The child abuse double standard

The Pope's visit has prompted many to ask new questions about the child abuse scandal which assailed the Catholic church. Before being so quick to express their hatred of the entire Church, Americans should compare that horrible story to the lesser-known reports coming out of the Channel Islands, which belong to the United Kingdom.

Previously, these islands were best known to Americans as the only British territory occupied by Germany during World War II. Now, the isle of Jersey has entered the news due to some gruesome finds at Haut de la Garenne, a rambling Victorian building used as a children's home until 1986. (It later became a filming location and a youth hostel.)

For many years, local residents had spoken of the abuses which had occurred there when it housed children. Twenty years after Haut de la Garenne ceased to be a child care facility, police finally investigated. They found evidence -- blood stains, a dungeon, child-sized shackles, pieces of a shattered skull, and lime pits perfect for the disintegration of bodies:

The discovery was prompted by a man who came forward to reveal that he had been asked by members of staff to dig the pits one day in the 1980s and fill them in again the next morning.

“When he asked what the pits were for he was told it was none of his concern,” the States of Jersey Police said in a statement.

This story contains recollections by victims:

Pamela said that every night staff pulled cowering children from their beds and battered and raped them. She added: "The things that happened there are indescribable, the most cruel, sadistic and evil acts you could think of."

Pamela first tried to alert the authorities in 1974. They ignored her.

Haut de la Garenne was part of a pattern:

It is emerging now that the victims repeatedly begged for help. Why did no one listen?

I have a pretty good idea why not, given how viciously the politically-correct establishment silenced me about the similar paedophile ring which raped me.

I was sexually abused by two male workers in children's homes in Islington, North London, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I was unusual, a kid who did not seek escape through drugs or suicide.

But I did run away and never again attended school. I spent my days at my local library, educated myself and went on to university, desperately hoping I could make someone listen. No-one did.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, I wrote reports on my abusers, demanding an inquiry.

In 1992, I even lobbied Margaret Hodge's office - she was then council leader - and met her stand-in, Stephen Twigg, now also a Labour MP. He did nothing.

The truth only emerged thanks to a three-year newspaper campaign which revealed that all of Islington's 12 children's homes were run by, or included, staff who were paedophiles, child pornographers or pimps.

I once knew the mother of two children involved in the McMartin case. At the time I met the youths, they were quite a bit older, but they had not gone back on their stories.

The public was made to believe that the McMartin kids were brainwashed -- that their parents (pictured in the media as religious fanatics) had put these stories into their heads. The parent I met was irreligious, and had refused for quite some time to believe the things her children were telling her. The kids did not change their accounts even when they went through the usual "rebellious teen" phase.

As the parent later explained to me, the McMartin story was shanghaied early on by ax-grinding religious zealots who transformed a child abuse case into a bizarre tale of massive Satanic conspiracies. As the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare morphed into a national mania, Lauren Stratford and other attention-seeking claimants came forward and made a lot of money, only to be exposed as charlatans.

Not for the first or last time, America's "conspiracy culture" had hidden an actual phenomenon behind a curtain of inanity.

The merchandizers and the fanatics prompted many to treat child abuse claims with an understandable skepticism. The skepticism ceased only when a new round of abuse assertions targeted Catholic clergy.

My brief here is not to defend any crime committed by any cleric -- although if you look closely, some of the accusers showed signs of being "Lauren Stratford" types. Neither would I ever try to defend the shameful handling of the scandal by the church hierarchy.

Instead, my question is a simple one: Why did so many people refuse to accept abuse claims until they involved Catholics? Why did skepticism disappear so rapidly when the perceived villains were men in black?

Even today, the first instinct of many people would be to classify Pamela's story (noted above) alongside that of Lauren Stratford. But if Pamela had pointed the finger at Roman Catholicism, the Religion Everyone Loves to Hate, she would never have had a credibility problem.

Today, many people associate priesthood and pedophilia, even though the percentage of clerics involved in the scandal was quite small -- 0.2 %, according to one study -- and even though similar scandals beset other religions and other institutions. In 2002, an Episcopalian named Philip Jenkins concluded that

My research of cases over the past 20 years indicates no evidence whatever that Catholic or other celibate clergy are any more likely to be involved in misconduct or abuse than clergy of any other denomination -- or indeed, than nonclergy. However determined news media may be to see this affair as a crisis of celibacy, the charge is just unsupported.

Literally every denomination and faith tradition has its share of abuse cases, and some of the worst involve non-Catholics. Every mainline Protestant denomination has had scandals aplenty, as have Pentecostals, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews, Buddhists, Hare Krishnas -- and the list goes on.

Again: Please do not take these words as an excuse for any crime committed by any priest. Nor would I want to minimize the Church's institutional problems. I simply want to point out that child abuse is a human story, unconfined to any faith or sector of society. The American (and British) psyche refused to credit such claims until we could safely point the finger at a despised minority.

Evil becomes comprehensible only when we can imagine the bad guy as The Other.