ABUSE TRACKER

UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle

October 1, 2017

By Betty Clermont

The downward trend in the number of Catholics is pretty familiar by now. In 2016, we were 18% of the population according to a recent PRRI report. In 2014, we were 21% and in 2007, 24% according to a Pew Religious Landscape Study.

The decline in non-Hispanic white Catholics is a bit steeper: 11% in 2016, 12% in 2014 and 16% in 2007.

Thirty six percent of Catholics are Hispanic; 9% are black, Asian and other. Hispanics are 52% of Catholics under the age of 30. The proportion of Hispanics is likely to increase because they have younger children and larger families, according to PRRI.

In 1990, native-born Catholics were 23% of the U.S. population and 87% were white, non-Hispanic.

“The largest decline among major religious groups” has occurred in the Catholic Church according to an earlier PRRI survey. “Nearly one-third (31.2%) of Americans report being raised in a Catholic household, but only about one in five (20.9%) Americans identify as Catholic currently.”

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.

NEW YORK (NY)
The Week

October 6, 2017

For decades, Barbara Blaine stayed silent about the sexual abuse she had suffered as a teenager at the hands of a Catholic priest. Then in 1985, the Chicago social worker read a newspaper story about a pedophile priest in Louisiana and decided to confront church officials in her hometown of Toledo. They dismissed her claims and left her feeling, she said, “raked over the coals.” Uncertain how to heal, Blaine sought out other victims and in 1988 formed the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). The group today has more than 21,000 members and is the nation’s most powerful voice for abuse victims. “I don’t think any of us thought when we started;’ Blaine said in 2014, “that we would still be doing it now:’

Blaine was 13 when she was first abused by a priest who convinced her that she was an “evil temptress;’ said The Boston Globe. After attending college in St. Louis, she moved to Chicago, where she headed a Catholic charity that helped to house the homeless. She initially founded SNAP in Chicago as a support group, but its mission soon expanded to advocacy. Members posted fliers outside churches warning that an abusive priest was inside; victims held vigils holding photos of themselves as children when they were first abused.

That activism, together with revelations of massive church cover-ups in Boston and elsewhere, eventually led U.S. bishops to pledge to remove all alleged abusers, said The New York Times. But SNAP accused the church of failing to keep those promises, so Blaine kept campaigning. Following her death, her husband, Howard Rubin, said he was inundated with messages from survivors. “I’m hearing from people,” he said, “who are saying, ‘She saved my life.'”

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.

SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA)
The Australian

September 30, 2017

By Richard Guilliatt

[See also our caches of Child institutional abuse probe’s approach under fire and ‘Those events never happened’.]

The $500 million royal commission into institutional child abuse is promoting “ethically dubious” and potentially harmful ideas about the counselling of sexual abuse victims and the reliability of their testimony, senior experts in the field have warned.

Several leading national and international researchers say the long-running inquiry has adopted a misguided victim-advocacy role and published misleading, inaccurate research that could potentially undermine the $4 billion redress scheme for abuse victims.

Richard Bryant, director of the Westmead Trauma Stress Clinic, said the royal commission ­appeared to be advocating counselling practices that were potentially dangerous and contradicted guidelines endorsed by the ­National Health and Medical Research Council.

His concerns were echoed by several experts in psychology, including emeritus professor Don Thomson, chairman of the ethical guidelines committee of the Australian Psychological Society, and Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California Irvine, an internationally renowned memory researcher who described some of the ideas endorsed by the commission as “brain babble”.

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.

SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA)
The Sydney Morning Herald

September 30, 2017

By Michaela Whitbourn

[See the article that Kezelman is responding to: ‘Those events never happened’.]

A leading child abuse activist linked to the $500 million child abuse royal commission has hit back at claims by her family that her psychological treatment triggered “false memories” of abuse at the hands of her father as she comes under fire over her role advising on a compensation scheme for victims.

Cathy Kezelman, a former GP who heads the influential Blue Knot Foundation representing adult victims of childhood trauma, helped co-write national counselling guidelines for sexual abuse victims and was appointed last year to a panel advising the Turnbull government on the rollout of a $4 billion redress scheme for victims of institutional child sexual abuse.

But in an article published in the Weekend Australian Magazine on Saturday, Dr Kezelman’s brother and emergency doctor Claude Imhoff said he “utterly refute[d]” his sister’s claims that she suffered horrific abuse at the hands of her father and a group of paedophiles led by her paternal grandmother.

“I can categorically state that those events never happened,” Dr Imhoff said.

He said his sister had “simply ignored the professional guidelines and not mentioned anything about the dangers of false memories” being created in counselling sessions and he was speaking out to prevent a wave of false accusations against alleged perpetrators.

Dr Kezelman told Fairfax Media it was “completely false” to suggest her own memories of childhood trauma were triggered by her psychological treatment.

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.

SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA)
The Australian

September 30, 2017

By Richard Guilliatt

[To download the counselling guidelines discussed in this article, visit the Blue Knot Foundation. The Royal Commission reports mentioned in the article are Empirical Guidance on the Effects of Child Sexual Abuse on Memory and Complainants’ Evidence and Redress and Civil Litigation. This article also references ‘I hated myself for the things I’d done as part of the abuse’, by Tim Elliott, The Sydney Morning Herald, November 19, 2012. See also our cache of this article: ‘Those events never happened’.]

She’s a highly influential activist for childhood trauma survivors. But questions are being asked about Cathy Kezelman’s own shocking story of abuse.

For Dr Cathy Kezelman, the past two decades have been tumultuous indeed. In late 1998, at the age of 44, she abandoned her demanding career as a Sydney GP after suffering a shattering breakdown following the death of her 18-year-old niece in a car accident. In the years that followed, her mental state seesawed wildly between bedridden clinical depression, terrifying panic attacks and flights of mania so severe that she once frenziedly hacked her garden to pieces with a saw and secateurs. At her lowest ebb, Kezelman would drive repeatedly from her home in the city’s affluent eastern suburbs to the nearby sandstone clifftops of The Gap, a notorious suicide spot that looms high above the Tasman Sea, where she would stand for hours at the safety rail “pondering my demise”.

In 2010, Kezelman revealed the source of her anguish: in a memoir entitled Innocence Revisited she wrote that she had been violently sexually abused from early childhood by her father, a former Brisbane schoolteacher, and by a group of sadistic paedophiles led by her paternal grandmother. The abuse was so traumatic, she wrote, that her mind had fragmented into multiple personalities, a condition that had been cured with the help of a gifted and patient psychologist. In numerous interviews to promote Innocence Revisited, and in her role as head of the advocacy organisation Adults Surviving Child Abuse (ASCA), Kezelman emerged as a compelling figurehead for survivors of childhood trauma. The NSW prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC hailed her courage, and the noted child development expert Professor Freda Briggs lauded her book as “a testament to human resilience”.

Today Kezelman is the most influential child abuse activist in the country. Her organisation, now called the Blue Knot Foundation, is regarded as the peak body representing adult abuse victims, and her work there has earned her an Order of Australia. Justice Peter McClellan, head of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, calls her an “old friend”, and the commission has strongly endorsed Blue Knot’s work. In her roles as a director of the Mental Health Co-ordinating Council of NSW and president of Blue Knot, she co-wrote the counselling guidelines that are being used to train thousands of staff in sexual assault clinics, mental health wards and counselling centres around the country. Most recently she was appointed to the panel that will administer the proposed $4 billion redress scheme to compensate victims of institutional abuse.

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.