The awful figures regarding abuse in the Church

Can we always trust the statistics we read?

Shannon Roberts

With the shock and dismay people worldwide have felt about the awful figures regarding abuse in the Church (which obviously did exist to an extent and was indeed very shocking), it seems disturbing that the media is allowed to get away with reporting so much false information. It certainly leads you to question both statistics elsewhere and just which groups are pushing the information we get from our media regarding population and any number of other issues…

Self proclaimed atheist, Brendan O’Neill, is famous for his satirical criticism of the movement that would say that children are a burden on the planet and old people should in some cases be euthanized to reduce their impact. His book “Can I Recycle My Granny?: And 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas” looks to be an amusing, if somewhat light, read (I can’t say that I have read it myself). 

While perhaps not strictly demography, his latest article in The Telegraph is aninteresting critique of how widely circulated and believed statistics can turn out to be quite wrong. He points out in his opinion piece yesterday the fairly shocking news that the image of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland promoted by the media has been found to be false:

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Read more : www.mercatornet.com

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Catholic-bashers have embellished the truth about abuse in Catholic institutions. 

It's time to put the record straight

By Brendan O'Neill 

The publication last week of the Irish government's McAleese Report on the Magdalene laundries has proved kind of awkward for Catholic-bashers. For if McAleese's thorough, 1,000-page study is to be believed, then it would appear that those laundries were not as evil and foul as they had been depicted over the past decade. Specifically the image of the laundries promoted by the popular, much-lauded film The Magdalene Sisters – which showed them as places where women were stripped, slapped, sexually abused and more – has been called into question by McAleese. This has led even The Irish Times, which never turns down an opportunity to wring its hands over Catholic wickedness, to say: "There is no escaping the fact that the [McAleese] report jars with popular perceptions."

In the Irish mind, and in the minds of everyone else who has seen or read one of the many films, plays and books about the Magdalene laundries, these were horrific institutions brimming with violence and overseen by sadistic, pervy nuns. Yet the McAleese Report found not a single incident of sexual abuse by a nun in a Magdalene laundry. Not one. Also, the vast majority of its interviewees said they were never physically punished in the laundries. As one woman said, "It has shocked me to read in papers that we were beat and our heads shaved and that we were badly treated by the nuns… I was not touched by any nun and I never saw anyone touched."The small number of cases of corporal punishment reported to McAleese consisted of the kind of thing that happened in many normal schools in the 1960s, 70s and 80s: being caned on the legs or rapped on the knuckles. The authors of the McAleese Report, having like the rest of us imbibed the popular image of the Magdalene laundries as nun-run concentration camps, seem to have been taken aback by "the number of women who spoke positively about the nuns".

And yet, despite the fact that the McAleese Report has utterly exploded the popular view of these laundries, some are wondering out loud if it was nonetheless legitimate and good to have produced so many embellished stories about evil nuns in recent years, as a way of highlighting the broader culture of abuse in the Catholic Church.

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Read more: blogs.telegraph.co.uk