The Scouting movement in Canada has been drawing flak for its past handing of pedophile predators. One instance has been cited where complaints led only to an alleged predator being shifted to another group. This was a few decades ago, and seems typical of organizational responses in those days. In the late 1980s I read a magazine account of how the Roman Catholic Church in the United States was largely ignoring the problem of pedophile priests. The perception, which grew over subsequent years and extended to other denominations and into Canada, was that ecclesiastical handling of such complaints was more oriented to minimizing the damage to the church as an organization than to repairing the impact on the victim and preventing recurrence. As an instance of this, in that era a padre in the Canadian Forces was convicted of sexual relations with young boys in his flock. He served two years at the rigorous military detention barracks in Edmonton, and then was released. A few years later he was back in the news doing pretty much the same thing, this time as a priest at a parish in northern Alberta. As I recall the news coverage, little was made of the fact that the church had returned him to a setting, which facilitated recurrence of his conduct. This case also underscores that a sexual orientation towards children can be difficult to suppress.
Youth oriented organizations always attract some adults whose true motivation – whether from a homosexual or heterosexual orientation – is obtaining sexual excitation from children. I suspect the motivation is usually apparent enough to the adult predator, but one instance a couple of decades back suggests that sometimes self-perception is clouded. A camping trip with young boys was involved, in the course of which a man had sexual contact with one or more of them. He pled guilty. But he wanted to tell the judge he was anxious to do his time, put the matter behind him – and get back to his mission of working with youth! Perhaps his drive for working with youth because of the opportunity it gave him to indulge certain proclivities was all subconscious, so that he genuinely saw his sexual molestation merely as a momentary loss of self control.
Professional attitudes have shifted over the years. Back in 1975 I had some involvement at the forensic unit of a psychiatric facility. A man was in custody for having sexual intercourse with his teenage daughter. What stunned me was the approach of the professional staff involved. Much of their discussion focused on how the family unit could be restored. There seemed little concern that the daughter had likely suffered severe emotional damage, and that restoration of the family unit might be harmful to her even without repetition of the abuse. Within 10 years there was a shift to a more perceptive view of the full consequences of activity. But I believe that even now the public, and to some extent official, response towards these repellent cases reflects a tendency to focus on the moral and sometimes physical horror of the incident – a trend embedded in one area newspaper’s constant reference to “sickos” in reporting child molestation cases – at the expense of understanding that such behaviour imposes long term, potentially life long, devastation on the victim.
Retired St. Albert lawyer David Haas is a former Queen’s Scout, and is himself a victim of child sexual abuse, though not in his Scouting activities.
