With tens of thousands of victims worldwide over several decades, sexual abuse by members of the Catholic Church is an unprecedented issue of justice. In order to reveal and confront the magnitude of the crimes, many transitional justice mechanisms are at work, including expert reports, commissions of inquiry, truth commissions and trials. Justice Info here publishes a world map of this fragmented, highly sensitive, often innovative justice in the face of an extraordinary institutional crime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
According to the credits of the film Spotlight, which in 2015 dealt with revelations of sexual crimes in the US diocese of Boston, sexual abuse of minors by members of the clergy has taken place in 206 cities in the world. But this is certainly a big underestimate. The long-hidden magnitude of this phenomenon affecting a Catholic Church with more than 1.2 billion faithful worldwide is today taking on devastating proportions.<\/p>\n
The first scandals broke in English-speaking countries in the 1980s. There was the scandal of the residential schools in Canada, where tens of thousands of children were physically and sexually abused in Anglican and Catholic religious communities from 1850 to 1996. A truth commission was established in 2008. Ten years later, Canadian MPs and indigenous victims were still calling for a formal apology from the Pope.<\/p>\n
In France, the conviction in 2001 of the Bishop of Bayeux-Lisieux Pierre Pican was a landmark. He was given a three-month suspended prison sentence for failure to report sexual abuse. The direct perpetrator of the abuses, priest Ren\u00e9 Bissey, was sentenced to 18 years in jail for assault and rape committed on some 15 teenagers between 1985 and 1996. This was the first conviction of a bishop since the French Revolution. It was not until nearly twenty years later that another bishop, Andr\u00e9 Fort, was also convicted for not denouncing abuse of minors. He was given a suspended 18-month sentence<\/p>\n
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