Turn abusers over to police?

[losh14]

one surprising element in almost all cases that go back many years is that somewhere along the line, a police complaint was made 1 or many times but the law enforcement authority failed to act, failed to arrest or failed to convict. this pattern is also emerging in studies that look at child abuse in other settings such as public schools, that while only a fraction of cases are ever formally reported, as many as 90% never result in an arrest or legal action of any kind, and only a small percentage of those cases lead to conviction.

This kind of underreporting is not unique to child abuse but to all forms of sexual assault. I did a story while a journalism major in undergrad on why less than 5% of sexual assault cases went to trial in our county. At one point, while grilling the local DA, he asked me to turn off the tape recorder and drop the pen. He told me he was entrusted with protecting civilians but also with making good use of the resources he had available - very limited in this poor, mostly agrarian county where 30% of residents were high school dropouts. He said if it came down to prosecuting a case of date rape and a case of meth dealing, he’d go after the latter because no one would question the intent of the meth dealer while juries would debate endlessly over whether the rape victim was making it up or ‘deserved it’ because she wore a dress, or was drinking, or kissed her rapist at some point in the evening.

Point is, cases of a sexual nature are REALLY difficult to prosecute. It doesn’t help if authorities of any form - clergy, school principals, government administrators - stonewall police investigations, and that is an issue in and of itself. But even when there is the fullest compliance it comes down to a matter of “the child said” vs “the man said”. At some point, the police have to decide whether there’s enough evidence to turn over to the Prosecutor, and the Prosecutor decides whether the case has sufficient merit to go to trial. Then, depending on the State, either a Grand Jury or voire dire decides whether to indict the person. Then, and only then, does it go to trial. This is a system that tries really hard to keep the innocent out of jail, but it makes it very difficult to punish someone who is guilty but leaves no visible evidence.

At the same time, accusations of sexual assault are so heinous - especially as regards children - that the accusation is intrinsically harmful. I understand the Church’s desire to protect priests from such accusations where they are baseless, and I doubly condemn anyone who would levy false accusations because of the damage they do to the accused as well as the contribution to making a real accusation harder to prove. I also understand the Church’s reluctance to take action unless something has been proven.

Still, if you get an allegation of abuse, you’d think the Church would at least try to keep the priest under careful eye and out of situations with children. Then there’s the counter-case of Fr. Borbach (riverfronttimes.com/2004-08-25/news/immaculate-deception), who spied two sisters at a family wedding he performed in rural Wisconsin, 45 minutes away from where the girls lived. He called their mother and asked if he could spend some ‘special time’ with them and she agreed, so he’d take them out for drives. Yeah, that’s creepy, but the point is that this wasn’t a parish priest abusing parishoners in-between classes, but a pedophile who sought children who were removed from his day-to-day life and abused them outside of a realm of supervision. Short of demanding he stay on parish grounds at all times, or sending him on permanent retreat, I can’t think of what his supervisors could have done at the time if they knew about the accusation (which the victim said she didn’t make until decades later, understandably given the emotional pain but unfortunate from the standpoint of being able to do anything about it).

By the same token, the pedophiles who become teachers and abuse their students are the really stupid ones - and consequently the ones we hear about getting caught. To the two people involved - victim and assailant - it’s cut and dried but to the rest of us it’s rarely a clear line.

The whole point of the recent allegations discussed now is that neither canon law nor civil law was followed by many of those involved in these (now decades old) cases.

Agreed, and these must be addressed where and if we can. There are attorneys who would love to hold the Church accountable for the actions of men who are now dead - which would give a victim some sense of justice but really begs the question of whether justice exists when the accused cannot present defense.

It should also be noted that forgiveness - if these pedophiles confessed - should depend upon their turning themselves in given the gravity of such sins.

 

[losh14]

How come the police weren’t just called in whenever there was a hint or claim of sexual abuse?

Not to belittle any allegation of abuse, but there’s reason to proceed with caution.

