Archive for the ‘crime’ Category
some thoughts on the Edward Snowden affair
Like many people, my imagination has been exercised by the Edward Snowden case, though I haven’t followed ii particularly closely. When I do think of it, it’s in terms of what the USA’s National Security Agency has been up to. As a humanist, I’m obviously not so concerned about the security of particular nations as I am about the human consequences of surveillance, spying, secretiveness and the like. So it was with some interest that I read in yesterday’s Adelaide Advertiser a letter to the editor which argued that Snowden had not committed a “real crime”. I thought the argument, prima facie, a good one. Snowden released secret data collected by the NSA about individuals – or released data to the effect that the NSA was spying on individuals, I’m not sure of the details – but not before making sure he was in a foreign country, out of the reach of the US government. Since then, there has been much shrieking about treason, not only from US officials, but from US allies. This is as you would expect. Imagine, though, a North Korean citizen releasing data to the effect that North Korea’s National Security Agency was collecting data, not only on North Korean citizens, but on citizens of many other nations. But this North Korean citizen waited until she was out of the country (let’s say in the USA) before releasing the data. North Korea’s government shrieks treason and demands that the individual is returned to North Korea to face the consequences of her actions. I would be very surprised if the US government acceded to such a request. I imagine that the western newspapers would place much more emphasis on the information leaked by this ‘traitor’ than on her behaviour, and that she would be treated more as a hero than a villain. And we can look at many other scenarios of this kind, with many different responses, depending on national allegiances. It follows that this kind of behaviour is not a ‘real crime’ in the way that murder, rape, theft, assault and many other crimes obviously are.
I can imagine counter-arguments. For example, that this just takes a libertarian line, saying that ‘real crimes’ are only those against individual liberty, while ignoring what we owe to our nation, the abuse of which is like an abuse to ourselves, and has the potential to make each of us more insecure. My response to that would be that, while I do find nationalism a rather shallow allegiance, that doesn’t make me a libertarian, as I believe very strongly in the ‘social glue’ that enriches our humanity and is in fact essential to it. So the behaviour would have to be measured in a more complex way, against the background of how it affects the non-national, human social glue as opposed to how it affects nationalistic concerns, which themselves have their shifting impacts, pro and con, on the human social glue.
Taking that argument, and considering what seems to have been leaked – but I admit I haven’t looked at the detail of that – the criminality of Snowden’s actions seems at the very least questionable. And besides, I would take the USA’s complaints more seriously if they made a more serious attempt to subscribe to international law and international criminal jurisdiction, which of course successive US governments treat with scarcely veiled contempt.
discipline and punish
There’s a tendency in certain countries to treat a juvenile as an adult when she or he commits a crime considered ‘heinous’, as if the nature of the act somehow constitutes evidence of maturity, though we know that this is not necessarily so. A child can easily kill another child, or an adult, or adults, if the requisite weaponry is to hand. We know that a sixteen-year-old isn’t sufficiently mentally developed to be treated as an adult – otherwise she’d be permitted to vote, to drive a car (without P plates), to drink alcohol, to watch R rated films, to travel overseas without parental permission and so on. Yet when such a person commits a crime that seems to us particularly unpalatable, with significant victim impact, we appear to let that impact affect our judgment as to the responsibility of the perpetrator. This, I think, is a serious problem.
It’s particularly a problem in overly punitive states, such as the USA, with its frightening prison statistics, and its vast swathes of the population living in a kind of anarchic, dysfunctional, hopeless poverty. Some of these people experience almost their first taste of discipline in a courtroom, where they find themselves the playthings of a system impossible to comprehend, speaking an opaque language, operating with such an indifferent forcefulness as to render its subjects inert and fatalistic.
I don’t have a solution to the problem, I simply observe and feel the unfairness deep under the skin, but as I’ve said before in other contexts, don’t get angry, get educated, and that means informing yourself, where possible, of the causes of this perversion of what most reasonable people would see as the proper treatment of juveniles as individuals with diminished responsibility.
First, there are claims of a rise in juvenile offences in the USA from the nineties, but this is not substantiated, and even if it was true, incarceration would seem more an evasion of the problem than a solution. Second, there is a general rise, again in the USA, in punitive approaches to criminal behaviour, moving away from long-term, more humane trends which first emerged back in the seventeenth century and which were bolstered by the eighteenth century Enlightenment. We can see this in the restoration of capital punishment but also in increased length of sentences. The USA is the only country on the planet that permits life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders.
But this, of course, is exactly the question I’m asking. Why has the US criminal justice system turned its back on humane approaches to crime and punishment? Is it merely reacting to public pressure, and if so, why is there this public pressure? Is it a response to real increases in crime, or to a mere perception of such an increase? My limited research tells me that there is no great surge in the US crime stats, but those in favour of tough sentencing and treating juveniles as adults might well argue that it’s because of the tough sentencing that crime stats are being kept low. So rather than wading into the statistical morass engendered by such arguments, I’d prefer to look at a more obvious and clear-cut connection – that dysfunction and deprivation are profoundly associated with criminal activity as well as drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence and the like.
