Okay, okay, okay...this thread needs a little expert advice. For those of you who don't know, I'm a director of risk management for a high school district. That means I not only have the task of defending the district from allegations of sexual abuse by staff, I also have the responsibility to prevent it from occurring in the first place. I know a lot about this subject and have attended conferences specifically discussing the U.S. Catholic church child molestation crisis, how they reacted, and how a responsible organization should react if a staff member (huh huh...member) is accused of sexually abusing a child.
The first responsiblity is to report the suspicion to law enforcement. In California, all school district employees, psychologists, doctors, child care providers, and CLERGY are mandated reporters of child abuse. I'm sure the other 49 states have similar laws. If the police drop the case, that's their call, but at least the mandatory reporter met his/her obligation. The reporting threshold is very low--if a mandatory reporter knows or reasonably suspects that a child may be a victim of abuse by an adult, they must make the report. "Reasonable suspicion" basically means if you you can articulate your suspicions to another person and they would draw the conclusion that child/sexual abuse MAY exist, then you must report it. In this case, any time the church was aware that a priest possibly molested a child and failed to report it, it was responsible for every subsequent act of molestation committed by that person.
Occasionally, the police will elect not to investigate an allegation, but that doesn't mean inappropriate behaviour did not occur...just that there might not be enough evidence to charge someone with illegal conduct. If that's the case, the organization still has to conduct an investigation and if inappropriate conduct did occur, jump on it and prevent it from occurring again, either with that person in particular or organization-wide.
A term gets thrown around a lot is "willful indifference." Whenever an organization has a duty of care (i.e., they're watching over kids while their parents are elsewhere) and they know of abuse, but take no steps to stop it, then they are equally liable. Yes, it may be the lecherous priest or employee who is committing the act, but as soon as the employer is aware, they have a duty to prevent further harm.
I also think of "negligent entrustment" and "negligent hiring" in the case of the U.S. Catholic church. Whenever they knowingly placed a priest with a history of abuse in a position where he had access to kids, they were negligent in their reckless disregard for child safety. Whenever they transferred a priest with a history of abuse to another location and failed to inform the new management of the reason for the transfer, they were negligent for all of the foregoing reasons.
I don't personally blame the Pope for any first-time incident any more than I would want to be blamed if one of my teachers whom I never met diddled a kid this morning in a classroom I've never been in. However, if I became aware of problems in my organization, I'd sure act quickly to find out who's doing it and get them out--either by law enforcement or constructive discharge. If I didn't, I'd expect my name to be right next to the district's and the teacher's when the lawsuit is filed after the second incident is discovered.
The sad thing is, the church could have wiped out this problem decades ago by purging the molesters, taking the lead in reporting them to law enforcement, and showing their parishoners (and more importantly any molester in their ranks) that they take the safety of their children seriously and they do not tolerate sinful or illegal activity by those who should be trusted above all. Since this has been going on for decades, it's really a problem JP inheireted, however, with the right spin, they could have minimized the scandal and what damage they suffered to their good will would have been short-lived and minor. Instead, everyone knows of the institutionally sanctioned sexual abuse of children endemic to the U.S. Catholic church and it will take at least a generation before they fully recover in this country, if at all.
It didn't take me long to learn in my career that you fight when you're right and you admit it and get out of harm's way as quickly as possible when you are wrong. Since the U.S. Catholic church didn't act appropriately, we then have to go up to the next level and ask, who could have stopped this? Perhaps the Pope could have instructed his U.S. cardinals to clean house and ensure their priests live by the moral code they preach.
