Institutional Child Abuse: Why The Parents, Wards And Government Agencies Of These Two Southern States Should Be Especially Alert

In the last two decades the papal office has been quite liberal with issuing apologies for the notorious crimes of its past - against the Jews, against the native Americans, for the inquisition in Europe and so on. However, when Indians asked the same office to issue a similar apology for the inquisition in Goa, which also happened to be the longest-running inquisition (1560-1774) in history, the Catholic Church refused.

The reason is simple. In other countries the mission has been accomplished, or cannot be further extended, because of strong, genuinely secular, institutions. In India that is not the case.

This is a pagan civilisation and a society 'to be conquered'. The Church is in the middle of a war and issuing an apology now would be a strategic blunder while in the case of the West it is a positive image makeover exercise.

The same applies for the institutional child abuse in India.

While in the West the Church has shown itself subservient to the secular authority with respect to institutional child abuse scandals, in India we see the Church in a denial mode. Here, the institutions of secularism seem to be subservient to the Church.

Let us consider the case of France. Between 1950 to 2018, 3,000 priests were reported to have sexually abused 2,16,000 minors. Apart from the priests, non-clergy Catholic officials in the Church were reported to have abused 1,14,000. A 485-page report is not the first document of shame that the Catholic Church has been facing recently. According to European Union news agency, since 2004, there have been 10 similar documents from Australia, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and the United States.

India may be having a stronger case than the West with respect to institutional child abuse.

Painfully perhaps, the first hint of such institutionalised abuse comes from the pen of one of the most respected makers of modern Tamil literature - Viruthacalam whose nom de plume was 'Puthumaipithan'.

In his short story, Avataram, written in 1947, he describes how a Konar (equivalent of Yadav) decides to take his extraordinarily brilliant boy 'Isakimuthu' (whose name means pearl of Isakki-Goddess) to a Catholic school because he finds the village thinnai school insufficient to satisfy the every growing inquisitive mind of the child.

The boy, though he likes the philosophy of 'Christ Muni', is equally repulsed by the way the Catholic clergy uses the hunger of the stomach to accept the heaven promised through the wounds of Jesus which through the boy's perspective, Puthumaipithan compares to a beggar asking for alms showing his wounds. So the boy does not care much for the proselytizing attempts.

Now the author comes to an important aspect:

The story happens at Palayamkottai situated in Thirunelveli - the writer's native place. Palayamkottai is one of the missionary epicenters of Tamil Nadu right from the colonial times. Now we need to think of the possibility of the above fiction as reflection of a very possible or plausible scenario.

Bishopaccountability.org is a website that is both a database and an online abuse tracker for the victims of institutional abuse. It has the following to say about a priest who is currently working in Kottar Diocese of Kanyakumari district:

Here, the point to be noted is that even after the Brooklyn clergy got him suspended, the intervention from Indian diocese got his reinstated.

Gracias stated that 'I ask pardon that a representative of the Church, appointed to be in charge of the community, was responsible for this.' However, subsequent lines that the Cardinal wrote hinted at a darker manoeuvre by the Church.

Clearly, what the powerful elements inside the Church had tried to do was to talk to the family playing 'good cop' while the supporters of the paedophile priest played 'bad cop'.

From Brooklyn to Mumbai, the Institutional Child Abuse (ICA) seems to have the same methodology. If the victims belong to the diocese, usually they think of the abuse as more the perversion of the individual and not a systemic problem. So they usually approach the diocese authorities than the police. This is the time the ICA lobby needs. They try to buy peace with the family either through nice words, promise of material things or shaming the victim. If the family of the victims remain strong then only it reaches the authorities.

In many cases of ICA in India, the victims come from marginalised sections of the society or from disturbed family backgrounds so that the children might not have a proper guardian to go and complain. Even if that happens, the ICA perpetrators have superior institutional strength—media support, political support and capacity to employ the best legal brains to defend them.

Given the institutional network of the abusers, the involvement of Government of India is a must. The child welfare board of Government of India should consult with the bodies in the West that have worked with ICA. They should constitute a body to investigate thoroughly all the cases of abuse and should also ask the silent abuse victims to come forward and register their complaints.

The Government of India should also inform the Papacy in no uncertain terms that it should instruct their members in India to cooperate with the authorities failing which India should not even hesitate to sever the ties with the 'Holy' See. Nothing is more important than protecting the children from institutional child abuse. The religious institutions of the West should be made to disabuse them from the notion that the medieval power they lost in the West could be gained in countries like India through political and media manipulations.