Another paedophile priest is caught: But how many more cases of general sexual child abuse go unreported?
You know that old Queen song, ‘Another one bites the dust‘? Well, another one did again - though this time it was not a Roman Catholic but a Baptist priest. Ecumenicism ain’t dead, in other words:
PLANO, Texas — A minister arrested in an Internet sex sting has resigned his position at a Dallas-area megachurch. Undercover officers posing as a 13-year-old girl communicated with the 52-year-old minister for about two weeks. The online conversations were sexual in nature, police said. On May 6, Barron suggested meeting the girl in person. He drove nearly 200 miles on Thursday to meet her in Bryan, where he was arrested. Police said they found a web-cam and condoms in the minister’s car.
So, obviously a Baptist and not an RC priest: the Catholic church frowns on the use of condoms.
On a more serious note, it is kind of scary that we seem to hear more and more stories about these types of sexual predators. Maybe this is a good sign: That we are now more aware of this problem and better able to trace and catch them. On the other hand, the fact that we catch an X number of them might just mean that we don’t catch all the others.
If you compare it with the coastguard’s struggle to catch cocaine smugglers, it always makes for some great headlines when they happen to catch another load that’s worth so-and-so many millions of dollars but everybody knows that most of the cocaine safely reaches the noses of the clients willing to pay for the product. One can only pray to the Gods of one’s choice that the amount of coke captured and the amount of it reaching the market don’t compare with the percentage of paedophiles caught and the percentage of those who get away with it - but it’s not something we can ever really be sure of, now can we?
What we do know is that sexual predators are attracted to jobs where it’s easier for them to have access to their intended victims. Hence the high percentage of youth workers, teachers and school ground employees etcetera who are caught and convicted for these crimes. Which is very unfair to all those other people who have chosen their careers because they care deeply for children and want to work with them for all the right reasons.
Still, we have to acknowledge that there are certain professions that are, in a way, the hide-outs of choice for these sexual predators. I’m not sure where that leaves us as a society. Obviously, you don’t want to organise Joe McCarthy style witch hunts for paedophiles among the whole population of teachers, priests, swimming instructors and what have you. That would be terribly unfair to all of those who work with children and it might even be counter-productive, in that it might just scare away people who like to work with kids but who would not be willing to cope with an officially supported automatic suspicion of their motives.
There are a few things we can and should do - and it’s a crime against our children that we don’t do these things automatically already. There should be some automatic vetting of candidates who want to work with children. Simple stuff: a check for previous criminal convictions for child abuse. It sounds ludicrous but this is not done everywhere as a matter of cause. Furthermore, when people move from one job to another, there should be a system of clear references when it comes to cases of paedophilia.
It is a complete outrage but too often schools (and yes, churches) and scouting organisations etcetera decide that they and their communities would rather not take matters to court, preferring to dismiss the predator rather than go through the whole gruelling process of a criminal trial - and in these cases the predators can move from one job to the next, without their new employers ever hearing about these crimes. Until the predators get caught at it again, after which they might end up in court or are simply allowed to move on to their next, quite similar job. There should, of course, be very stiff penalties against any institution, or persons who get involved with these kinds of cover-ups - something we already have in the case of murder, like an ‘accessory to paedophilia.’
No laws will ever stop the predators, of course but we could try to make life a bit less easy for them than we are doing now. As a society we also shouldn’t want to be accessories to paedophilia. That would seem to be the least we could do for our children.
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