IRELAND
Irish Independent
October 29, 2017
By John Meagher
A case of sex abuse has repercussions beyond the obvious as the families of perpetrators are also drawn into the trauma
Betrayal. It’s the first word that Dr Marie Keenan thinks of when she considers the overriding emotion experienced when a family member is revealed to be a sex offender.
“That sense of betrayal is enormous,” she says. “This is someone they loved, whom they thought they knew intimately, and now they are having to confront the most horrific news.”
Dr Keenan, a lecturer at the School of Social Policy, University College Dublin, is one of the country’s foremost experts of the impact of sex abuse – not just on the actual victims, but those other people caught in the slipstream.
“It’s not just a private tragedy,” she says, “but when these cases go to court and the names are published, it becomes a public matter as well and that can be terribly traumatic.
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Dr Keenan has written extensively about the sex abuse within the Catholic church and notes “the ripple effect” of abuse. “Of course, it’s hugely damaging to the victim, but I found that many of priests and some of the bishops too were greatly impacted. They had worked with someone for years and had not had the slightest inkling that there was paedophilia there. So there’s a sense of guilt that they carry around with them.
“People always ask themselves why they didn’t sense that something was amiss with the person in question, particularly if they worked with them for years.
‘Out there among us’
“It can be very difficult to accept and, certainly, in the Church there wasn’t enough counselling services provided. I would think it would be wise of ‘The Irish Times’ [Tom Humphries’ former employer] to offer counselling to anybody who worked with him in the past.”
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