I was a day-camp counselor for three summers. One year a 7-year-old told his mom that Gabe, one of the counselors, had had sex with a 5-year-old girl. Police were immediately called, and Gabe was arrested the next morning as he arrived at work. The camp director sent out a quick communique to parents, summoned all staff to a meeting and let everyone know what had happened and that we would have a new policy that whenever kids were brought inside, a supervisor would have to accompany the group so that no counselor could be alone with children at any point in time.

As the shock set in. the questions started: “Where was Gabe at the time?” We don’t know. “Where did the girl say it happened?” The girl hasn’t said anything, the family’s attorney has stated they want to protect her right now. “How did we find out?” A boy told us. “What did he say?” He said that he heard the girl say that she had sex with Gabe on Tuesday after lunch.

That’s when Sam (Gabe’s co-counselor) raised his hand and said we gotta talk. Some of the 5-year-old girls had wanted to hold a play wedding but they couldn’t find any 5-year-old boys, so they asked Gabe (whom they all had a crush on) and he said “sure”. They held this wedding right after lunch on Tuesday - used ribbons for rings, had one of the girls act as rabbi (Jewish day camp), the ‘bride’ walked with flowers around Gabe 7 times, etc. Gabe hugged his ‘bride’ and said “Okay, now we gotta break up because I’m really married to Carrie” who was the 5-year-olds’ counselor.

Mid-service, the 7-year-old boys walked by, coming back from the athletic field and teased the girls. One of the boys shouted “Now you’re gonna have sex and make lots of babies!” The boy who told his mother was in that group.

After a few days of frantic talking between the girl’s parents, the boy’s parents, the day camp, the police, it all got figured out that nothing had happened. You had two little boys - one as naive as a 7-year-old should be, the other too wise for his years - and a really unfortunate story.

The result wasn’t harmless. Gabe was allowed back at the camp but so many parents kept their children home the following day that he quit after that.

Gabe’s arrest was front page above the fold of our local paper, next to a color photo of him. Some of his classmates saw the article, called his school, where he was a sophmore majoring in elementary education. The school expelled him immediately and notified his department.

His classmates missed the piece that he had been cleared, which was somewhere in the middle of the next week’s paper and didn’t have his picture. The university readmitted him after he sent back the police report, but his department advisor refused to sign him up for classes, saying “We think this is the wrong field for you.” It didn’t help that he had to explain why he wasn’t working at the day camp any more.

I don’t know what happened to Gabe after that, but honestly the reaction to this allegation destroyed this man’s credibility and his career. I hope he’s happy - he was a great guy and I’ll never forget the horror of that surprise on that morning.

 

[Biggie]

I listened to Al Kresta yesterday interview Leon Podles, author of “Sacrilege” and then spent the evening reviewing the material on several sites related to the scandal. Kresta asked Podles to what he attributed the fact that bishops failed to take responsible action to reports of abuse and Podles responded “hard heartedness”. He answered that bishops were simply heartless. Kresta asked how many U.S. bishops met that description and Podles responded, “Two thirds.”

Reading through much of the material, once one puts aside the repugnance and applies a little insight to one’s own experience, what became apparent to me is how shocking some of these allegations must have been in the time period they were made, shocking to the point of incredible.

I have read a few responses here that seem to indicate an understanding that the simple notion of contacting the police is actually not so simple in the context of victims and accused within a religious institution. I would only add that it was not so simple in the context of the times.

These cases were occurring in numbers a half century ago during the late fifties through the sixties. Discussions concerning sexual activity, much less revelations regarding it were not conducted in the way they are today. That very fact provided some of these abuser priests the ability to identify their sexual innuendos and behaviors as avant garde. Earl Bierman, one such priest with whom I am very familiar, taught psychology and was able to sell himself as a fresh and open intellect rebelling against the old guard in the diocese.

Bishops were not only confronted with unbelievable allegations about a subject which was taboo even in discussion, but were also pitted against a popular priest-abuser who could offer that his views were being misunderstood by an out of touch hierarchy. It is no excuse, but it is a partial explanation. I simply do not believe that two thirds of US bishops were hard hearted leading them to dispassionately dismiss the plight of victims. Podles statement is, in my opinion, one dimensional and hard hearted in itself.