David Quinn: A more honest media would relentlessly hunt down child abuse wherever it is found

April 16 2010 04:44 AM

COVERAGE of the Church's sex abuse scandals is now thoroughly unhinged. Even people outside the church are starting to realise this.

One is the renowned former mayor of New York, Ed Koch, who is Jewish and disagrees with the Catholic Church on practically all the hot-button issues including same-sex marriage and abortion.

Writing in 'The Jerusalem Post' last week, he came straight out and accused much of the media of bias.

He said: "I believe the continuing attacks by the media on the Roman Catholic Church and Pope Benedict XVI have become manifestations of anti-Catholicism. The procession of articles on the same events are, in my opinion, no longer intended to inform, but simply to castigate."

He continued: "Many of those in the media who are pounding on the church and the Pope today clearly do it with delight, and some with malice."

Over at the popular online magazine, 'Spiked', atheist Brendan O'Neill told his fellow atheists not to join in on the non-stop "church-bashing".

He said the current reaction to the scandals is "informed more by prejudice and illiberalism than by anything resembling a principled secularism, and one which also threatens to harm individuals, families, society and liberty."

Koch and O'Neill are right.

This is no longer about uncovering child abuse because if it was then every organisation with a history of child abuse in its ranks would be pursued with equal vigour. We know this is not the case.

A more honest media would relentlessly hunt down child abuse wherever it is to be found.

For example, the US media would run endless stories about the sex abuse going on in American public schools right now, today.

Professor Charol Shakeshaft of Virginia University conducted a study of sex abuse in schools on behalf of the US Department of Education.

It estimated that there was the absolutely staggering total of 290,000 such cases between 1991 and 2001 alone.

Furthermore, Shakeshaft discovered that out of a sample of 225 teachers who admitted to sexually abusing a pupil, not a single case was reported to the authorities and only 1pc lost their license to teach.

If the Catholic Church is guilty of a 'criminal conspiracy' against children, then so are US schools.

This study has received only a fraction of the coverage devoted to clerical sex abuse even though abuse is still rampant in American public schools and even though there has been a massive cover-up of these scandals.

If the media were truly concerned about child abuse per se, this would have been a huge story. It wasn't and that is a damning indictment of the media and its particular biases. Or maybe it is a damning indictment of the public, and our biases?

If the media were more honest they would also tell us that cases of child abuse by priests peaked in the 1970s and 1980s and are now a fraction of what they were.

A couple of weeks ago, the US bishops' independent child protection office issued its annual report showing the number of allegations received through the American Church's 300 dioceses in the previous year.

It received 398 allegations but only six of these allegations were contemporary. The rest related mainly to events of several decades ago and mostly to priests previously accused of child abuse. This, too, received almost no coverage.

I mentioned that the scandals peaked in the 1970s and 1980s. We know this from the John Jay College's study of Catholic priests. This is by far and away the biggest study of abuse ever conducted into any organisation in any part of the world.

It examined the period 1950 to 2002 and found that 4,392 priests out of 100,000 had been accused of some form of child abuse in that time -- ranging from a single allegation of molestation to multiple allegations of rape. (The great majority of victims were adolescent boys aged 12 to 14).

But it also found that 40pc of the abuse cases occurred in the six-year period from 1975 to 1980. This is a truly stunning finding. What was going on then?

It was only later, from around the mid-1990s, that these cases came to public and media attention but the damage had been mainly done in those earlier years and in particular over those six years when something especially evil was clearly at work in the church.

Almost no-one knows any of the above facts. Likewise, almost no-one knows that in the US insurance companies don't see the Catholic Church as being higher risk than other churches.

As one insurer told 'Newsweek': "We don't see vast difference in the incidence rate (of abuse) between one denomination and another. It's pretty even across the denominations."

Now, ask yourself why you know none of this and then try and convince yourself that Ed Koch isn't right when he says that many of the current attacks on the church are "manifestations of anti-Catholicism".

dquinn@independent.ie