Church sex abuse costs tripled in 2005 DPA Washington, April 1 (DPA) The Roman Catholic Church in America spent $399 million in 2005 on settlements with sex abuse victims, triple the amount of the year before, according to reports.
An additional $68 million was spent on lawyer's fees, psychological counselling and other expenses, The Washington Post reported Friday. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops released its annual report on efforts to protect minors from sexual abuse by priests, a scandal that has been unfolding in the US since 2002. After dozens of court cases and convictions, the church has paid out nearly $1.5 billion to victims. More than 12,500 victims have come forward and 5,000 US priests have been accused. Those numbers have gone up since the bishops' 2004 report, which said that 4,000 priests - or four percent of the Catholic clergy - had been accused from 1950 to 2002, and 10,000 children, mostly boys between the age of 11 and 17, had allegedly been victimised. The Bishops conference has taken the lead in tackling the scandal, holding hearings and releasing several reports since 2002. They also engaged the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to research the criminal side. These experts, however, found a sharp decline in the number of cases since the early 1990s. Decades of lax response by higher-ranking clergy to abuse cases ended in 2002, with the first criminal prosecution of a priest in the Boston Area. The Boston archdiocese has been nearly bankrupted and forced to close parishes to pay out settlements, and high ranking church officials have stepped down across the country in the wake of similar trials elsewhere. The US scandal followed more than a decade of revelations about similar abuse around the world, including Ireland, where the government had to pay settlements to victims because it had engaged the Catholic church to run its orphanages, where much abuse had occurred. New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice was commissioned by the US bishops in 2002 to conduct the unprecedented statistical survey of child sexual abuse in the US church. --DPA _____________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. Goanet mailing list (Goanet@goanet.org) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: %(user_optionsurl)s This email sent to %(user_address)s