Posts Tagged ‘Sexual Abuse’
Monday, March 8th, 2010
8/3/10
A bishop has given new details of sex abuse at a boys’ choir in Germany once headed by the Pope’s brother. Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, bishop of Regensburg, in southern Germany, where the Domspatzen choir is based, said Pope Benedict XVI’s brother Georg Ratzinger, 86, did not head the choir at the time. The two “remembered” cases of sex abuse at Domspatzen dated back to 1958 and therefore “did not coincide with the period where professor Georg Ratzinger was in charge”, Bishop Mueller said in the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano newspaper. Mr Ratzinger headed the choir between 1964 and 1994, he said. The director and composer Franz Wittenbrink, a former pupil of the school attached to Domspatzen, spoke of an “ingenious system of sadistic punishments connected to sexual pleasure” at the school.
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Tags: Christianity, Germany, Sexual Abuse
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Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
John Cooney: 17/2/10
Rome is proud of its claim to be the “Eternal City”. For 2,000 years it has claimed to be the moral arbiter of world affairs. Over the centuries, it has always managed to weather the storms of heresy, Reformation, the disunity of Christendom and secularist attacks from ungodly governments and literary critics. Rome too, has also survived scandals arising from bad popes, who have been worldly, corrupt and sexually lecherous, even siring offspring from illegitimate carnal relations with women. However, the crisis of child clerical sexual abuse is threatening to pose the biggest challenge ever to the Vatican’s moral authority. Yet, the late Pope John Paul II, ably and zealously aided by his then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger, was more concerned with removing dissident theologians from being recognised as orthodox Catholic scholars than with defrocking paedophile priests and ensuring full cooperation with the civic authority.
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Tags: Christianity, Irish, Rome, Sexual Abuse
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Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Hugh Mackay, 17/11/09; (2 Items)
So we’re to have another national apology, tendered by the Prime Minister on behalf of the Parliament and the Australian people. This time, it’s the turn of the “forgotten children” – those who languished, and were often neglected or abused, in institutions for orphans and other marginalised or displaced children, including those sent here from postwar Britain “for their own good”. No doubt an apology is called for. Even those who are cynical of such formalities would have to acknowledge that terrible wrongs were committed against these children – comparable in many ways to the wrongs committed against the members of the so-called stolen generations of Aboriginal children. But there’s a terrible gap in this process that no one seems to be acknowledging. You can easily identify that gap if you ask yourself: what is the purpose of an apology?
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Tags: Apology, Australia, Gender, Global, Sexual Abuse
Posted in Australia, Gender & Marriage, Health & Children, Human Rights, Sex Trade | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
Riazat Butt & Anushika Asthana; 30/9/09
The Vatican has lashed out at criticism over its handling of its pedophilia crisis by saying the Catholic Church was ”busy cleaning its own house” and that the problems with clerical sex abuse in other churches were as big, if not bigger. In a defiant and provocative statement, issued after a meeting of the UN human rights council in Geneva, the Holy See said most of the Catholic clergy who committed such acts were not pedophiles but homosexuals attracted to sex with adolescent males. The statement, read out by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s permanent observer to the UN, defended its record by claiming that ”available research” showed that only 1.5 per cent to 5 per cent of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse.
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Tags: Christianity, Sexual Abuse
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Monday, August 10th, 2009
Nick McKenzie; 10/8/09
Melbourne’s Catholic Church is under pressure to overhaul its handling of sexual abuse cases after revelations that a priest accused of abusing a minor was told beforehand that he was the subject of a covert police probe, undermining the investigation. The pressure is likely to intensify amid claims from the Catholic Vicar- General, Bishop Les Tomlinson, that there exists a sexual abuse ”victims’ industry” that seeks to exploit victims’ suffering to make money. The priest who was told of a police investigation is the now-convicted sex offender Paul Pavlou. Pavlou was informed of the police inquiry by a church-appointed investigator in July 2007, only days after his victim’s lawyer requested that the priest not be told of the investigation. Three weeks later, police raided Pavlou’s house and discovered the priest’s computer had been wiped. They also found a letter warning him of their inquiry
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Tags: Australia, Christianity, Sexual Abuse
Posted in Australia, Christianity, Health & Children, Human Rights, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
26/5/09
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin slammed Irish Catholic orders last night for concealing their culpability in decades of child abuse and said they needed to come up with much more money to compensate victims. The comments from the Archbishop of Dublin, a veteran Vatican diplomat, were the harshest yet by a Catholic leader following last week’s report detailing widespread abuse in scores of church-run industrial schools from the 1930s to 1990s. Archbishop Martin said the nuns and Catholic brothers who ran the workhouse-style schools must drop their refusal to renegotiate an intensely criticised 2002 agreement with the Irish government over compensation for victims. The orders seven years ago agreed to pay E128 million ($229.51 million) to the government to be protected from victims’ civil lawsuits. In return, the government expects to pay about 13,800 victims of physical, sexual and mental abuse and their lawyers more than E1.1 billion. All those who accept the state settlements, which average E65,000, must waive their right to sue both the church and government. Their abusers’ identities also are kept secret. Scores of other alleged victims have refused the offer and sued church and state authorities.
