LONDON — Boys and girls in Ireland were beaten, sexually abused and emotionally terrorized for decades in workhouse-style schools run by the Roman Catholic Church where a "culture of silence" protected victimizers rather than the children in their care, according to a long-awaited report.
For more than half a century, chronic, excessive and arbitrary punishment created "a climate of fear" in which students at schools administered by Catholic religious orders lived "with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from."
Through it all, the report says, government inspectors failed to stop what was going on. The neglect came despite attempts by some individuals to bring their abusers to account in an effort to lessen the trauma victims suffered for years afterward and that still haunts many today.
These are some of the findings of the controversial 2,600-page report unveiled in Dublin on Wednesday after a nine-year investigation by Ireland's Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse. Drawing on the testimony of nearly 2,000 witnesses, men and women who attended more than 200 Catholic-run schools from the 1930s until the 1990s, the commission painted a damning picture of a church engaged too often in covering up misdeeds instead of rooting out their perpetrators.
The five-volume report is a major rebuke to a religious institution that continues to wield significant, albeit declining, influence on Irish society, especially on moral issues such as divorce and abortion. But the church's standing has been weakened since the abuse scandals began to become public in the mid-1990s, by which time many of the schools had closed. This loss of stature has undermined the church's ability to counter a rise in secularism that accompanied Ireland's leap in prosperity.
The investigating panel found that sexual molestation was "endemic" in the church, committed by offenders who were often transferred to other institutions rather than dismissed or turned over to authorities.
Nonetheless, the report was not tough enough for some of the victims. Many are angry that it includes no names of alleged offenders, an omission that one of the religious orders under investigation fought for and won in court. Only pseudonyms are used, making slim the chances of criminal prosecution based on the report's findings.
"We expected that these people would be named and shamed and that some of them would be convicted," John Barrett, who testified before the commission, told Irish radio station Today FM.
