Daphne every citizen has a right to a defence, be it from Giannella or from Paul or from X. So what’s cooking here? Do we tell the court to remove their lawyers as well? Remember that they have as yet not been condemned by the courts and until such time, they are innocent until proved guilty. And besides it’s only the alleged victims’ stories that we have heard and to date these stories have even been compounded to rapes and what not. No one has heard the truth behind these alleged stories. So let’s stop at that shall we.

[Daphne – The priests made statements to the police, under interrogation, in which they admitted their crimes, the difference being that they did not call them crimes but mistakes. Nobody is questioning their right to a lawyer, of course not. We are discussing something quite different: the behaviour of those lawyers behind closed doors, safe in the knowledge that they will not be exposed to public opprobrium.]

http://ncronline.org/news/accountability/vatican-cardinal-bucked-us-bishop-abuse

Daphne, please reconsider such glib and hurtful statements that “If they didn’t, it was because they didn’t want to for reasons best known to themselves and which are their business not ours.”

[Daphne – How is that sentence either glib or hurtful? What it says is that it is nobody’s business but theirs why they didn’t wish to take the matter to court, because they are best placed to understand their situation and the rest of us are not.]

You do not know what they went through and what they are feeling. Neither do I but I have professionally treated many people who reveal abuse when they are much older and believe me they cry and feel the pain as it it had happened yesterday.

Children who have been abused (sexual, physical or emotional) will often suppress painful humiliating and paralysing memories for years before they can handle a disclosure let alone an open discussion.

It is worse when the abuser is in a position of power such as a priest or the head of the family. Sometimes there is pressure from the family not to cause “trouble”. Such recalled memories often re-traumatise the victim and is akin to post-traumatic stress disorder in the way ‘flashback’ memories are experienced.

This is why such victims need protection against aggressive questioning in court and why specially trained police have to interview them and why many countries have abolished the statue of limitations for such crimes.

[Daphne – I agree with you about the aggressive questioning in court. It is exactly what I have said: that the ‘closed doors’ in this case protect the defence lawyers as much as their clients. Dr Caruana Curran and Dr Mallia feel safe in being as savage, unpleasant and unkind as they please, because there is nobody there to witness their behaviour except the parties to the case, and there can be no reporting of what occurs.]

An exact parallel is when a banker is found out to have committed fraud, and the bank dismisses him without reporting him to the police, so the bank does not tarnish its reputation. THAT is a conspiracy of silence. A cover up would be to send the person to work in a different branch – which surely the bank would never do. And that’s exactly what the Church has been doing for a far more serious crime.

Concerning the defence council like Giannella Caruana Curran and Manwel Mallia – it’s a common and normal occurrence for a lawyer to decline a case because because the other party is a friend of theirs.

[Daphne – Or for any other reason: it’s a free country and no lawyer is obliged to take up a brief unless ordered to do so expressly by the court in cases where the accused turns up without a lawyer.]

And yet Malta’s top lawyers find no difficulty in accepting such heinous cases. I would certainly have difficulty in defending such cases, in as much as I would never, ever be able to defend Mr Fritzel in Austria!

Some of the victims tell you that in their situation they were so innocent that they did not even realise there was something wrong going on (in the sexual act itself) .These were orphans with no parents to cry to and speak to. They were in a total state of confusion , scarred for the rest of their lives . And you expect them to report to the police. Daphne , picture the situation 20 years ago – a victim decides to report to the police. The police would run a mockery of the victim making such accusations . Probably the victim would end up at Mount Carmel . For goodness sake ! Even now, I lodge a police report for someone scatching my car , and the line of questioning I get is as though I am lodging a false report .
Its all coming out now , because the media uncovered it all , and the victims know that possibly their version of events is credible.

[Daphne – David, the point at issue remains that without the consent of the victim nothing can be done to prosecute the perpetrator. This is not a matter of a cover-up or not a cover-up. The situation you describe applied historically not just to the sexual abuse of children but to the abuse of women and all sorts of other situations which horrify us today but which were looked at differently then. To mention just one case from recent memory: that man who shot and killed his father in Gozo a few years ago. Do you remember how the evidence during the trial shocked us all, shocked even the jurors who ended up finding him not guilty of murder because the thought of sending him to jail was just too much to contemplate? The whole village knew what was going on in that household. So did the police. The man abused his wife and sons mercilessly, keeping them working as unpaid slaves as adults, threatening them with a gun as children, beating them all, taking other women home for sex. Did anyone do anything? No. The victims, all adults, were paralysed into action until one of them snapped and shot, and nobody came in from the outside to interfere when they were children because in those days, nobody did – not just the church but also the state. You might as well accuse the whole of society of being involved in a cover-up, which it pretty much was. Think of all the girls and women – some from families that would surprise you, in fact the more ‘important’ the family, the more likely it was to happen – dispatched to England to have their ‘illegitimate’ babies there and return without them after the pregnancy was concealed. Was the church involved in that? No. It was the social hypocrisy of the times. There is still a huge amount of social hypocrisy, only part of which has to do with Catholicism and the rest has to do with maintaining one’s reputation in a small society. Of course children can’t report to anyone other than their parents – that’s precisely why all these victims the world over are reporting now, as adults. Even as a parent, it’s a very difficult decision to make: do you report the perpetrator and expose your child – at a very tender age – to the kind of savage grilling these men are getting now (and they’re men) from Giannella Caruana Curran and Manwel Mallia (no holds barred, imagine a child going through that) or do you let your child recover in peace and not prolong the agony? Rather than a cover-up, what we are looking at here is a conspiracy of silence which takes in society as a whole. The behaviour of the Catholic Church in these issues only reflected the attitudes of the society and times in which it operated, and make no mistake about that. Some time ago a woman we probably both know or know of killed herself after a lifetime of depression, the result of her father abusing sexually when she was a child, and what she thought was her mother’s collusion in it, or rather than collusion, refusal to see. How is the Catholic Church involved in that cover-up? This is the way people were, and many of them are still like that. I’m a realist about these things.]

@ A Camilleri,

Yes, on very rare occasions I was disciplined. I bear no grudge however, as my misdemeanours then, had warranted ‘six of the best’. And that I acknowledge even today.

No, it was not child abuse. We were not hanged, drawn and quartered if that is what you wanted to hear, Mr. Camilleri.

I still do not regard it as a tantamount to violence and abuse. The caning if one could call it so, was more of a ceremony (albeit an embarrassing one for the receiver) than a show of force. No excessive or brute force was inflicted upon the pupil.

Actually there are more: Malta, Gozo, Comino, Cominotto, Filfla, St. Paul’s island, Manuel island. Those are seven, then there is the Fungus Rock and that low lying island across Maghtab I do not know if it has a name.

At least 7 islands, last time I counted: Malta, Gozo, Comino, Cominotto, Manoel, St Paul’s and Filfla. Fungus Rock is a little too small I think to be considered as anything but a fragment.

The Magdalenes were excluded from the state’s Residential Institutions Redress Board. No one in Ireland–not church, not state, not families, and not society–has apologized to the victims and survivors of these institutions.