US Bishop: Church Must Discover Why Victims Don’t Report Abuse

Bishop Conlon (CNS/Paul Haring)

Catholic bishops should find out what is keeping sex abuse victims around the world from coming forward, said Bishop R. Daniel Conlon, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on the Protection of Children and Young People.

U.N. statistics have shown “that sex abuse is widespread and crosses all cultures and societies” and is not just a phenomenon plaguing the church or Western nations, he told Catholic News Service Feb. 13.

A further indication that abuse is a concern for the global church is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s mandate for all bishops to establish anti-abuse guidelines by May this year, he said.

“We as a church, we want to be at the forefront of society in helping to deal with this issue so, even in countries where there have not been allegations of abuse in the church, the church can still be a forceful agent for bringing about change in the larger society,” he said.

Bishop Conlon, bishop of Joliet, Ill., was in Rome to attend two international gatherings dealing with the church’s response to child protection. The first was a Vatican-backed symposium Feb. 6-9 organized by the Pontifical Gregorian University. The other was the Feb. 11-14 Anglophone Conference on the Safeguarding of Children, Young People and Vulnerable Adults.

The Anglophone conference has been meeting every year since 1996 and brings together bishops and experts in child protection to share concerns, successful policies and prevention programs. Bishop Conlon said the annual conference takes a more practical, rather than theoretical, approach to what is happening in the field of protection and how policies can be improved.

The conference, which began as a meeting for bishops from English-speaking countries, has expanded to include lay child protection officers, social workers, lawyers and church leaders from around the world. This year nearly 50 delegates attended from 15 countries, including Chile, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea.

Bishop Conlon said he would like to see even more bishops and representatives attend from Asia and Africa, even if they are not receiving many or any accusations of clerical abuse of minors.

He said, “They would recognize very much that there is domestic abuse” of children, which is also plagued by shame or silence that keeps the tragedy largely hidden.

At next year’s Anglophone conference — to be co-hosted by the United States and Sri Lanka — “I’d like to have someone address the cultural realities in developing nations,” he said, “to help us understand better what makes it unlikely at this point for a victim of sexual abuse as a child to come forward either as a child or later as an adult.

“We know that there’s harm that was done. So as much as we find it painful to deal with those allegations, we know that for the sake of the one who was abused, it’s beneficial to come forward” and say what has happened, he said. [More]

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CNS