Let’s not be unmoved by horrors of child abuse
THE report into child sex abuse in the scouts is like reading the Ryan report into clerical sex abuse all over again. Another tranche of innocent children delivered into the hands of an outwardly Christian and respectable institution, which enjoyed the unquestioning trust of society to shape and mould its young charges.
Another corrupt organisation eager to turn a blind eye to the suffering of juveniles at the hands of authority figures and to coerce the good people within who wanted to report abuse into silence in order to shore up its reputation.
The scandal of clerical child sex abuse was not so much the numbers of children defiled by paedophile priests but the cover up which was sanctioned from the top echelons and involved nothing more sophisticated than moving perpetrators from one parish to the next to prey on new groups of children.
The tentacles of the scouting movement never reached as far as the Catholic Church but according to child protection expert Ian Elliott, who wrote the report, there is evidence that just like the Church, the scouts was a ‘seriously dysfunctional organisation’ with ‘sex offenders dominating the leadership for decades’.
The report found that there was ‘an almost complete absence of any concern for the young people who were abused’. One of the report’s more disturbing case studies shows an attitude bordering almost on contempt for child welfare when a senior scout leader admitted to being an active sex offender within the scouts and to using the organisation to meet children to groom as sexual partners.
The scout leader said that it was known that he couldn’t control his sexual impulses among young people, that he had spoken about it to his peers but his request to resign his commission was refused.
More than 300 former scouts have made allegations of historical abuse, mostly between the 1960s and 1990s, with many allegations involving leaders plying their teenage charges with alcohol when on camps before raping or assaulting them. That’s hundreds of youngsters traumatised by abuse in their formative years and damaged in ways we can’t imagine.
Yet the harrowing ordeal inflicted on so many youngsters elicits not much more than a metaphorical shrug of the shoulders from us.
Why are we not more upset at this dreadful betrayal of children and their families?
The disclosure of clerical sex abuse rocked Irish society to its foundations, the den of vipers identified at Swim Ireland provoked shock and outrage yet it seems that over years our wave of collective anger at child sex abuse has reduced to a trickle.
It’s understandable that the history of almost unrelenting child abuse in our most august organisations has inured us against the true horror of these crimes.
We can’t always be shocked at eccentric public figures being revealed as abusers in the same way as we were at Jimmy Savile. We can’t lie awake at night at yet another sporting organisation being exposed as a pervert’s paradise. We couldn’t function in society if we experienced everything as if it was for the first time.
There are many parents who despite misgivings still want their children to enjoy the benefits of the scouting ethos.
In my neighbourhood the local scouts were so popular, you couldn’t get a place if you tried.
Likewise there are parents who encourage their children to join the church choir or become altar servers, satisfied that the culture of abuse and cover up has been dismantled. Yet safeguarding standards are only as good as those who are vigilant about upholding them and are aware about the vulnerability of childhood.
Becoming hardened to revelations of child sex abuse may be inevitable but complacency about child protection is a danger we should constantly be on our guard against.