Ideas
Institutional Child Abuse: Why The Parents, Wards And Government Agencies Of These Two Southern States Should Be Especially Alert
Aravindan Neelakandan
Jan 30, 2022, 05:53 PM | Updated 05:53 PM IST
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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.
According to the head of the commission the retired and respected judge, Jean-Marc Sauvé, France, with 3,33,000 victims is 'at the lower end of abuse scale.' That should give us an idea of the monstrously massive amount of institutional child abuse.
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:
In his seventh standard Isakkimuthu got a teacher Ars.Fernandes the Catholic priest who had a strange desire. The handsomeness of the boy became the target of his dishonest lust. The boy was shocked. He ran to the head priest of the institution. But he received neither justice nor consolation. With no alternative left, as a typical child he tried impossible ways (to counter the abuse), he was chased away from the school.
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.
The question is: are we seeing the same phenomenon that has rocked the West in Kerala and Tamil Nadu? It is strongly possible. In other states too and even in other countries, Catholic priests with connection to these two states have exhibited alarmingly problematic behaviour. There is also a hint of institutional culpability.
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:
Nelson was convicted in a New York court in 2003 of fondling a 12-year-old altar girl in the Brooklyn diocese. He was sentenced to four months in prison and has since returned to his church in the diocese of Kottar in southern India, where he works in the bishop's office.
Jeff Anderson and Associates who provide legal consultancy and services for institutional child abuse victims in their report available online on the sexual abuse in the Diocese of Kottar has this to say about 'Rev'. Nelson case:
The abuse reportedly occurred in 1999, while Fr. Nelson was working at St. Mary Star of the Sea in Brooklyn, New York. At the time of the alleged abuse, the survivor’s family reported to the Diocese of Brooklyn and Fr. Nelson was subsequently removed from the Diocese. Bishop Tharmaraj of the Diocese of Kottar, India, subsequently wrote a letter of recommendation on behalf of Fr. Nelson which helped Fr. Nelson secure a job in the Archdiocese of New York. Fr. Nelson continued to work in the Archdiocese of New York until he was arrested in 2002.The Anderson Report: Sexual Abuse in the Diocese of Brooklyn, p.57
Here, the point to be noted is that even after the Brooklyn clergy got him suspended, the intervention from Indian diocese got his reinstated.
In December 2021, the Archbishop of Bombay, Oswald Cardinal Gracias, asked 'pardon' from the community in another similar case involving a priest named Lawrence who was convicted of sodomosing a young boy.
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.
As I was leaving for Rome hours after the complaint, an Auxiliary Bishop was delegated to supervise the hearings, contact the police and keep in touch with the family. Our records show that the Church hearings began the very next day after the complaint was filed, Fr. Lawrence was arrested the same night, and the priests were asked to meet the family.
Now the same events were described by the mother of the victim as follows in the report made by Daijiworldmedia Network:
Mother of the victim said that the supporters of Fr Lawrence held a morcha against the family accusing them of filing a false case to extort money. The boy who was bleeding due to the sodomy was not taken into consideration. The victim’s mother said that the Archbishop of Mumbai tried to cover up the incident. Oswald Cardinal Gracias said that he is going to Rome and will see the issue after return. The only person who really stood by the boy and his mother was Brother Joe of SSVP. The cardinal gave no proper response to the victim and his mother when I took them to him. Moreover, a parish official asked the mother to forget the incident saying that after all the victim is a boy and not a girl.
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 way Indian judiciary moves, the victims who mostly come from low income sections of the society, may have to endure legal battles for years if not decades, that too with uncertainty of getting justice. So, for most of them, an out-of-court compromise with compensation seems a better option than a legal battle. This helps in the abuser escaping and institutional abuse go on unabated.
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.
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Aravindan is a contributing editor at Swarajya.
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