Courtney McGrailDear Editor, While Mick Peelo is to be thanked for his belated recognition and publicising of the fact that the vast majority of Ireland’s abusers and would-be abusers are not clergy, I cannot but wonder about the wisdom of how he talks about how this might be handled (‘Time to end zero tolerance?’ IC 20/10/2016).
With the numbers of adult abuse survivors in Ireland running into the hundreds of thousands, as survivors made up over a quarter of the adult population 15 years ago, one would think the number of Irish people who have abused must run to the tens of thousands.
The actual number could be even higher, of course, but even if it is tens of thousands, two things seem clear.
One is that there is no way our prison system could cope with all our abusers if they were to be convicted. The other is that the number of convicted abusers must be a tiny percentage of the total. Mr Peelo says that 90% of abusers are never convicted, but even that sounds low, as on that basis if tens of thousands have abused, we might expect thousands to have been convicted: has that happened? Are solid figures available on how many people the state has convicted of abuse?
With only a small number of abusers having been convicted, it’s surely unsafe to make broad claims about what helps abusers reform, heal, and learn to control or quash their temptations. I have no doubt that psychiatrists can talk from experience about people who have improved, but how could one know whether those convicted abusers who have battled their demons are representative of abusers in general.
The term ‘anecdote’, it’s sometimes said, is not the singular form of ‘data’: this seems a subject in desperate need of hard numbers, not just hopeful stories.
Yours etc.,
Richard O’Connor,
Lucan, Co. Dublin.