Commission describes decades of child mistreatment in Catholic-run institutions.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, May 21, 2009
DUBLIN — Eleven-year-old Tom Sweeney kept skipping school. Eight-year-old Mannix Flynn got caught stealing a box of chocolates. Christine Buckley, barely a month old, was the child of an unwed mother.
In the Roman Catholic Ireland of old, such offenses were sufficient to land all three children — and more than 30,000 others throughout the 20th century — in Dickensian workhouses for girls and boys run with an iron fist by Catholic religious orders.
A 2,600-page report, published Wednesday after a nine-year investigation into child abuse by Catholic religious orders, painted a portrait of a system that protected child-molesting church officials while consigning generations of children to misery. Thousands of children were physically and sexually abused from 1930 to 1990, according to the report.
"A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from," Ireland's Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse concluded.
But several victims of the abuse — some of whom scuffled with police Wednesday after they were prevented from attending the report's release at a Dublin hotel — said the report didn't go far enough on what really matters: the names of their abusers. No priest or nun was named in the report — a fact many of the victims groups decried, because the findings would not aid those pursuing criminal prosecutions.
"It's deeply flawed, incomplete, a whitewash," said John Kelly of the Survivors of Child Abuse.
The report found that molestation and rape were "endemic" in boys' facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order. Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless, according to the report.
"In some schools a high level of ritualized beating was routine," the report said.
Sweeney, who spent five years in two Christian Brothers-run institutions, says he suffered sexual abuse and beatings. He said he has bitter memories about more everyday humiliations — such as being forced to wrap his urine-stained sheets around his neck and parade in front of other children when he'd wet his bed.
"It's something you'll never forget, the way you lived in these industrial schools," he said.
Additional information from The Washington Post.
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