Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ by the clergy turned into a torrent in the USA, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia and Ireland. These accounts showed how the clergy used their priestly power to coerce and silence their victims. An eleven-year-old girl told how a priest would follow an act of abuse by saying: ‘This is our secret and you mustn’t tell anybody. You are very special Sarah, very special indeed. Secrets can never be broken. However, if you do tell anyone, then God will know what you have done. Because I am a priest, God will inform me of your deed, and as a consequence you will need to be punished. I want you to remember, Sarah, if God tells me you have been naughty, I will kill you. Do you understand? I will kill you.’³⁹

      The Catholic Church was extremely slow to acknowledge that harm had been done by priests to those in their care. Following legal action by some victims, the Church has made some modest remunerations, and some dioceses have created the post of child protection officer, but the ethos of the institution has not changed. How can it when a cardinal, in the process of inauguration, ‘takes a vow of secrecy to the Pope which states: “I promise to keep secret anything confided in me in confidence that if revealed will cause scandal or harm to the Roman Catholic Church.”’⁴⁰

      When Monsignor James Joyce was child protection officer for the Catholic diocese of Portsmouth from 1994 to 1999, he met victims of abuse and their families. He wrote, ‘Most were in shock, stunned not only by what had happened and its effect on them, but also by the silence and denial by the Church. Many victims of abuse had their lives destroyed. They found relationships with their families and friends distorted, their sexuality confused and their whole being affected. They couldn’t understand why it had happened to them. ’⁴¹

      Monsignor Joyce found that the system whereby child protection officers were priests or deacons who, as the Church requires, had made a vow of obedience to their bishop rendered them powerless. A priest or deacon cannot tell a bishop what to do. He wrote, ‘The climate in the Church is still one of denying abuse and minimising its effect, because to accept it is to open up issues about power. Parishes and dioceses can still be run on the whim of a priest or a bishop, and there is no appeal or grievance procedure in the law of the Church.’⁴²

      Media stories of abusive priests have been matched by stories about workers in care homes for children who physically and sexually abused the children in their care, and by stories of international paedophile rings whose members entrap, abuse and even murder children for their own amusement and for the creation of pornography which is now a multibillion-dollar industry. Some care home assistants and some paedophiles have been charged, and some of these have been convicted for their crimes. Terrible though all these stories are, however, they do not arouse the kind of public passion that forces governments to take some major action to deal with the perpetrators, protect children and compensate those who have suffered. Nick Davies, whose investigations into care home abuse and the activities of paedophiles have won awards, noted that ‘The political reality is that the Home Office continues to steer police resources into dealing with reported crime. In its major 1996 inquiry, Childhood Matters, the NSPCC concluded: “The legal system, designed to provide justice and redress for the victims of abuse, is failing to do so consistently.”’⁴³

      Nick Davies wrote about the work of Rob Jones, who, as a young detective sergeant, moved to Avon and Somerset’s Child Protection Team, where he developed a way of working which resulted in the successful prosecution of many of the members of a paedophile ring who preyed on teenage boys. In 2000, wrote Nick Davies, ‘Rob Jones devised his own package of proactive child protection to safeguard children from abuse, particularly in the world of sport. He called it Child Safe. His chief constable supported him. It was the only such scheme in the country and he set out to spread it to other forces and recruited footballing stars, including Gary Lineker and Kevin Keegan, to help him. Some forces have adopted it. Others are not so keen. They say it’s women’s work.’⁴⁴

      ‘Women’s work’ is something such men belittle and scorn because what men call women’s work involves caring for others. Caring for others calls for the tender emotions which many men in the course of their upbringing are forced to learn to deny. For the majority of women feelings of affection, kindness, sympathy and tenderness are linked to sexual feelings, but when men deny these feelings and their link to sexual feelings, sex becomes an activity no different from driving a fast car or winning a game of golf. Sexual feeling becomes no more than the sensation of excitement and power that can confirm the man’s sense of existing as a person. To get this feeling he acts upon someone’s body, or on his own, and uses it as an object, in the same way he uses a car or a golf club. Just what a man does with a sexual object is often bizarre - it is men, rarely women, who develop fetishes and perversions - and often inhuman - it is men, extremely rarely women, who commit rape.

      If this attitude towards sex is the result of what is an ordinary upbringing for a boy, what happens to a boy who experiences not just the usual indoctrination about maleness but also the experience of being treated as a sexual object?

      Jack and his wife Joy agreed to my recording his story, in the hope that it might be of use to other people in a similar predicament. All that Jack asked was that I should not give the name of the orphanage he lived in as a child. ‘Things are different now,’ he said, ‘or at least I hope they are.’

      We had met twelve years previously when their son Mark had been in trouble at school. He was a very bright lad, but he stayed away from school a lot, and when he was there he would not work. His headmaster wanted to expel him, but before this could be done the Education Department needed a psychologist’s advice. Mark and his parents came to see me, and eventually Mark went to a boarding school. His parents came a few more times to discuss their marriage. It had become clear that much of Mark’s difficult behaviour stemmed from the strain in their relationship.

      Joy found it hard to criticize Jack because she knew he was a devoted, caring father. She wanted to make their relationship better and wanted to talk to me about it. Jack was not so keen, but he came back with her for several meetings. After a while they stopped coming, saying that things were better, and I lost touch with them. Over the years I often wondered what had happened to Mark. I was relieved, as we sat down in my office, when Joy said, ‘Mark said that we ought to get in touch with you.’ She went on, ‘It’s very good of you to see us, and at such short notice too.’ She told me that Mark was married with two children and had his own business. Alice, their eldest, was married, their second daughter, Jenny, was working in Edinburgh, Ray was a research scientist, and Louise, the youngest, was at university.

      Joy paused and looked at Jack. He looked dreadfully upset. He said, ‘I’ve been very stupid. It’s about the children… when they were young… what I did to them. I… interfered… with them… not all of them. I didn’t think -’

      His voice broke. Joy, gently, took over, and went on talking, taking responsibility for telling me what had happened. She spoke very simply and directly, explaining carefully and laying no blame, trying to be fair to everyone concerned. She described how their eldest daughter, Alice, had three children and lived a hundred miles away. Joy had noticed how infrequently Alice visited them, and how when they visited Alice the atmosphere was very strained. She knew that Alice and her husband were having difficulties and that Alice was consulting a counsellor about this. One day Alice phoned to say that she would be calling to see them. She made a special point of arranging to arrive at a time when Jack would be home from work. When she came she asked both of them to sit down so that she could tell them something very important. Joy thought Alice was going to tell them she had left her husband, and was puzzled when Alice said that she was going to leave the problem with them.

      Then СКАЧАТЬ