Rape-camp analogy for Brothers was fair

Though it might surprise Breda O'Brien to hear it, I had a friend in the Christian Brothers. Since he worked as a teacher in a Brothers' school in another Irish city, I didn't see him very often. I stayed with him a few times when my work took me to his part of the world. He dropped in on us a few times a year. He is a very likeable man - funny, energetic, charming and very intelligent. He took a drink, played with the kids, swapped yarns. He was like any other well-adjusted, reasonably contented Irish professional in his early 50s.

Except that we knew he must be going through a hard time. A torrent of revelations has swamped the institution to which he remained loyal. It had to be immensely difficult to cope with the utterly disillusioning truth, and with the sight of familiar faces being shielded from the cameras on the way into court.

Two Christmases ago, when he was in our house, we went out of our way to talk to him about all of this, to sympathise with the hurt he must be feeling. He thanked us and talked about how most people simply avoided the subject, adding to the awkwardness and sense of isolation. A few weeks later, he was charged. He had known that it was coming. His intention, as we later discovered, was to disappear, supposedly to Australia, say nothing while in prison, and re-emerge in all innocence.

In court, he pleaded guilty to 25 charges of indecently assaulting two sisters and their brother between 1975 and 1981. His modus operandi was the now familiar one. He befriended a family is distress, gained their trust, and then groomed each of the children in turn for a sexual relationship.

As one of the victims put it, "He came to our family as a friend and struck up relationships with all of us as a friend first and foremost, but then he abused that position."

After the shock of this discovery subsided, what struck me most forcibly was my own gullibility. I am supposed to be a professional sceptic, and in the eyes of people like Breda O'Brien I have some unspecified "difficulty with religious orders" which makes me want to get at them.

I have no such difficulty: I have spent a lot of time in recent years talking to groups of nuns, priests and brothers. I have written, for example: "Most Christian Brothers institutions had a small minority of abusers, another small minority of extraordinary saintly men, and the same range between the two poles as any organisation at the time might contain."

My real personal failing in all of this has been stupid blindness. I remember very clearly watching my friend play with children in an unusually physical way and thinking, "Isn't it great that he's unselfconscious enough not to be worried about people getting the wrong impression?" I actually thought that it really proved he wasn't an abuser, since no abuser, surely, would be so open in his physical affection for children in public.

And what really makes me ashamed is that I would still be thinking this if my friend's coldly calculated plan of explaining his time in prison as a trip to Australia hadn't been foiled by his victims' decision to give up their own anonymity so that my friend could be named in court reports.

Perhaps the experience has made me a bit tougher than I used to be, a bit more likely to call a corrupted institution a corrupted institution. Breda O'Brien suggests that I must be insane to have compared Christian Brothers' children's homes to Bosnian rape camps, "a term of abuse to which even the sleaziest tabloid did not descend".

I used the analogy quite deliberately, prompted by the fact that both the Australian and British parliamentary inquiries into the Brothers' treatment of child migrants conclude that ordinary language like "sexual abuse" is entirely inadequate to the horror of what was done.

Maybe Breda regards as sleazily tabloid the following passage from the House of Commons Health Committee report: "Those of us who heard the account of a man who as a boy was a particular favourite of some Christian Brothers at Tardun who competed as to who could rape him 100 times first, his account of being in terrible pain, bleeding, and bewildered, trying to beat his own eyes so they would cease to be blue as the Brothers liked his blue eyes, or being forced to masturbate animals, or being held upside-down over a well and threatened in case he ever told, will never forget it."

Perhaps she can think up a cooler, more appropriate analogy for that kind of systematic sexual sadism inflicted on powerless prisoners. I can't.

The key words used by the international inquiries are "systemic" and "systematic". They point, after great deliberation, to the corruption of an institution by the commission of terrible crimes, by its leadership's refusal to act on its knowledge of those crimes and by the moral inadequacy of a response which has put the preservation of assets as the first priority. I've learned a painful lesson about the need to resist the natural desire to believe that it isn't so.

Anybody who takes the trouble to read the UK and Australian reports, which are freely available on the Internet, should be saved from that foolish mistake.

fotoole@irish-times.ie