Last Saturday afternoon I went to see the film Spotlight. It is fast gaining a reputation as an important film.
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It covers the revelation in 2002 of child sexual abuse by over 200 Catholic priests in Boston and a cover-up by the Church and local authorities, by a group of journalists from The Boston Globe. They found evidence of a church hierarchy systematically moving paedophile priests between parishes and schools, setting up undisclosed “treatment centres” for them in suburban streets, destroying the paper trail, and paying victims paltry amounts of compensation and binding them to silence. At the end of film, a long list of US cities affected by this travesty rolls on followed by other global cities. Australian cities were prominent in the list, including Newcastle.
This film is an important one for our region, as we share with Boston a high level of crimes against children by Catholic priests. Indeed, Newcastle is one of the most affected regions in Australia. We also share with The Boston Globe, a local newspaper (Newcastle Herald) that made a commitment to investigating and publishing case after case of child sexual abuse despite attempts by the Church to cover them up.
Award-winning journalist Joanne McCarthy spent years uncovering Catholic clerical sexual abuse in the Newcastle-Maitland diocese. She doggedly pursued these cases and believed the accounts from victims, when no one else was showing interest. Indeed, in announcing the Royal Commission, Julia Gillard acknowledged Joanne as one of the figures that led to its establishment.
The Newcastle- Maitland region also shares with the Boston region a large percentage of Catholics and many Catholic organisations. In Boston, Catholicism was an integral part of the social web and meant that it took outsiders (a new (Jewish) editor at the Boston Globe and the (Armenian) lawyer representing the victims) to see that this was a serious problem.
It becomes clear that the journalists are not the heroes in this story. The head of the Spotlight team had been handed boxes of information on child sexual abuse five years prior and had relegated a small article to the back of the newspaper. All of the journalists had been raised Catholic. As insiders they were too close to see the story around them.
The true heroes in Boston, Newcastle and beyond are the victims and survivors, their families and supporters. They are the ones who suffered the abuse and its aftermath, whose stories were disbelieved and discredited. They were often treated abysmally by the church, and stigmatised as troublemakers. They are the ones who have borne the psychological, social and financial consequences of major trauma, yet who have continued to raise this issue until it is heard. The Royal Commission is Australia’s chance to right this terrible wrong.
Spotlight is not just a movie about historic wrongs in one US city. It’s a story about too many people, in too many countries, who have been victims of a global miscarriage of justice. There is a great line at the end of the film “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse a child”.
Protecting children from sexual abuse involves the whole community. Evidence from inquiries shows that many people have been bystanders to these crimes and remained silent. This raises challenging moral issues for us as we come to terms with how so many societies across the globe have failed to protect children from harm. How have so many people known but done nothing?