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Tags: Christianity, Ireland, Sexual Abuse
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Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
2/4/09
A team of New York prosecutors, counselors and religious leaders will work to combat sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. The centerpiece of the outreach program, which was announced Wednesday by District Attorney Charles Hynes and leaders from community-based organizations that serve Jewish communities, is a hot line abuse victims can call and speak to a culturally sensitive social worker. The establishment of the team, which will focus on child sex abuse, comes partly in response to a discussion on State Assemblyman Dov Hikind’s radio show in the summer of 2008. The show prompted dozens of listeners to come forward with stories of children being molested.
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Tags: Children, Jewish, Sexual Abuse, USA
Posted in Health & Children, Human Rights, Israel & Palestine, Religion, USA | No Comments »
Saturday, February 14th, 2009
Natalie O’Brien; 14/2/09; (2 Items)
Former students and colleagues of a Marist brother found guilty of sexually abusing children have been asked to come forward as investigations widen into the activities of the man, who taught at almost a dozen schools across NSW and Queensland. It is feared that there may be many unknown victims of Ross Francis Murrin, who taught with the order for 26 years and is already serving a jail term for abusing eight primary school boys in 1974 at the Marist Daceyville school in Sydney’s east. Murrin, 53, is to be sentenced next month in the NSW District Court after pleading guilty to the latest charge of sexually abusing a boy in his care at St Gregory’s college in Campbelltown, in Sydney’s southwest, in the mid-1980s.
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Tags: Australia, Sexual Abuse
Posted in Australia, Christianity, Health & Children, Human Rights | No Comments »
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
28/5/08
A victim of family violence will in future get a protection order at any time of the day if efforts by the Magisterial Services to improve access to justice for these people go as planned. Part of the process towards achieving this goal, as well as improving other services in the law and justice sector, begins with consultative meetings and workshops tomorrow. The meetings, organised under the practice direction on family and sexual violence project, will be held in different parts of the country. The first will be held in Lae tomorrow.
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Tags: Domestic Violence, PNG, Sexual Abuse
Posted in Gender & Marriage, Human Rights, PNG / West Papua, Sex Trade, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
5/5/08
The Reverend Marcial Maciel once looked like a shoo-in for sainthood, but the charismatic leader of one of the most important orders in the Catholic Church has ended his life better known as the highest ranking priest ever disciplined because of sexual abuse allegations. The leader of the Legionaries of Christ – the order Maciel founded in Mexico in 1941 – informed the congregation of his death at 87 in a letter that mixed expressions of devastating loss with the news the funeral would be private.
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Tags: Christianity, Sexual Abuse
Posted in Australia, Christianity, Human Rights | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
Stephen Lunn; 5/5/08
The social development of many young Australians may be stunted because potential male role models will not engage with them for fear of being wrongly accused of child abuse. Men are worried about putting themselves in positions where such an allegation may be levelled against them, either within families and more broadly at school or in social settings such as team sports, warns Australian Institute of Family Studies director Alan Hayes. This may add to the problems of the current generation of children, who are more anxious and have more developmental problems and mental health issues than previously, he says.
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Tags: Australia, Sexual Abuse
Posted in Australia, Health & Children, Human Rights, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
Patricia Karvelas; 15/4/08
Indigenous people have suffered the most under welfare reforms that lead to benefits being stopped for eight weeks for people who fail to comply with the regulations imposed by the Howard government. And the Rudd Government has been condemned for not ending the system, despite promising to do so while in Opposition. New figures show that the number of people who have had their payments stopped has more than doubled over the past eight months. Under the regime, recipients who make three mistakes suffer an immediate loss of payment for eight weeks.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Canberra Debate, Culture, health, Sexual Abuse, Support
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Health & Children, Human Rights, Sex Trade | No Comments »
