Child Rape … it is not just Catholic Clerics

Taslima Nasreen, an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, has a blog posting today that has opened my eyes a bit further, apparently some Islamic clerics are also into the sexual abuse of children … An Imam and his friends gang raped a girl in Narshingdi, Bangladesh just two days ago. It is … Read more

If you knew Child Abuse was taking place, could you honestly do nothing at all?

I blogged yesterday about the evidence presented by a BBC documentary that Cardinal Seán Brady, when tasked with investigating some child abuse, was given a list of other children being abused and did nothing about it. I did not expect to return to the topic so soon, and yet here I am again … why? Well, … Read more

US bishop charged with failing to report abuse

The news is that … at last … a US Catholic bishop has been charged with failing to report abuse. Bishop Robert Finn has been indicted on a charge of failing to protect children after he and his diocese waited five months to tell police about hundreds of images of child pornography discovered on a … Read more

Catholic Child Abuse – The Cloyne Report

Back in 2009, the Commission of Investigation Report into the Catholic Diocese of Dublin (Nope not my grammar, that is what they called what was also known as The Murphy report) was published with the details of some truly horrifying child abuse. It was not the end-game and so they did not stop there because the last Irish government had agreed to extend the Murphy commission’s remit to include Cloyne, so further investigation proceeded. On Wednesday 13th July they finally issued their report.

To give this a contextual time line, the commission was asked to investigate the handling of sex abuse allegations in Cloyne by church and state authorities between 1 January 1996 – when the church’s first-published guidelines, its Framework Document, came into play – and 1 February 2009. In other words, this is restricted to a period of time that “starts” from the day they claimed to have cleaned up their act and does not consider any of the historical abuse prior to 1996.

First the link so that you can go read it yourself. Here is the full report. At 421 pages in length, it is not a quick read.

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Islamic schools a cover for child slavery

There is a report on the BBC about child slavery in Senegal. As many as 50,000 boys in the west African state of Senegal are living in slave-like conditions and being forced to beg, according to human rights workers. Human Rights Watch says teachers at many of the country’s private Islamic schools, or Daraas, are … Read more

Sinead O’Connor was right

There was an interview with Sinead O’Connor a couple of days ago in the Guardian, its an interesting read. Apparently back some time ago she made a rather public and very startling declaration … In 1992 she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on the American TV show Saturday Night live. She … Read more