Pretend for a moment that you are a Catholic School Principal in Queensland and a mother comes to you with allegations that her daughter as been sexually assaulted by a veteran member of staff. What do you do? What do you do?
- Inform them that you will follow the matter up then file their complaint in the circular filing cabinet after they have left.
- Inform them that you will pass on the information to your superiors, and do so leaving it at that.
- Inform them that you will report the matter to police, and suspend the teacher until the matter has been investigated.
And perhaps what’s more to the point which of the two above can you get away with legally? It’s points 2 and 3, but only because the mother is complaining directly to the principal. If the complaint had been reported to another teacher the principal would be obliged to pass it on to the police. WTF?
So why have I led you through this hypothetical?
This is why:
THE Catholic Church has been found to have broken the law by failing to report to police suspicions that young girls at one of its primary schools were being sexually abused by a teacher, who allegedly went on to rape and molest 12 other students…
According to the story the principal reported the assault to someone in the Catholic Education Office, that someone managed to lose/sit on that report until such time as another parent decided to cut out the middleman and go to police.
Please read the entire article above to gain the full effect of the damage done by incompetence, wilful or otherwise. But some highlights,
- No one gets to take responsibility for this stuff up
- Catholic Ed has no policy in place to deal with this situation
- There is no discernable culture of appropriate action within Catholic Ed on how to handle matters relation to abuse by a teacher
Really ignorance should be no defence? Where have these Catholic Educators being living for the past 20 years?
Worst of all: the result of inaction, of discomfort, of doing nothing is – 43 cases of rape and sexual assault involving 13 girls aged between 9 and 10.
If you are in the uncomfortable position to have to report an abuse, toughen the f*ck up and report it. I’d rather by uncomfortable and lose a few friends than be responsible for facilitating the rape of 13 children.
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Did you notice this?
"CATHOLIC authorities have escaped further possible charges of failing to report child sex abuse allegations at a Toowoomba school because too much time has lapsed."
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,1,2644...
Should I read this tomorrow? I may not be able to contain the rage
The continued failure to report serious matters to the police, or, as has been reported recently, informing suspects they are under investigation, to my mind, constitutes being an accessory after the fact.
This should at the least be reasons to prosecute those accessories-after-the-fact. However, what we are talking about is a continuous and widespread culture of the organization concerned to protect paedophiles.
Compare and contrast the general public outrage at accusations by Xenophon (probably warranted) about a relatively small group of counter-factualists, Scientologists, with the “ho hum” reaction to constant proof of Roman Catholic organizational efforts to help criminals avoid secular justice.
If this was not such an obscenely powerful organization, it would have been proscribed years ago. If formal inquiries initiated by politicians into the Church of Scientology as an organization are underway, it’s time a much bigger inquiry investigated the never-ending abuses by the Roman Catholic church.
What we are dealing with is an organization that has experience gained over many centuries protecting itself from more than just paedophilia. It regularly has to deal with theft, unhealthy alliances with the underwold, its complicity with big business and government, etc. etc. Lump them all together and you get a better picture of what the Roman Catholic Church is all about. It is only paedophilia that gets citizens concerned and it willing to overlook all of its other "sins". If the population would hold them accountable for their actions or inactions as it would any regular citizen, the Roman Catholic Church would not enjoy its special "status".
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