Shining the Spotlight on Child Sexual Abuse

Abstract

Earlier this year, the film Spotlight won the Academy Award (Oscars) for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Spotlight tells the story of a group of journalists at The Boston Globe who break the story of the clerical abuse of hundreds of children by over 200 Catholic priests in the Boston area in 2002. It was the first major reporting of abuse by Catholic clerics in the US and shocked the nation, indeed the world, with the breadth of abuse and the silencing of victims and their families by the Church and their lawyers. I saw the film in Australia at a local cinema in Newcastle, New South Wales. As a social researcher writing on the Catholic Church at the Royal Commission and the NSW Special Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, I wasn’t surprised that I recognised in the small audience a number of survivors, families and supporters of victims and Catholic community members. I wasn’t surprised that it was a small number; this is a difficult film to watch about a subject most people do not want to think about. The Royal Commission into institutional child abuse was set up in 2013 after years of work by survivors and supporters to uncover abuse across institutions including the Catholic Church. Despite knowing much of the literature in the field and having attended many sessions at the Royal Commission, it came as a shock when the last screen shots listed the number of American cities affected by clerical abuse and cities around the world. The list runs into the hundreds and in Australia includes Newcastle, Wollongong, Adelaide, Ballarat and Melbourne. People around me gasped as we recognised Newcastle on the list: somehow seeing our small city on the big screen bought home the reality of this crisis. Clerical sexual abuse is not a small issue on the periphery of social maladjustment. It’s a major crisis of institutional abuse of power that has affected millions of people across the globe.