Religious organisations and communities are frequent targets of abusers.
Religious institutions are often well-placed and strongly motivated to cover up incidents of sexual and physical abuse.
We work to hold these organisations to account and get justice for abuse victims and survivors.
Many religious organisations enjoy a close relationship with the establishment and tend to see themselves as above the law. This can increase the risk of abuse, prevent perpetrators from facing justice, and impede efforts to support and compensate victims and survivors of abuse.
Those intent on abuse are often attracted to religious institutions. Such organisations give access to, and sometimes extreme control over, numerous children and vulnerable adults.
When abuse does occur, religious organisations often act to protect the reputation of the institution above the rights of the victim. They may pressure the victim to stay silent and move the perpetrator to somewhere unaware of their reputation.
Many religious institutions also have influence and connections that enable them to evade justice and scrutiny, often for decades.
All forms of abuse, be they sexual, physical or psychological, can cause serious harm. Victims of abuse in religious settings have suffered physical and mental health problems, including addiction, self-harm and suicide.
Abuse can take place in any religious setting. That's why we work at the national and international level to hold religious organisations to account for safeguarding failings, and to ensure victims and survivors can get justice.
Take action!
1. Share your story
Tell us why you support this campaign, and how you are personally affected by the issue. You can also let us know if you would like assistance with a particular issue.
2. Write to your MP
Ask your MP to support our work to end abuse in religion settings
3. Join the National Secular Society
Become a member of the National Secular Society today! Together, we can separate religion and state for greater freedom and fairness.
Latest updates
UN Committee Against Torture criticises Vatican failures on child abuse
Posted: Fri, 23 May 2014 13:11
The UN Committee Against Torture has criticised the Vatican (in its guise as The Holy See) for several failures in its handling of the child abuse scandal.
The Vatican is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture and has been questioned by the Committee as part of its regular examination of those states that have ratified the treaty.
The subsequent report, published on 23 May by the Committee Against Torture is critical of the Vatican's failures.
Earlier this year, the Vatican was similarly scrutinised by the Committee on the Rights of the Child. Its report was similar in many respects, but more scathing in tone.
The Torture Committee also slated the Vatican for failing to order that all abuse allegations should be reported to the police, for moving abusive clergy around from one diocese to another, enabling them to continue abusing children.
It was critical of the Vatican helping abusive clergy to evade proper accountability for their actions and for failing to see that victims got adequate compensation.
"Clergy … were transferred to other dioceses and institutions where they remained in contact with minors and others who are vulnerable," the Committee Against Torture charged.
A leaked copy of the document had been obtained by the Boston Globe which reported:
Unlike the earlier UN assessment, the new report mixes criticism with praise for steps taken by the Catholic Church over the last decade to combat child abuse, including tougher legal sanctions for clergy and the creation of a new papal commission in December 2013 to press for reform. That commission includes Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley of Boston.
The committee lauded an April 11 statement by Pope Francis on the subject of child abuse, in which he said, "We will not take one step backward with regards to how we will deal with this problem and the sanctions that must be imposed. On the contrary, we have to be even stronger."
The report follows a May 6 hearing in Geneva of the Committee against Torture in which Vatican officials disclosed for the first time that over the past decade, 848 clergy have been removed from the priesthood for acts of sexual abuse and 2,572 assigned lesser sanctions, most of the latter priests who were elderly or in ill health.
At the same time, the committee suggested that pledges of zero tolerance by church officials aren't always effectively translated into action.
Specific cases were referred to by the panel, including:
- Father Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul who, after being charged with molesting a 14-year old in Minnesota in 2004, fled to India. He is currently being pursued by American prosecutors.
- Archbishop Josef Wesolowski of Poland, who was a papal envoy in the Dominican Republic. He abused children both in the Dominican Republic and in Poland and is presently holed up in the Vatican. The Vatican refuses to extradite him to face the charges.
- The Magdalene Laundries in Ireland which abused and exploited so-called "fallen women" for more than a century. The panel asked the Vatican to properly compensate the victims and to rehabilitate them as much as possible – whether or not their tormentors have been brought to justice.
The panel was also "concerned by reports'' that Catholic officials "resist the principle of mandatory reporting'' of abuse allegations. It said that the Vatican should ensure that abuse allegations are pursued by independent prosecutors to ensure that there is "no hierarchical connection between the investigators and the alleged perpetrators," and also insisted that officials who fail to respond appropriately to abuse complaints are subject to "meaningful sanctions." The Committee reflected the criticism that although individual priests might be sanctioned for abuse, there was no equally strong accountability in place for bishops and other officials who fail to report abuse or who actively cover up scandals.
The Boston Goble reported:
The committee called for "an independent complaints mechanism'' where victims or others can "confidentially report allegations of abuse.''
The UN panel also advised that a new commission established by the pope in 2013 to lead a process of reform should have "full power to investigate cases of alleged violations of the convention, [and to] ensure that the results of any of its investigations are made public and that they are promptly acted upon." The committee asked that the Vatican respond to its concerns in a follow-up report by May 2015.
Unlike the earlier report from the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the new report does not venture into matters of Catholic moral teaching on subjects such as abortion, homosexuality, or contraception.
The Vatican ratified the Convention against Torture in 2002, and its appearance before the UN panel in May was part of a regularly scheduled series of hearings to monitor implementation in various nations.
Commenting to the Boston Globe on the report, the Vatican's top envoy to the United Nations, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, expressed relief that the report was not as harsh as the previous one from the Committee on the Rights of the Child. He said the new report was "more technical and professional" and even contained some congratulation on ongoing efforts to put things right.
