As Charles Pragnell, who was head of research at Cleveland social services at the time of the 1987 scandal puts it, child protection agencies “are racked with too many theories for which there is little or no evidence. Social workers' training does not equip them for undertaking investigations. There is a group conditioning among social workers and paediatricians which prevents them ever accepting they are wrong.”Which the author has experienced firsthand, since his mentally-handicapped adololescent daughter has taken to perpetually and publicly pleasuring herself, which raised the suspicions of authorities. My first reaction is, who has spent any time with the mentally handicapped and hasn't heard of that phenomenon before? One begins to wonder if Social Workers get any training at all?
Innocent remarks by children, he adds, are blown up into full-scale investigations because of the requirement to report immediately to their appointed “child protection officer” anything that could possibly be interpreted as a sign of abuse. Child protection workers then begin with the assumption that abuse must have taken place. The consequent deluge of investigations makes it all the harder to pick out genuine abuse.
I have to add the particularly Catholic angle, and that leads me to an entry at the First Things blog a few weeks ago about VIRTUS, the child-protection training program some 50 American dioceses have enacted after the abuse scandals of several years ago. Since I teach CCD in my parish, I've had to take the training --absolutely everyone who interacts with children in even the remotest way in a Catholic school or parish must. The post's author is annoyed that the response to a clergy problem should be taken out on everyone else:
How did it happen, I wonder, that a crisis involving the priesthood turned into a stick with which to discipline the laity?I can't agree with her there. Statistically, a child is far more likely to suffer abuse from a layman than a priest, and indeed a trustworthy spy in the chancery office has told me my Archdiocese has screened out more than two dozen convicted or credibly-accused child-abusers who were applying for positions at our schools since the mandatory finger-printing and training program started. It's sad it's come to that, but I think that shows the screening program at least is valuable. Plus, it's wise to set some arbitrary standards of behavior such as not shutting the door if you're alone in a room with a kid, etc. It protects kids but also volunteers and teachers who might be falsely accused.
However, I completely concur with her assessment that the program encourages everyone to assume the worst. Worse, it takes people with no psychological training whatsoever --parents who want to teach CCD or chaperone field trips-- and trains them to be looking at everyone with suspicion and reporting suspected abuse every two seconds. It's Orwellian.
The videos also bow to political correctness and belabor the point that heterosexuals are more likely to be abusers than homosexuals. Which is true as a matter of raw numbers, but false as a question of statistical probability.
Nor does it inspire confidence that the experts in the training videos to a person do not seem to be normal people. I don't mean to be unkind to them, but they all seem like the sort of person who goes into the mental health field in order to exorcise his own demons, and I question their capacity to tell us anything about healthy sexuality.
And there's a prissy lady from some institute in the midwest who instructs us in the most urgent tones that it's not! enough! to discuss sexual privacy with our innocent children a couple of times, we must! do so explicitly! over and over! and over! again like drill sargents. I'm pretty sure following her advice literally would in itself constitute psychological abuse of children in the latency period.
The Church got itself into the abuse crisis in the first place by listening too hard to "experts" in Psychology, instead of to its own moral teaching and plain common sense. I'm afraid the correction makes the same mistake.
The most disheartening thing, however, is the utter failure of a program created for Catholic dioceses to place sexuality itself and the mission of the parish or school, the family, and even the wretched but repentant sinner, in a Christian context. It's well-intentioned, but the program seems more calculated to create an army of self-righteous busybodies than anything else. Which brings me to a wonderful remark from C.S. Lewis that I stumbled onto at American Digest (ninme's bud):
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.Well if that isn't the problem of our age all the way around: people whose consciences fully approve themselves.
