“Something more is needed, and this is decisive: the adoption of concrete measures.” The Ombudsman, Ángel Gabilondo, on Tuesday urged Congress and the Senate to adopt measures to compensate victims of sexual abuse in the Church, a task that still awaits to be accomplished by the State after addressing the scale of the problem in his Report on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. A necessary response.
Gabilondo presented his investigation before the Joint Congress-Senate Commission, which he urged to act to advance the restoration of victims, a central element of the work carried out by the institution, he recalled. In his intervention, the Ombudsman stressed that everything that happened in this area is due to the “silence and concealment” of abuses, both on the part of the Church and other institutions responsible, at least, to ensure the safety of minors. “It’s not true to say that everyone knew it, but it’s also not true to say that no one knew it,” he explained. In this sense, the Mediator recalled that the European Court of Human Rights has ruled on several occasions that the State cannot under any circumstances refrain from taking care of minors.
The Mediator hoped that the work carried out and the resulting conclusions and recommendations “will contribute to the determination of the facts and responsibilities, to the reparation of victims and to the planning of public policies aimed at the prevention and treatment of cases”. sexual abuse committed against children and adolescents.
Gabilondo recalled that the work does not stop with the completion of the report and demanded that Congress and the Senate begin to adopt measures aimed at compensating the victims. “It’s not about providing an answer or resolving the problem,” he recalled. “This is ongoing or, at best, ongoing,” he insisted, while noting that Spain was “one of the last countries” to investigate the issue, while others like France, Belgium and Canada have already taken stock of previous investigations.
The Ombudsman explained that his institution proposes 24 specific recommendations to compensate victims, structured around five central ideas: the need for recognition of the problem by public authorities; understanding it; consider the causes and consequences; by highlighting the way in which the problem was addressed, which consisted of denying or minimizing it; repair and assumption of responsibilities.
When it came to the responses of the parliamentary groups, all the participants were dismayed by the panorama drawn up by Gabilondo’s report, with the exception of Vox, which accused the Mediator, insinuating that only the investigation could constitute an embezzlement of funds. , and against Sánchez for a mix of reasons that ranged from excision in Mauritania to the law of yes means yes, and a little less to the PP, which condemned abuses in the Church, but regretted that “95% cases”, all this, according to MP Carmen Navarro. Both formations, the first with more enthusiasm but also the second, supported the work of the Catholic Church in this situation.
Vox presented the institution as a simple victim (“criminals used the Church to cover up their crimes,” explained MP Ignacio Hoces) and accused the government of not investigating all victims of sexual abuse, what the PP defended. that the Church collaborated in the investigation, a statement that contradicts Gabilondo’s report.
450,000 victims linked to the Church
The Ombudsman’s 777-page report also includes a survey which reveals that 0.6% of the population has been sexually assaulted by a Catholic priest or religious. This percentage is taken from a survey carried out by the company GAD3 based on a sample of 8,013 people. This demographic study indicates that tens of thousands of minors have suffered sexual abuse in congregations, schools or any other religious institution.
The survey reveals that in general, 11.7% of the Spanish population say they suffered sexual abuse in their youth and 1.13% say this abuse occurred in a religious context. Extrapolating this percentage, this would mean that there are approximately 450,000 victims of Church-related abuse in Spain and 240,000 have been assaulted by priests or consecrated persons. The generic question on abuse reveals that in Spain, one in ten people have been victims. “We believe that these are very significant data, even if it is not necessary to extrapolate them and that is why we did not do so in the report,” the Mediator then explained.
Ángel Gabilondo highlighted, once again, the importance of the testimonies collected by the Victim Care Unit because “they reveal the devastating impact that sexual abuse had on their lives”.
The report includes the testimonies of 487 victims, obtained during interviews carried out in Madrid and other regions of the country. Among them, the vast majority (84%) were men. Victims highlight the emotional and behavioral problems they suffer as a result of the abuse. And a third of them reported experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress and, for some of them, experiencing depressive symptoms, feelings of shame and stigma, and suicidal acts.
In any case, the objective of the report was not to provide a unequivocal and “concrete figure” for the number of victims of sexual abuse. “Pretending to do so would have meant ignoring the silence of certain victims or the deaths of others,” Gabilondo recalled on Tuesday. All the testimonies collected by the Defender, recalled Gabilondo, were between 30 and 70 years old; most of them are in their fifties.
