions of moral authority and their followers’ inherent trust in them to turn powerless children into prey, while the alleged perpetrators on college campuses have been fellow students of the alleged victims. In spite of these differences, what unites the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal and the current campus rape crisis is the flimsy claim of confidentiality upon which both institutions have based their feeble responses. (I work for Boston University, and the opinions in this column are solely mine.)
Catholic bishops’ claims of confidentiality ranged from due process for the accused, which is a reasonable claim, to the need to shield the reputation of God’s minions on earth, which is not one. Universities’ confidentiality claims are rooted in a Nixon-era law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which was enacted to keep student grades confidential, not to provide a smokescreen to obscure the facts in cases of on-campus rape.
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