(The Nationalist, 04 June 1999)
The States of Fear programmes on physical and sexual abuse of children in Ireland’s child-care institutions in recent decades have come and gone. The three TV programmes shown in recent weeks on RTE 1 have rightly had a large impact and they will continue to be discussed for some good time to come.
It’s worthwhile standing back at this stage and trying to assess their significance, because if we don’t learn from the mistakes of the past we will almost certainly repeat them in the future.
Anyone who lived through the post-war period knows very well that the beating of children for real or alleged faults was widespread at the time. It was the age of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’. Parents beat their children; schoolteachers did so, and indeed they were expected to do so by some parents. There was a common view at the time that children, especially boys, needed a beating now and then to make them behave themselves.
What was not widely known was that sexual abuse was also taking place. That would have come as a great shock to people, and it would have provoked a very strong reaction as it does now. The sexual abuse of children by any person is a shameful abuse of power and is enormously destructive of the trust that should exist between children and adults responsible for their care. It is a violation of a person which does great damage.
Why did it take so long for these matters to come into the public domain? One reason was fear: people were afraid of authority figures. They were afraid to challenge the Catholic Church because it held huge power over their minds. But some of the anger now directed at the church should probably more accurately be seen as the anger which people feel at themselves for their lack of courage, their failure to speak openly of what they knew. A great Irish parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, said that for evil to triumph it is only necessary that good people should do nothing. That is one lesson for us all.
The media have done a good job, a service to the whole community, including the church, in exposing the evil of physical and sexual abuse of children by church personnel among others. If criticism is to be effective in changing attitudes it needs to be fair. There is a feeling among some Catholic Church personnel that they are being scapegoated for the entire problem. Scapegoating has the effect of making people defensive and driving them into denial. There is a need for patience and understanding for all those involved, even, or perhaps especially, for the perpetrators of those crimes, if only because some of them were also victims of sexual abuse in their childhood. That also needs to be said.