Amnesty International Annual Lecture

Thousands of people in Northern Ireland have experienced clerical and institutional child abuse. Can they now secure justice? Can the rest of us come to terms with what was done while society turned a blind eye?

Colm O’Gorman brings 12 years experience of successful campaigning on this issue in Ireland. In 1998 he launched a legal case against the Roman Catholic Church as a result of his experiences of sexual abuse at the hands of one of its priests when he was a teenager. His battles with the Roman Catholic church led to the resignation of the Bishop of Ferns Dr Brendan Comiskey and the establishment of the Ferns Inquiry, the first state investigation into clerical sexual abuse in Ireland.

Colm O’Gorman is author of the best-selling book Beyond Belief, founder of the One in Four organisation, and Executive Director of Amnesty International Ireland.

“One of the most inspiring and dignified voices heard in Ireland in recent times” – Mary Robinson.

In association with the Human Rights Centre at Queen’s.

Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence

The following post first appeared as an article in the Amnesty International UK Magazine. It sets out the themes I will explore when I give the annual Amnesty International Lecture as part of the Belfast Festival 2010 on October 21st. More on the lecture here.

Ireland has struggled in recent years to come to terms with the horrific legacy of child abuse in institutional care. The harm done to many thousands of Irish children by those charged with their care has rocked our society to its core. The State abdicated responsibility for the welfare of its most marginalised children to almost entirely unaccountable agencies. Those children were abused and degraded on an unthinkable scale. It is made all the worse because those agencies were churches, institutions charged with providing moral guidance.
In the southern Irish context the Roman Catholic Church operated most institutions, but a number were also run by Church of Ireland agencies. After decades of silence and denial by all of us, once named, the simple stark horror of what happened in those institutions could no longer be ignored.
International law is clear about the obligations on any State to address such past human rights violations.
States have an obligation to respect, protect and fulfil the right of victims of human rights violations to an effective remedy. In addressing past violations, states must ensure that the truth is told, that justice is done and that reparation is provided to all the victims. States obligations are the same even if non-state agencies such as churches are responsible for the abuse.

Addressing past violations has enormous value for wider society, by exposing the failures in law, social policy and attitudes, which allowed child abuse to occur on such a scale.
In this context responding to the past is not simply about addressing a historic hurt. It is also about acknowledging a source of ongoing trauma for victims of abuse by ending their enforced silence and the widespread, political and social denial of their hurt.
So this is not simply a matter of making real a past denied; it reveals the impact of that past today, on the lives of those who were abused and their families. In dealing with the past, as difficult and frightening as it is, we will find a way to name it, respond to it and learn from it.
Too often, we run from things we have done that we feel mark us as bad. I know that feeling; for so many years I ran from my own feelings of shame related to my own experiences of childhood abuse.
I believed that what I saw then as shameful, awful experiences named the truth of who I was. But they don’t.
The truth of who I am is to be found in the way I responded to the events that I have experienced. How I chose to deal with them, once I was free to do so.
In Ireland we have been forced to face up to the fact that thousands of Irish children were raped and abused by some of the most powerful members of our society, and that many of us turned a blind eye to the abuse, or refused to believe it was even possible. We can never again say, “I didn’t know”.
So what of that future? Can we move on with confidence, certain that we have faced what we needed to face and consign all of this to history?
I don’t think so.

As long as history has something to teach us about what it means to be human we must be open to hearing it again and again. We must learn that the terrible things we humans do to each other are only possible because we choose to tolerate them. We must learn that doing nothing in the face of great wrong is not passive neutrality. It is an act of violence – a violent refusal to act to prevent harm when we have both the capacity to understand the harm caused and the power to prevent it.
We have created the world we live in and we have the power to change it when change is needed. It may not always be easy to do so, but it is possible, even inevitable, if enough of us decide to demand change.
Be it ending the cover up of clerical sexual abuse by the Roman Catholic Church, or closing Guantánamo Bay and ending the use of torture, or outlawing the use of the death penalty, we can each be a powerful force for good, if we choose to be.
Too often, we are so frightened of acknowledging the awful things done to others by people close to us, and even by ourselves that we end up allowing such things to happen through our denial. In our silence we collude, in our denial we facilitate and in our softly spoken words of gossip we fail to take responsibility for what we know.
We are so frightened of seeing the darkness in our collective humanity that we fail to embrace the light that exists in at least equal measure there; the profound beauty in our own humanity that can respond with truth and courage to the things we see and do that are simply wrong.

What we have yet to understand is that we can only be enriched if we have the courage, compassion and integrity to name and confront injustice wherever we see it, especially when we are party to causing injustice ourselves.

Posted by Colm on Sunday, September 19, 2010