Sex abuse a big problem for all of us

27 Jul 2012

By Robert Hiini

If you were only looking at the weight of media reporting, you could be forgiven for thinking there was an epidemic of child sexual abuse, perpetrated by the Catholic Church.

What is getting less air time is that the three Catholic bishops at the centre of media attention last week are determined to address the issue, even as they attend to cases that happened under different prelates, decades earlier.

There is no doubt that the abuse perpetrated by pederast priests is in no way merely historical for victims. As the recent Four Corners report ably demonstrated, its effects have been debilitating and, in many instances, life-destroying for many men and women.

In the past 20 years, the media has done the Church a great service in exposing cases of abuse, of cover-up, and of exacerbation, when offending priests were left unpunished and moved to different dioceses to begin abusing anew.

In the cause of better protecting children from abuse right now, however, the virulence with which the media excoriates the Catholic Church might, at the very least, be extended to other quarters.

Contemporary child sex abusers are much more likely to be male relatives than they are to be Catholic priests.

Male relatives other than the victim’s father, make up the greatest proportion of all child sex abuse perpetrators (30.2 per cent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2005 Personal Safety Australia report).

Then comes family friends (16.3), acquaintances/neighbours (15.6), ‘other known person(s)’ (15.3), fathers/stepfathers (13.5), and strangers (11.1).

While more than 70 priests and religious have been convicted of sex offences in Australia, in 2010-11 there were 5,437 substantiated claims of sexual abuse throughout Australia, according to the Child Protection Australia 2010-11 report; 431 of those came from Western Australia.

Sexual abuse made up 13 per cent of all substantiated harm. In every State and Territory, girls were more likely than boys to be sexually abused (in almost every state, boys were much more likely to be physically abused).

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were almost eight times as likely to be the victims of child abuse and neglect.

What these facts reveal is that we certainly do have a problem with the horror that is the sexual abuse of children. But it is “our” problem, as a society, not just for “those people” in the Catholic Church.