"Endemic" Rapes and Beatings in Irish Catholic Schools - WTF?

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The title really say it all. I'm speechless. Raping and molestation common in the boys schools, while beatings with instruments designed to maximize the pain common in girls school.

Yikes!

 

I agree with the WTF... holy christ, this makes me sick. How can the Church condone (or at least protect) these sorts of actions? Apparently "thou shall not rape children" is not a commandment.

 

And these are the ones the believers turn to when in crisis? Well, thank god i'm an aethiest!

 

I'm not very surprised, I think it has been more or less widely recognized that this sort of thing happens. Obviously Churches are unfit to supervise these schools with their secrecy in trying to avoid public humiliation. The governments need to start watching over these institutions and make regular checks to see if everything is in order, this is done with normal school so why are religious schools an exception? I don't care if they are private or not they certainly don't have the right to beat and rape children and their privacy certainly is not my concern when it comes to protecting children.

Hopefully this scandal with spark things up a bit and wake the Irish government (as well as other governments with similar institutions, I doubt Ireland is alone in this) to this issue.

 

the more devout someone is....

 

I don't think this was clear from the article but these kind of schools were a feature up to the 50s and 60s. Note that the victims are now aged 50 to 80. These institutions were closed well before my lifetime (oh, according to the article they weren't. They would have been very rare though and the abuses rarely date from this time) and the scandals have been mainstream since the 90s. It pretty much finished the Church off as a moral authority. It's not a comment on Irish schools now and it's not a comment on the current regulatory system.

The Church traditionally provided education in Ireland up until very recently, the government not having the funds to set up schools themselves. These institutions don't represent regular Catholic schools (where abuse did occur less frequently) but are more akin to orphanages or workhouses out of Oliver Twist. Though in many ways they resembled prisons and it's a disgrace how some children ever ended up there.

On the non-sexual abuse, it should be pointed out that these priests/nuns were dumped into these places almost much as the children by their orders and they might have stayed there for their lives. You had people who might have had very poor personal empathy and absolutely no training trying to control and teach a class of 80 dysfunctional kids. Corporal punishment wasn't seen as unusual then. It was a recipe for disaster, though I don't mean to excuse those who committed these crimes.

The paedophilia was henious and the cover ups equally so. It's sickening that people knowingly put the Church's reputation before the welfare of children. Of course, this has now caused the Church's reputation to be ruined completely.

I wouldn't blame the Church completely for their current denials. They admitted it happened in many cases but how do you prove what happened 50 years ago? Most of the abusers and their protectors are long dead. And where there's compensation there's claims (though the state has disgracefully agreed to pick up nearly all the tab). The compensation authority found a lot of claims were clearly bogus. Abuse support groups (not the Church's strongest supporters) reported problems with people registering for group counselling purely to learn the details so that they could make claims. They wanted to find out simple things like the colours of uniforms and the names of priests, things which any victim would clearly know.