Covering up the abuse

The Catholic church is telling newly appointed bishops in a training document that “According to the state of civil laws of each country where reporting is obligatory, it is not necessarily the duty of the bishop to report suspects to authorities, the police or state prosecutors in the moment when they are made aware of crimes or sinful deeds,” that it is “not necessarily” their duty to report accusations of clerical child abuse, and that only victims or their families should make the decision to report abuse to police. The special commission created by Pope Francis, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, had appeared to play no role in the training programme, even though it is supposed to be developing “best practices” to prevent and deal with clerical abuse. The committee’s position is that reporting abuse to civil authorities was a “moral obligation, whether the civil law requires it or not”.

The training guidelines were written by a controversial French monsignor and psychotherapist, Tony Anatrella, who serves as a consultant to the Pontifical Council for the Family. The French monsignor is best known for championing views on “gender theory”, the controversial belief that increasing acceptance of homosexuality in western countries is creating “serious problems” for children who are being exposed to “radical notions of sexual orientation”. The guidelines reflect Anatrella’s views on homosexuality. They also downplay the seriousness of the Catholic church’s legacy of systemic child abuse.

SNAP, a US-based advocacy group for abuse said the news proved that the church had not substantially changed.  “It’s infuriating, and dangerous, that so many believe the myth that bishops are changing how they deal with abuse and that so little attention is paid when evidence to the contrary – like this disclosure by Allen – emerges,” the group said in a statement.

Suffer Little Children

A child is killed by violence every five minutes in the world, says the UK's branch of the UN children's agency Unicef. Most of those deaths occur outside war zones. It says those living in poverty are more likely to be the victims of violence. An adolescent boy in Latin America is 70 times more likely to be murdered than one in the UK.  Unicef says 95,000 children and teenagers - most of them in Latin America and the Caribbean - were murdered in 2012 alone. Nigeria had the highest number of child homicides - 13,000, while the US had the highest homicide rate among countries in Western Europe and North America.

Research showed that violence was "detrimental to all aspects of a child's growth... with sometimes lifelong repercussions." 30% of who are victims of violence are likely to develop long-lasting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The report says no nation is currently able to provide children with the full protection they need.

This report can be added to earlier research about the exposure of children to violence.

About 120 million girls around the world - slightly more than one in 10 - have been raped or sexually assaulted by the age of 20, a UN report says. Boys also report experiences of sexual violence, but to a lesser extent than girls.

Of the countries surveyed, nearly half of all girls aged 15-19 believed that a husband was justified in hitting his wife under certain circumstances, the study added.

 One in four children experts say will witness domestic violence by the age of 18.  It is claimed by the Early Intervention Foundation, this can have "significant consequences" for those children not not getting the support they need.

Six out of 10 children aged between two and 14 are physically punished by carers

Gender-Based Violence - Social Norms And Priorities

You would be hard pressed to find an aid worker that thought sexual violence was not an important issue. But ask them to define what it is, and you may leave them stumped.

Is it sexual violence, gender-based violence (GBV) or violence against women and girls? And what about male victims? How do you address GBV in patriarchal societies? And how do you balance collecting evidence-based data with responding to victims and/or preventing incidents in the first place?

Researchers at the Humanitarian Practice Network (HPN) at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London have been thinking around these questions as part of a “Good Practice Review” for tackling GBV in humanitarian contexts.
“We commissioned this work because we felt there was a gap,” explained Wendy Fenton, HPN coordinator at the ODI’s Humanitarian Policy Group.

“When we started looking at the issue and talking to people we realized that there wasn’t even agreement about what GBV programming or prevention and response actually was. Even the terminology seems to be contested.”

They found a wide range of different concepts, terminologies and priorities, and the researchers said that in spite of the major advances in humanitarian and development programming, there was still a lack of firm consensus about how to define, prevent and respond to GBV.

The HPN paper Preventing and responding to gender-based violence in humanitarian crises authored by Rebecca Holmes and Dharini Bhuvanendra, was published last month and will be presented this week at the 10th annual Dubai International Humanitarian Aid & Development (DIHAD) conference, which focuses on women and aid.

Conference panelists will examine the role women play as essential providers of assistance in humanitarian crises; the disproportionate impact of conflict and disasters on women; and how aid is and should be adapted to meet gender needs.

After evaluating the wide range of practice and policy approaches to GBV and charting programming milestones and initiatives over the years, the 36-page HPN paper concludes that knowledge of GBV in emergencies was “inadequate”.

It adds that owing to “deeply embedded cultural and social norms around GBV, any intervention designed to address its causes, consequences and effects can only work at the margins; bringing about real, meaningful change will be a slow, long-term process, in which humanitarian response can play only a small part.”

Cultural sensitivities can be one of the biggest hurdles in finding consensus about how to respond to GBV in emergencies.

Because of the hidden nature of GBV (including high rate of underreporting of sexual and other forms of violence) as well as the lack of GBV experts deployed in the early stages of emergencies to assess GBV issues it's often a challenge to counter this view [that GBV is not a critical concern] until well after the emergency has subsided and data can be more routinely collected.

Some humanitarian actors also maintain that responding to acts of GBV (particularly those not directly related to conflict and displacement) is the preserve of culture and therefore outside the scope of humanitarian intervention.
Issues of sexual violence have rarely been far from the headlines recently, led by high-profile gang rape cases in India, and other cases in Kenya - and South Africa, as well as reports of child marriage and sexual abuse among Syrians in refugee camps, and the subsequent community action and celebrity-backed campaigns attempting to target rape both domestically and in conflict settings.

In June the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) will host in London a global summit on preventing sexual violence in conflict, while its aid agency, the Department for International Development (DFID), has allocated £35 million (US$57.7m) of funding to support campaigns to end female genital mutilation/cutting.


Full article here