Data on sexual abuse in the Polish Catholic Church is too late for decades Religion

Last Monday, the Polish Catholic Church release new data on the number of complaints he has received alleging sexual abuse at the hands of his clergy.

In total, 368 complaints were made to the Church between 2018 and 2020 about the alleged ill-treatment of more than 290 priests and other religious figures. The cases began in 1958 and 173 of them are about children under 15, which is the age of leave in Poland.

After releasing these figures, the head of the Polish Catholic Church, Archbishop Wojciech Polak, apologized to the survivor and apologized. While some survivors will appreciate this, there is no excuse that the Polish church has arrived late in the decade.

This is only the second time that the Polish Catholic Church has released such data. He did it for the first time in 2019 revealed 382 members of the clergy were accused of sexually abusing 625 children between 1990 and 2018. The church says 42 priests are named on both lists.

Although the move is a positive sign that the Polish church is finally embracing the problem, there are a number of problems with these figures that have taken the church several decades to release in the first place.

On the one hand, it is useful for the Polish Church to have made this data public, as it provides some data on the subject, although it has been widely accepted that cases of abuse that are clarified are just the tip of the iceberg.

On average, a survivor needs 24 years to report abuse as a child, the reasons being a victim’s sense of shame, without acknowledging that what happened is abuse or a fear of not believing it.

The only public amount of cases of clerical abuse in Poland is a map created by activists, which currently records more than 580 cases dealt with by the media, or which ended with a court ruling. But those who reach out to the courts are also minimal cases because often survivors do not want to recover from trauma in a formal jurisdiction because they will have to deal with the attacker again.

But, beyond church data, the latest data is limited. The church did not publicly disclose the names of 292 members of the clergy accused of sexual abuse, even in cases where they were deemed “credible.”

It seems to be a policy backed by the Pope himself to protect the “good name” of priests. However, many dioceses in other countries have voluntarily disseminated this information.

In most Polish cases, the church has said it has imposed “interim measures” while investigating the allegations, including the temporary removal of the accused from service and the impediment to contact with children. But we know from other countries that these priests are often left unattended.

The church also did not explain how it has acted with the 42 clergymen who have appeared on the 2019 and this week’s lists, in cases that are repeated over and over again.

Adherence to the identity of the alleged perpetrators and the details of the church’s action against them (the church seems to be a global policy) shows that the Polish church still protects the alleged abusers by protecting their identity.

In Poland, this lack of transparency also extends to how the church investigates allegations of abuse. Thirty-nine of the 368 claims were deemed “reliable” and were therefore dismissed. How were these decisions made?

Of the 173 cases involving children under 15, the church said 148 of them were reported to police. Another 25 people were also not charged because the defendants were killed or the claims are unjustified or are still being investigated. But at what stages does the church send a complaint to the law enforcement authorities? Shouldn’t he do so as soon as he learns of the alleged abuse?

Also, what has happened to cases of abuse of young people between the ages of 15 and 17? For reasons that are not clear, although the church’s 2019 report provided some statistics on this age group, the latest data divides survivors into only two age groups: under-15s and over-15s.

Of the 174 cases in the latter group, 80 percent were not reported to police. One factor may have been the fact that surviving adults (still) do not want to file a police complaint, as is often the case. For young people between the ages of 15 and 17, it is essential to inform the authorities.

And why doesn’t the church encourage survivors of abuse to report their cases to civil authorities from the outset? Instead, commissions run by the church are increasingly being set up to receive complaints from survivors around the world, despite complaints that they are institutionally marginalized and lack transparency.

For survivors who move forward, complaining to the church means seeking justice in order to give it to the same organization that did their abuses and did not prevent or actively cover it up.

In the case of the Polish church, the organization, which continues to disseminate only limited information about the abuse committed within its walls, proves that it cannot be trusted. This is, after all, the same organization that currently refuses to cooperate with research into child sexual abuse in Poland. has had trouble getting information From the Polish church.

The church began publishing statistics in 2019 because of pressure to do so after people raised awareness about the issue.

This was largely due to the 2018 film Clergy (Kler) about the dark side of the church, which included child abuse, broke box office records and became one of the most important Polish films in history.

Then came the documentary Tell anyone (Tylko nie mów nikomu) In 2019, he collected the first accounts of the abuse of survivors. He determined how the persecutors moved from one parish to another and continued to have access to children, as well as how the bishops survived and how their families blocked their claims from continuing. The documentary has been viewed more than 24 million times so far.

Following the release of the documentary, a survey reveals that almost 90% of respondents have accepted the authority of the church decrease, 67 percent believed the church’s response to the scandal was inadequate.

He believes that the lack of real church initiatives has led the Polish church to the lawsuit too late to preserve its legitimacy. The two data sets do not compensate the PR strategy for an organization that has not been waiting for a scandal for a long time.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the attitude of Al Jazeera’s editorial.