"It takes into account the positive steps taken by [the Vatican] and the church in general," he said. He was particularly relieved that it does not accuse the Vatican of having violated the UN's 1984 convention against torture – something that could have laid the Vatican open to a whole new raft of legal challenges.
Tomasi did, though, say that although the report does not directly assert that the child abuse scandal is a form of torture under international law, such a conclusion could be inferred from it.
He also repeated the claim that the Vatican is not legally responsible for the actions of priests around the world – only for those within the walls of the Vatican City.
The Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests, the largest victims' advocacy group in the United States, said in a statement: "It has now been 12 weeks since another United Nations panel released a lengthy report about the Church's on-going clergy sexual violence and coverup crisis."
"As best we can tell, every Catholic official is ignoring every one of those recommendations," the group's statement asserted. "That is shameful."
The Vatican said it would give "serious consideration" to the Committee's recommendations.
Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, which has been campaigning for stronger sanctions against the Vatican over its mis-handling of the Child abuse crisis, said: "The Committee should be praised for not being cowed by the Vatican's shameless threats to renounce the Convention if it was criticised. Crucially, like the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Torture Committee criticised the Vatican's refusal to instruct the Church to report credible accusations to secular authorities and its self-serving refusal to accept that its obligations under the Convention extend beyond Vatican City to the international Church, particularly on child abuse accusations.
"We do not share any enthusiasm, however, for the Vatican's defrocking of thousands of abusing clerics resulting in them being released into the labour market without being subjected to secular justice, and the resultant criminal record. This will almost certainly put other children at risk from former priests reoffending."
You can download the UN Committee against Torture's 'concluding observations' on the Holy See here.
Vatican unveils figures on its punishment of child abusers
Posted: Wed, 7 May 2014 17:24
The Vatican has, for the first time, revealed how it has disciplined priests accused of raping and molesting children.
According to the Holy See's UN ambassador in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, over the past decade, the Vatican has defrocked 848 priests who were believed to have raped or molested children, and sanctioned a further 2,572 priests for lesser offences. Sanctions included "a life of prayer and penitence."
Overall all, according to its officials, the Vatican handled more than 3,400 cases of sexual abuse since 2004.
The figures were revealed during the Vatican's examination by the UN Committee Against Torture this week.
During the examination, Archbishop Tomasi admitted that it was only in 2010 that the Vatican explicitly told bishops and religious superiors to report to police any credible cases of abuse, where local reporting laws required them to do so. According to an Associated Press report, previously, bishops and religious superiors had been "shuffling paedophile priests from diocese to diocese rather than subjecting them to church trials."
The Committee demanded a response from the Vatican to claims that the Vatican had given refuge to a papal envoy accused of sex abuse. In January, it was reported that a request for the extradition of Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, who faces accusations of sex abuse in Poland and in the Dominican Republic, was refused by the Vatican.
Archbishop Tomasi told the committee that there is no climate of impunity within the Church, and that "there is a total commitment to clean the house."
Campaigners and survivor groups have questioned this claim however, and highlighted the omission by the Vatican of any names or details of the child abusers sanctioned by the Church. David Clohessy, the director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said that whilst "every step towards more transparency about clergy sex crimes and cover-ups is good […] this one – the number of priests defrocked – is largely meaningless. Parents can't protect their kids from a number. What parents need are the names and whereabouts of child-molesting clerics."
Sue Cox, of Survivors Voice Europe, said in reaction to the examination: "The statistics of Tomasi are meaningless, he quotes meaningless figures but no names or details. He says our evidence of rape and abuse is "anecdotal" but churns out figures which cannot be verified.
"The Vatican simply cannot police itself. Even if it "cleans its house" and begins to adhere to the laws of the land, and even if we did see a change in safeguarding, we will still be left with hundreds of thousands of abuse survivors whose traumas are being ignored and trivialised."
During the examination, Archbishop Tomasi argued that the Holy See's obligation to enforce the UN Convention Against Torture (UNCAT) stopped at the boundaries of the Vatican City state, stating that, "The Holy See intends to focus exclusively on Vatican City state."
This attempt by the Vatican to evade responsibility for the actions of the Catholic Church elsewhere in the world, and draw an "alleged distinction" between the treaty obligations of the city state and the Holy See was rejected by the Committee.
One committee expert and director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute, Felice Gaer, said the Holy See had to "show us that, as a party to the convention, you have a system in place to prohibit torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment when it is acquiesced to by anyone under the effective control of the officials of the Holy See and the institutions that operate in the Vatican City state."
Before the UN examination, the Vatican's chief spokesperson, the Reverend Federico Lombardi, had warned that it would be "deceptive" to link torture with the types of paedophile abuse committed by those in the Catholic Church. He called on the UN not give into pressure from nongovernmental organizations "with a strong ideological character" intent on framing the sexual abuse of minors as an issue of torture.
"The extent to which this is deceptive and forced is clear to any unbiased observer," Lombardi said.
In response, Sue Cox commented: "Frederico Lombardi has made it quite clear that he does not regard childhood clergy sexual abuse as torture as defined by the UN Convention against Torture. He even suggests that "ideological organisations" such as ours, are "deceptive". The pope also recently complained that the Church is being "singled out" and persecuted.
"Their PR machine is in full swing, but they contradict themselves and each other at every turn. This is a narcissistic organisation fighting to save its face, regardless of the damage caused to human beings."
Earlier this year, the UN committee on the rights of the child had expressed its concern that corporal punishment, including ritual beatings of children, remains widespread in some Catholic institutions, reaching "endemic levels".
