The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The Media and the Scandals

Michael Breen

Issue 356, vol.89, Winter 2000

There was also exaggeration in the impression created that child sexual abuse was confined to Catholic Church personnel. Only individual cameos can illustrate the exaggerations.

Exaggeration of some of the consequences of clerical child sexual abuse:-
- A television chat-show host spoke in such a manner about a cleric going on leave of absence, that viewers were led to believe that any cleric taking leave of absence was facing an accusation of paedophilia.

- If ever the findings of a high-profile trial should be set aside and the selection of highly-dubious witnesses exposed, the normal reaction would be public protests, in the correspondence-columns of newspapers as elsewhere. But when precisely this transpired in the case of a(n ex-)nun charged with abuses of children in her care, there was no wave of protesting letters. Such silence, it can be argued, is a symptom of a population brain-washed by the media to think of church personnel as no longer worthy of basic civil rights.

- The figure of Fr Brendan Smyth, convicted paedophile, was raised to iconic status by the media. Those who had been in the care of that particular ex-nun had only to link his name to hers for their accusations to appear in banner-headlines. The malevolent ‘image’ of religious influence, Brendan Smyth’s photograph has been used as the illustration for journalistic pieces on topics such as celibacy, women priests, falling vocations, the Church in Ireland.

Exaggerated delimitation of child sexual abuse to church personnel:-
- Journalistic contributions on topics as broad as “paedophilia” or “psychiatric disorders” or “evils of the internet” again had the Smyth photograph as the accompanying illustration.

- The epithet ‘paedophile’ kept occurring with ‘priest’ - but not with ‘teacher’, ‘farmer’, etc. A heading like “Perverts swap sick tales in prison” would appear flanked by the photograph of a named convicted priest paedophile - when the priest was not one of the individuals referred to.

- But omission was more important than commission. There was little attempt to show that the overwhelming majority of abusers are relatives of their victims (or that married men are the primary abusers - a finding that undercuts any causal link between celibacy and abuse).

If, for the future, the media wish to make a positive contribution to solving the paedophilia crisis, then one thing they could do is keep readers informed of the discoveries (including paedophilia’s incidence across all segments of society) unearthed by scholars in the field.

Michael Breen, a priest of the Dublin Diocese, is head of Communications at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick.