Tuesday, March 30, 2010

End Child Prostitution

SAVE A CHILD FROM PROSTITUTION— CHOOSE HOTELS THAT SIGN THE CODE
By Janet Clark
While slavery might strike most people as just an archaic relic from our less-than-stellar past, rotting on the scrapheap of history where it belongs, unfortunately that isn’t true. Recently ABC News aired a series detailing the reality of modern-day slavery, and in May of this year, speakers at the Iowa Preventing Abuse Conference spoke about the most tragic victims of this scourge, child prostitutes. While children in the United States are all too often victimized in this manner, the problem is even more widespread in other countries, especially those with high rates of poverty. Children in those countries are forced into prostitution either through physical violence or because they have no other means of making enough money to feed themselves. The non-profit organization End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and the Trafficking of Children (ECPAT) estimates that more than one million children worldwide are drawn into the sex trade each year. Each year! According to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice, Asia, Mexico and Central America are “prime destinations” for child-sex tourists. What’s worse, it’s estimated that 25% of these “tourists” come from the United States.
While this may seem like a problem both too horrible to contemplate and too huge to effect, there is a way for any concerned citizen to help end child prostitution. The child sex tourism industry is enabled by people in the legitimate tourism industry who turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to what is happening right in front of them, or in some cases actively assist the abusers of these children in order to receive paybacks. But the good news is that a significant sector of the tourist trade has decided to act on behalf of the children who have no power to liberate themselves. More than 500 companies around the world have signed the Code of Conduct for the Protection of the Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism. According to ECPAT, companies that sign the Code commit to implement the following six criteria:
• To establish an ethical policy regarding commercial sexual exploitation of children.
• To train the personnel in the country of origin and travel destinations.
• To introduce a clause in contracts with suppliers, stating a common repudiation of commercial sexual exploitation of children.
• To provide information to travelers by means of catalogues, brochures, in-flight films, ticket-slips, home pages, etc.
• To provide information to local “key persons” at the destinations.
• To report annually on the implementation of the previous five criteria.
The American Society of Travel Agents, with more than 20,000 members, has signed the Code of Conduct. So has one large American travel company, Carlson Companies, which includes Country Inn and Suites, Regent International, Cruise Holidays, Radisson Hotels, and Park Plaza. Several smaller American travel companies, Royal Regency International, Ela Brasil Tours, and Flamingo Travel, have also signed the Code of Conduct.
The conspicuous list is the one with the names of all the American companies who have not signed the Code. On that list, you’ll find Choice Hotels, whose holdings include Clarion Quality, Comfort Suites and Comfort Inns, Sleep Inn, and Suburban; Hyatt Hotels, parent company of AmeriSuites and Hawthorn Suites; Starwood Hotels, which includes Starwood, Four Points, Sheraton, St. Regis and Westin; and Hilton Hotels. Why are these companies dragging their feet when it comes to protecting children?
“Many European companies have demonstrated their commitment to practice a socially responsible, child-wise tourism by signing on to the Code of Conduct. However, there has yet to be significant commitment from U.S. companies,” according to ECPAT. If we work together, we can change that.
Are you planning a summer vacation? Reward the hotels that have signed the Code, and let the other hotel chains know why you are choosing their competition. Does your civic or religious organization hold meetings in hotels? Encourage them to only deal with companies that sign the Code. Especially for organizations that deal with children, such as teachers, school boards, and social workers, it’s important to give your business to those companies that protect children around the globe and withhold it from companies that refuse to be a part of the solution.
Pressuring companies to sign the Code of Conduct may seem like a small thing to do, but when all legitimate businesses in the travel industry live by the Code, we will be one step closer to ending child prostitution. Slavery in all its ugliness should not exist in our world today. Let’s get it out of the headlines and into the history books.

Previously published in the Des Moines Register

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Reach for the barf bag

According to Archbishop Timothy Dolan, the pope who covered up for priests who raped kids is just like Jesus. Or something like that. "The leader of the nation's second-largest diocese urged his congregation to pray for the pope, saying he was suffering some of the same unjust accusations once faced by Jesus," according to an associated press article.

Well, Tim, there are just a few differences. Let me help you out here. Jesus was a humble carpenter who plaintively remarked once that while foxes had their dens and birds their nests, he had nowhere to lay his head. Had he been walking the earth today, he might have said, Pope Benedict sleeps in a multi-million dollar mansion while I wander around homeless.

Jesus said of the little children, let them come unto me, and if anyone causes harm to them, the offender would be better off to have a millstone tied around his neck and thrown into the sea. The pope, on the other hand, has demonstrated a shocking lack of concern the children who were raped, sodomized and sexually assaulted while supposedly under his care, while displaying tenderness for the offenders. He allowed Father Larry Murphy, who sexually abused 200 Deaf boys, to live out his life as a priest instead of being defrocked simply because Murphy asked him to.

Jesus mingle with the poor, the miserable, the lonely, the sick. He ate with women, which was a big no-no in his day. The pope hobnobs with the rich and famous, and if he has ever been photographed with a woman, I don't remember seeing it. He did, however, allow the mother of a nine-year-old rape victim to be excommunicated for taking her little girl to get an abortion instead of making her bear the rapist's twins. He did, however, make a ruling that a woman could not have her uterus removed to prevent a pregnancy that could kill or harm her. Not a champion of the powerless in my book.

The most pertinent difference: Jesus was persecuted UNJUSTLY. Jesus spoke out against the powerful and got killed for it. The pope IS a person in power. He is the equal of the Pharisees that Jesus condemned, concerned only that the religious institution look good, not that the people's needs be tended. He follows the letter of the law while blatantly ignoring its Spirit. To compare Jesus with the pope is nothing short of blasphemy.

Friday, March 26, 2010

Break the silence

“Cry out as if you had a million voices, it is silence that kills the world." St Catherine of Siena (25 March 1347 – 29 April 1380)

Monday, March 22, 2010

Words to ponder

"The entrenchment of a theology of the body that honors a fetus but ignores the child who is raped and molested by spiritual authorities is reprehensible."

Anthea Butler, associate professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/2371/_training_god%E2%80%99s_rottweiler:_catholic_church_sexual_abuse_must_end

Saturday, March 20, 2010

The pope and sexually abusive clergy

This is a copy of a letter posted on the CBS News blog. It's a report of the pope's previous handling of sexual abusive clergy. Note how he gets tough on abusers- just when the media gets a whiff of what's going on.

News reporting of the latest scandals in Ireland and Germany involving supervision of and inquiry into pedophile priests and others by the Vatican and several Papal administrations is missing a significant context. It would seem the press has largely forgotten or ignored some critical past history. It's compelling backdrop. It reveals that Pope Benedict XVI has, for at least a decade, had first hand knowledge of the dramatic pedophilia-sexual abuse involvement of one of the church's most powerful and influential former leaders, the late Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado. He was the founder and superior general of the Legionaries of Christ. Marceil's incredible sexual assault history dated back decades, according to a plethora of news reports. In 2001, according to The Hartford Courant, the Rome-based Legion, specializing in education, had 480 priests and 2,500 seminarians, active in 20 countries on four continents. It operated schools in Latin America, Europe and the United States, including a minor seminary in Cheshire, Conn.

A former Hartford Courant investigative reporting colleague and good friend of mine, the late Gerald Renner, and Jason Berry, a National Catholic Register reporter, collected affidavits from those affiliated with the church, all alleged victims of Marcial Maciel's conduct. They implicated Maciel, the Mexican founder of the Legionaries of Christ, in molesting 9 former male students between the ages of 10 and 16 while they were attending church schools. The story and follow-on articles first appeared in The Courant in 1997 when Pope John Paul II reigned. Maciel, the former Pope and the church leadership essentially denied the overwhelming truth of the in depth articles for years. The Vatican hired two high priced lawyers to check into the stories, attorneys who offered the press little insight into the situation, Renner told me after the stories appeared.

But, eventually those horrifying allegations helped ignite an inquiry of Maciel supervised by Cardinal Joseph Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict. However, that so called investigation, despite overwhelming evidence of misconduct unearthed by Renner and Berry, did not lead to any discipline for Marciel. Years later, say past news reports, after he became Pope in April 2005, Benedict had several opportunities to take action against Maciel, but once again did nothing. It wasn't until after Renner and Berry wrote a book on the scandal, "Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II," that he did. The book detailed what Berry and Renner believed was a cover up of Maciel's alleged sex abuses. They wrote about the punishment of one priest who tried to expose the wrongdoing. Benedict's punitive action came in May 2006 when he approved restrictions on Maciel's ministry. Interestingly, the ruling arrived about the time when Renner's and Barry's book was to be translated into Spanish, the language of those who were long time potential witnesses to the Maciel scandal.

So Pope Benedict is certainly not virginal when it comes to knowledge of the cover ups of abusive sexual activity by priests or other higher level members of the Catholic Church.

Sincerely,

T. Dennie Williams
Freelance Writer
PO Box 511, 56 Brush Hill Road, Litchfield, Ct. 06759
Telephone 860-567-0280
email denniew@optonline.net

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

We need justice

When reports of priests sexually assaulting children and young people dominated national headlines back in 2002, the Vatican responded. They said priests were raping and sodomizing their young parishoners because the United States is too liberal and our sexual morals too lax, expecially in big bad Boston. (I don't remember hearing them issue a retraction when the news began reporting the same claims in the Midwest and the South- I guess we are just as much a bunch of libertines as the Boston crowd.)

When the crisis popped up in Australia, bishops decried bereaved parents as "cranky" when they complained their children committed suicide after being sexually assaulted by priests. Canada chimed in: thousands of Indian children were raped in the Catholic orphanages, according to published reports. And it was getting a little harder to blame the culture of the United States.

Last year, reports were released in Ireland detailing the massive amounts of abuse, including sexual assaults, that occurred at Catholic orphanages, churches and school; tens of thousands of people have come forth, and for every single person who finds the courage to speak out, many others suffer in silence. An Irish problem? The country was, for centuries, impoverished and backwards. That must be it.

But now, Europe is erupting with report after report after report of children being sexually abused in Bavaria, in Austria, in Switzerland, in Germany. (Although, as a Vatican insider helpfully pointed out, many who were raped or sodomized or groped were not really children, they were teenagers. Only someone who is not a parent would think that makes it all better.) Even the pope has been implicated in passing a predator on to another parish. The man, who had forced an 11-year-old boy to give him oral sex, received a month of therapy first, though, so naturally it was a big surprise when he reoffended. This priest was on active duty until last week.

The pope, the Register reported in the March 11 issue, "has taken a strong stand against abuse by clerics in the Roman Catholic Church." That month of therapy was rough, I'd imagine. Or maybe they are referring to the fact that, every so often, the pope pops out and says, "sexual abuse is bad." That's tellin' 'em!

No, they must be referring to the fact that the pope has written a letter of apology to Irish Catholics.

A letter of apology. For rape, for sodomy, for brutally stealing the childhoods of tens of thousands of the most vulnerable Irish citizens.

When are the governments of the many countries where this church has caused so much damage going to find their collective intestinal fortitude and DO SOMETHING? If this was some little podunk church in Arkansas, the feds would have it shut down faster than their creepy leader could proclaim puberty is consent. Is this another case of too big to fail, or even too big to be held accountable? I hope not; so many brave survivors have come out in the hopes that theirs will be the last generation to suffer at the hands of abusive clergy.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Danke!

I love the Germans, and not just because I'm married to a man of German descent. I love the Germans because they are the first nation on the face of the earth with the intestinal fortitude to speak the truth about the Roman Catholic clergy abuse crisis. "Germany says Vatican covered up priest child sex abuses," proclaims the headline in an article from today's World Bulletin. The justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, is the very first high-ranking public official to call the Vatican on their actions.

"In many schools there was a wall of silence allowing for abuse and violence," Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger told Germany's Deutschlandfunk radio, the article reported. "Even the most severe cases of abuse are subject only to papal secrecy and should not be disclosed outside the Church," she said, citing a 2001 Catholic congregation directive.

Danke, Ms. Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger! While virtually all the other government leaders around the world pussy-foot around the fact that the Catholic church is operating the world's largest organized pedophile ring, you are calling them out on it. Finally, finally, someone with authority is saying what we lowly bloggers have been shouting at the top of our laptops for so long.

To read more, go to http://www.worldbulletin.net/news_detail.php?id=55225

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

The case of the Delaware pediatrician accused of sexually abusing his patients bears striking similarities to the Roman Catholic abuse crisis. The doctor moved from one area to another, accusations of sexual abuse were brought before his governing medical board but dismissed, and because of the huge amount of complicity and denial in the community, Dr. Earl Bradley was able to rape and sexually assault more than 100 children.

The doctor photographed many of the children he molested, and authorities have asked the parents of Bradley's patients to provide family photos so they can identify the victims. Parents are understandably horrified and in shock. Less understandable is the apparent desire to be kept in the dark some parents are expressing.

"I don’t know what I’m going to gain from knowing that he had done something to one of my kids,” one mother told a reporter.

Well. It seems to me the more important question is not what the parent will gain by knowing, but what suffering the child will endure if the parent refuses to know. All too often parents refuse to see what is too painful to deal with, allowing their children to bear the burden alone. I've heard more than one story of Catholic abuse survivors who told their parents about being sexually assaulted and got punished for speaking out.

I'm glad at least one set of parents was willing to listen when their two-year-old girl told them the doctor had hurt her. Because they believed their child and came forward, Bradley won't have the chance to abuse any more kids.