More than 200,000 minors are believed to have been victims of child crime by religious people in Spain, a figure that would rise to over 400,000 if sexual assaults by laypeople working for Catholic Church institutions are included, according to a report published on Friday Report.
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These estimates follow the work of the first independent commission set up in Spain to assess the level of child crime in the Church, which presented its 777-page report to the House of Representatives.
AFP
The document is highly critical of the stance of the Catholic hierarchy, affirming that its response to the revelation of these attacks “has long been characterized by negation or trivialization of the problem.”
“Unfortunately, for many years there was a certain desire to deny the attacks or to hide or protect the perpetrators,” explained the president of this commission, Ángel Gabilondo, the “defender of the people” (equivalent to the defender of rights). in France) during a press conference.
Asked by AFP about this report and Mr. Gabilondo’s comments, a spokesman for the bishops’ conference said the church would not immediately respond.
She recalled that in the morning, shortly before the presentation of the report, the Bishops’ Conference announced that it would hold an extraordinary plenary meeting next Monday to discuss this document.
AFP
“To mark”
In Brussels, where he was attending a European summit, current Spanish Prime Minister and socialist Pedro Sánchez called the report “a milestone in the history of democracy in our country.”
“Today we are a slightly better country because we have made public a reality that everyone knew for many years but that no one talked about, at least not in the terms used today. ‘today,’ he said at a press conference.
AFP
The report does not contain numerical estimates of the number of victims, but includes a Commission-commissioned survey – the first of its kind – of more than 8,000 people that allows conclusions to be drawn about the extent of the scourge.
According to the results of this opinion poll, 1.13% of the Spanish adult population (estimated at around 38.9 million people) say they were sexually abused as minors in a religious environment.
Of this total, 0.6% (i.e., more than 230,000 people) report having suffered sexual assault by religious figures, while a slightly smaller proportion (0.53%, i.e., more than 200,000 people) report being sexually assaulted as minors by laypeople People who work in religious institutions, for example teachers, have been attacked.
Mr Gabilondo said the cases covered the period “from 1970 to the present”, but some stretched back to the 1940s.
Among the twenty measures proposed in the report are the creation by the state of a fund to pay reparations to the victims, as well as the implementation of a “public act of recognition and symbolic reparation” for the victims.
“The beginning of something”
Representatives of victims’ associations were generally satisfied with the commission’s report.
“It is a serious report that responds to the demands of the victims,” said spokesman and co-founder of the “Enfance Volée” association, Juan Cuatrecasas, to AFP, seeing it as “the beginning of something.”
AFP
Unlike France, Germany, Ireland or the United States, Spain, a country with a very strong Catholic tradition, has never before conducted an independent survey on the subject.
Mr Gabilondo also recognized that Spain was “lagging behind” compared to its neighbors.
For comparison: an independent commission had identified 216,000 underage victims in France since 1950.
The expert commission was set up by the Congress of Deputies in March 2022 with the task of “shedding light” on the “despicable personal acts against defenseless children” within the church.
The latter, which for years refused to investigate child crime there, did not want to take part in the commission’s work. However, she agreed to provide him with information about child abuse cases collected by the dioceses in March.
Facing growing political pressure and allegations of obstruction, the company took a first step in February 2022 by launching its own external audit, entrusted to a law firm. The release is planned for the end of the year.