David Quinn
Cast of Spotlight The Church, BBC and Rotherham abuse scandals all have a culture of deference in common, writes David Quinn
Spotlight, the film about how the Boston Globe helped uncover clerical abuse scandals, won the Best Picture award at the Oscars last weekend.
The film is aptly named because the Boston Globe did put a spotlight on the scandals, and now the film itself, hugely helped by its Oscar, is doing the same. Here in Ireland, the media turned a very intense and glaring spotlight on clerical abuse scandals for almost two decades.
But it was the public anger unleashed by the coverage of the scandals in America back in 2002, led by the Boston Globe, that really caused the Vatican to sit up and take notice.
The American media are vastly more powerful than the Irish media, the American Church vastly more wealthy than the Irish Church. The American Church was being sued for billions of dollars. Dioceses were being pushed towards bankruptcy. The Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law, resigned.
Accepting the Best Picture Oscar, producer Michael Sugar said he hoped Spotlight would help ensure that institutional silence over abuse would not be tolerated and this message would “resonate all the way to the Vatican”.
He directed his message to the Pope, saying: “Pope Francis: it’s time to protect the children and restore the faith.”
This is actually unfair and conveys a wrong impression to the hundreds of millions who watched the Oscars or the highlight clips on the news and on other programmes. It gives the impression that the Church has done little or nothing since the scandals first broke upon public consciousness and that the Pope himself does not take the issue seriously.
Protection system
The Catholic Church in America has extremely robust child protection systems in place now, as does the Church in Ireland. So does the Church in many other parts of the world. Hopefully in those parts of the world where systems are not up to scratch, the Church in some developing countries, for example, that will change, and soon.
Indeed, in countries like Ireland and the US, the scandals peaked in the 1970s and 1980s. Few very more recent complaints, comparatively speaking, relate to abuse after that period.
Child sex abuse scandals were in the news for other reasons last week as well. These cases did not involve the Catholic Church. In one case they involved extremely widespread child abuse in the northern English town of Rotherham and in the other a new report into why the BBC did not put a stop to Jimmy Savile’s abuse of children in the decades he spent working for the station.
The Rotherham scandals affected almost 1,500 girls who were sexually abused and often raped by men of mostly Pakistani heritage over many years. Last week some of the perpetrators were sentenced to prison and now the police are under huge pressure for not doing more to stop the abuse.
A report in 2014 by Prof. Alexis Jay found at least 1,400 children had been raped, trafficked and groomed in Rotherham over a 16-year period. Rotherham Council and police officials failed to act.
South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner Shaun Wright, resigned. He had been a Rotherham councillor in charge of children’s services between 2005 and 2010.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission is involved in 55 investigations into how South Yorkshire Police dealt with child sexual exploitation in Rotherham.
Dr Alan Billings, the current South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner, told the BBC: “It was a complete disgrace and that’s the awful legacy that the force has had to deal with and to accept, first of all, and there must be no denial about this, they must say and I think they have done, that yes these awful things were done in the past, it was wrong, it was bad and they’ve had to recover from that.”
Similar scandals have been uncovered in other British towns such as Rochdale and Oxford again involving men of Pakistani origin, and again local politicians, social workers and police turned a blind eye.
The report into why Jimmy Savile and the broadcaster Stuart Hall were able to get away with abusing so many people, minors and adults alike, for so long while working at the BBC, was authored by Dame Janet Smith.
Victims
It identified 72 victims of Savile and 21 of Hall. It found that a number of middle ranking BBC staff knew what was happening but did not do enough to stop him. The report claims that senior management at the BBC did not know what was happening, but victims doubt this and have condemned the report as a ‘whitewash’.
In one case the report describes how a junior employee at the BBC complained to her supervisor in the late 1980s that she had been sexually assaulted by Savile, and was told “keep your mouth shut, he is a VIP”.
This gets to the nub of the issue. The Smith report said the culture of the BBC was “deeply deferential” towards its celebrities and that an “atmosphere of fear” (which Smith said still exists) stopped people coming forward to make complaints about Savile and others.
In the case of Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere a similar atmosphere of deference and fear stopped the authorities acting to protect victims.
The Jay report into what happened in Rotherham, said “several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist”.
British Home Secretary Theresa May blamed “institutionalised political correctness” for the unwillingness of police, social workers and local politicians to act.
What we are seeing here is a pattern that led to the cover-up of abuse in the Church, the BBC and in places like Rotherham, namely a culture of deference.
In the case of the Church it was a culture of deference towards priests. In the case of the BBC it was deference towards celebrities and in the case of Rotherham and elsewhere it was deference towards ‘minorities’ combined with a fear of being called ‘racist’.
This is what all institutions must guard against. Deference has its place but can never allow people to get away with abominable crimes. Perhaps someday a movie might be made about what happened at the BBC and why, and what happened in places like Rotherham and why. A spotlight on deference and how a culture of deference can go badly wrong is what we really need.