SCOTLAND
Herald Scotland
Kevin McKenna / Friday 5 February 2016
IF THE testament of my friends who have already seen Spotlight is to be trusted, I can expect an enthralling if deeply uncomfortable cinematic experience when I go to see it next week. The film is about the investigation conducted by the Boston Globe newspaper in 2001 into widespread and systemic child sex abuse by Catholic priests in the city and the how the church tried to cover it all up.
For a small but growing group of men and women in Scotland the film carries a wretched resonance. When they were children, they were sexually abused in locations around Scotland by Catholic priests and in Catholic primary schools, yet they are still waiting for the Church in this country and the Holyrood Government to take their cases seriously.
A handful of them, representing abuse survivors’ groups from all over Scotland, have been granted an audience next Thursday with Angela Constance, the Education Secretary. They will be given an hour and expenses of no more than £100, significantly below the going rate for qualified legal representation, and the group face being without a lawyer at their meeting.
Allocating just one hour for this meeting and refusing to meet each of the groups represented separately suggests that this will be another box-ticking exercise as the Government and the Catholic Church in Scotland seek to continue their mission to bury this out of sight.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.