Investigating child sexual abuse

A chara, – Michael McDowell writes: “The report of the commission of investigation into clerical abuse by the clergy of the Dublin archdiocese was widely seen as a great success. But Judge Yvonne Murphy was required by its terms of reference to inquire in private into a small sample of cases where priests were accused of abuse” (“Major inquiry into secondary school sex abuse may be less useful than focused study”, Opinion & Analysis, January 4th).

Rather, the terms of reference of that commission were to investigate the handling of allegations by diocesan and State authorities, which is somewhat different. While its report was widely seen in the media as a “great success”, it left half of its mandate largely incomplete: the investigation into how allegations were handled by State authorities, as the report acknowledged (paragraph 6:62). Diocesan documentation was in accessible order; State documentation was not, and so the commission took a “pragmatic approach” (paragraph 2:19), and relied on recollections rather than documentation. The result is that the report focuses overwhelmingly on how the diocesan authorities acted, and relatively little on how the State acted. So it conveyed the impression that it was a Catholic Church problem rather than a societal problem.

Michael McDowell suggested “a focused, sample-based inquiry” rather than a “massively lengthy, comprehensive and expensive inquiry into all sexual abuse of pupils of religious secondary schools”.

Seven years before the 2009 Murphy Report, Helen Goode, research co-ordinator for the clerical child sexual abuse study conducted with Prof Hannah McGee, director of the Health Services Research Centre and the Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) Project, and Prof Ciaran O’Boyle of RCSI, concluded an article in The Irish Times on November 6th, 2002: “How will society more generally address the 97 per cent of child sexual abuse, still largely hidden, and not perpetrated by clergy?”