Sin, Silence and States of Denial: Canon Law and the ‘Discovery’ of Child Sexual Abuse

Abstract

In discussions of the sexual assault of minors, feminists, historians of sexuality and religious authorities are in uncommon agreement. They concur that, although minors have been subject to sexual assault throughout the modern era, the late 1970s and 1980s saw a new ‘discovery’ of the phenomenon. This discovery initially was located in feminist critiques of male violence within the family, but quickly spread to other sites: homosexuals, paedophile rings, satanic ritual abuse and most recently clerical sexual abuse. Recent inquiries into sexual abuse in Christian Churches have collated data of abuse on a scale hitherto unimagined. The data suggests that abuse was most prevalent between 1945 and 1980, the period prior to the articulation of feminist critiques of sexual violence. Many have sought to explain this historic ‘black spot’ as the product of a failure of comprehension. Feminists have claimed that their articulation of sexual politics was required before child sexual victimhood could be recognised. Church authorities, on the other hand, have repeatedly stated that their failure to respond appropriately to allegations of abuse was because such abuse was ‘unthinkable’. This paper seeks to complicate these explanations of historic blindness to child sexual abuse by examining the capacity of church law to comprehend and articulate the harms of child sexual abuse prior to the feminist critiques of the 1970s.