This issue is not going to go away. The outrage around continued reports of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church in my home state has now given rise to a call for there to be a Royal Commission of enquiry. We already have a state government enquiry, but clearly people think the problem is so important that it should be dealt with at a federal level through a high-level national investigation.
I understand this. Child sex abuse is a subject that makes people very angry. It feeds into and on their emotions. There is a sense of disbelief and shock – thank goodness, because getting our heads around how a man (or woman) can persuade or force a young child to perform sexual acts is way beyond the understanding or imaginings of most of us. I always swear that, despite two decades now of researching and writing on this topic, I still don’t “get” it and that, if ever I do, I’ll retire.
But what is a Royal Commission supposed to achieve? A letter writer to my local Sunday paper recently suggested that reluctance to push for a Royal Commission stems from the fact that the issue of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is too complicated an issue. I don’t think it is. I think the problem is that many people – even those who are horrified at the reports that we are reading about paedophile priests abusing young children – are reluctant to ask the questions we should be asking, and that any Royal Commission should be focusing on: Do we, as a nation, accept that an institution – any institution – is above the law, that it should be allowed to administer its own form of “justice”?
Sadly we understand
The truth is, we know a great deal about child sexual abuse. We know that men, and occasionally women, abuse children for sexual pleasure. Not all of these men are paedophiles. Some do not have a sexual deviance that can be recognised, categorised and even (if not very successfully) treated. Non-paedophile sex abusers have sex with children just because they want to. The main difference between these two groups lies in the ages of the children they abuse: paedophiles confine their perversion to children who have not yet reached puberty; non-paedophile sex abusers do not discriminate although most often they target young teenagers, since they are often easiest to reach.
Since paedophilia is a sexual deviance, by the way, the fact that the abuser cannot marry will make no difference whatsoever to his behaviour. Some paedophiles do marry, although many prefer to avoid adult company. They abuse children because they are paedophiles, not because they are celibate.
We know that paedophiles infiltrate organisations where they can get unfettered and unsupervised access to young children: they may become youth group leaders or teachers, volunteer in children’s camps, or enter a religious order – and not only the Catholic Church. They will find a way to get access to children on an ongoing basis, because they need a constant “supply” of pre-pubertal children, discarding them as they reach puberty and replacing them with younger victims. This is how the numbers of victims accumulate and the abuse can go on for years and years.
We know how paedophiles go about grooming the children they are targeting, and how they keep records of their victims, including photographs they can exchange with other paedophiles to prove their credentials – the source of much child pornography.
None of this is complicated at all. Repulsive, yes. Unbelievable, despite the evidence. Criminal, absolutely. But complicated? Not really.
The difficult question
The difficult question that any Royal Commission must pose and ideally suggest an answer to has to be: when a paedophile becomes a member of an organisation and not only abuses children within that organisation but actually uses the very nature of the organisation to commit his crimes, what is the responsibility of the organisation and what should we do if we find that the organisation has not upheld that responsibility?
In the case of the Catholic Church, there is a very specific factor that has to be taken into account here: the inviolability of the confessional. New Zealand researcher Ron O’Grady has noted that the early church practised public confession, where worshippers made their confession to other worshippers. It was not until the late 6th Century that Christians began to confess to a priest, and it was only in 1215 that private, or auricular confession entered the doctrine of the Western church. Canon law then confirmed the absolute secrecy of the confessional, describing the sacramental seal as inviolable. In practice, the priest may not even refer to the issue outside the confessional, even to the confessor.
This is the situation that remains operative in the Roman Catholic Church, although in some countries it is in decline. It raises a number of questions of law:
- If the country’s laws regard as a criminal offence the failure to report a crime, is a priest who has heard a confession and chosen not to report it guilty of a criminal offence?
- If a confessor, priest or lay person, confesses the sin of child sexual abuse, does the priest who heard the confession not have a duty of care towards the children in his church who he knows are being abused or at risk of being abused?
These questions have arisen in several countries that have had their own “priest abuses children in his care” scandals in recent years. In a landmark decision, in 2001, a court in Normandy, France, found the Bishop of Bayeux, Pierre Pecan, guilty of perverting justice by concealing the crime of one of his paedophile priests. Although he was only given a three-month suspended sentence, the precedent is of paramount importance because it was the first time a court has convicted a religious leader for concealing a crime he learned about in the confessional.
Best interests of the child
So what about the Catholic Church in Australia? Or any other organisation, for that matter, that knows about paedophile activity in its midst but chooses not to report it to the police, or to “deal with it” through internal processes that do not, by their very nature, label the perpetrator’s actions as criminal?
I believe that no-one should be above the law. As a nation, we have made promises to our children by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Those promises focus on always ensuring that “the best interests of the child” come first, and include protection from sexual abuse and exploitation. In ratifying the Convention, we undertook to adjust our laws to fall into line with the Articles of the Convention, and child sexual abuse is indeed a crime in Australia. Like robbery, or extortion, or rape, or murder.
When a crime is committed, we pursue the criminal and bring her/him to justice. We have mechanisms in place to ensure a fair trial and appropriate sentencing. As a nation, we rely on this whole system to underpin the values we want to live by, and we teach them to our children, Catholic and Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist, Hindu and atheist.
Surely there can be no exceptions? No-one is above the law and we should not accept substitute laws or substitute law-makers. Living by the law is not at odds with doing our duty to God, or Allah or Yahweh or any other divine being we worship. I have read nothing in the Bible nor Koran that says that God excuses us from living by the law of our country. And the laws of God as laid down in the holy books do not contradict our laws, far from it. The holy books call on us to protect our children, to take responsibility for their well-being and to teach them to respect and uphold the law. How can they trust and believe us if we make exceptions to these rules?
In 2001, a priest at a Pentecostal church in New Zealand was found to be sexually abusing young children in his Sunday school class. He was summoned before the church elders, of whom he asked forgiveness. The elders prayed with him and granted him pardon. The congregation was advised that the priest had sinned but been forgiven and that everyone should “forgive and forget”. A few weeks later he was caught abusing another child.
Paedophiles do not stop when they are absolved of their sins. As long as they continue to receive absolution, they will continue to abuse.
Are we, as a nation, courageous enough to say that Catholic priests, along with all other child sex abusers, must be reported to the police, tried and, if found guilty, punished? Can we accept that the confessional should not be used to conceal crimes against our children? Are we ready to admit that the Catholic Church’s own internal mechanisms for dealing with paedophile priests are unacceptable and that we accept no parallel procedures that circumvent our national legal system?
Would a Royal Commission have the guts to take on these challenging questions on our behalf?