I’m now going to make a seemingly bizarre leap from crime and drug-taking in dysfunctional and deprived areas of the USA to the choices made by laboratory rats. In The lab rat chronicles, Kelly Lambert describes experiments done with lab rats some decades ago, experiments that should have garnered far more attention than they did. Individually caged rats will increase their consumption of a drug when they can self-administer it by pressing a lever, and they’ll show clear signs of withdrawal when the drug is taken off the menu. In other experiments, rats were given the choice of water, sugar water and water laced with morphine or cocaine. They drank more of the drug-laced water than of the other choices. When injected with a drug in a particular environment, and with a saline solution in another environment, they consistently chose to be in the ‘drug’ environment, when subsequently asked to choose.
These are fascinating experiments suggesting that rats, like us, are drawn very much to drug-induced states. Right? Well, actually it’s more complicated than that, and these are not the experiments Lambert wants to draw our attention to.
The experiments I’m referring to were carried out by Bruce Alexander and colleagues in the early eighties. Alexander was interested in exploring the difference between the responses of lab rats, who generally lived in deprived, unstimulating and most likely stressful conditions, much like the inmates of a prison, and their wild and free relatives. So he created a rich, colourful and varied rat environment with lots of opportunities for the rats to entertain themselves, and each other, because they inhabited the much expanded space (some 200 times that of a standard rat cage) in groups of sixteen or more. When the drug experiments were repeated with these more socially active and choice-enriched rats, the results were very different. These rats were considerably less interested in the drugs on offer. As Lambert points out, it’s noticeable that rates of addiction to drugs in prison are far higher than outside, in spite of all the obvious difficulties in obtaining them.
The fact that these important experimental results have been largely ignored in favour of exploring, in rats and in humans, the neural processes implicated in drug addiction, perhaps provides a clue to the imprisonment problem in the USA. Finding the neural pathways for drug addiction, and finding ways to block those pathways, assuming that it would ever turn out to be a simple process, would make the problem ‘go away’. No drug addiction, or no drug effect which would encourage the user to keep returning to the drug, means no problem, right? You just ‘innoculate’ the drug user with the ‘drug blocker’ and she’s no longer an addict, and you go and collect your Nobel. It’s a bit like incarcerating everyone who commits a major crime – you make them ‘go away’. Far easier than trying to transform them by creating a whole new environment for them, full of stimulating activities, community supports, and roles and functions to tap into.
So when you look at the incarceration rates in different parts of the USA, and among different sub-groups, note how they correspond to regions and populations of deprivation and dislocation and systemic poverty. It’s not rocket science, but the real solutions are costly, and they require the kind of collective action that the USA, of all nations, is least capable of. Meanwhile, the USA is the only nation on the planet where, having committed a major crime as a juvenile, you can be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. That’ll learn em.
how to debate William Lane Craig, or not – part 7, objective moral values and duties
ceci n’est pas Jesus
Dr Craig’s sixth claim, that his god is the best explanation for objective moral values, is one I want to dwell on at some length, so please sit back in your electrified chairs and enjoy my reflections if you can. But please note that I dwell on the subject for my own interest’s sake, not because I find Dr Craig’s views require much work to overcome – far from it.
I suppose it’s fair to say that when it comes to moral issues, unlike with matters scientific, we all like to consider ourselves experts, and we’re all a little more committed and vociferous, because – it’s personal. So I’ll begin with some personal stuff. From earliest childhood I’ve always felt very emotional about issues of cruelty and injustice. I was often in tears on witnessing kids in my class being bullied – more often than not by teachers. When I was a little boy I read the Hans Andersen story, ‘the little match girl’, a simple but devastating story about a young girl out in the cold snow, trying to sell matches for her impoverished family, afraid to go home without having sold any. She finally dies, out in the cold, on the last night of the year. This tale of unfairness and cruelty and indifference, had me awash with tears at the time, and literally haunted my childhood. I think it’s fair to say that a sense of empathy was well developed in me from an early age. Needless to say, ethical ideas based on the harm principle, such as those articulated by the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, held great appeal for me, but further than this, active moral programs to protect and support individual human beings, such as those enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights and in the many conventions and protocols that have followed from that declaration, are programs that I hold dear.
The point I’m making here is that the starting point for my own moral values was an emotional one, a visceral one, if you like, and not something derived from any ‘higher consciousness’ or reflectivity or rationality. And I suspect that’s quite a common experience. We don’t generally choose to cry over or be haunted by an injustice. So where do these deep emotional feelings come from? I have absolutely no reason to associate them with a non-material being who has, as far as I’m aware, never communicated anything to me. Nor was I, during my childhood, convinced that everyone would feel the same way as I did if exposed to the story of the little match girl. Some would, I was sure, but others would be cruelly indifferent, and there would be a whole variety of responses along the spectrum. In short, my observations of life, even from an early age, told me that people valued things and experiences very differently from me, and very differently from each other, to a rather bewildering and unpredictable degree.
So, from the fore-going I hope it won’t come as a surprise to you that I don’t believe in objective moral values, but that I’m far from believing that this entails some kind of moral nihilism or amorality. In Dr Craig’s presentation of this argument, he suggests that those who don’t subscribe to objective moral values, by which he means, values that come from a male supernatural being, don’t see anything ‘really’ wrong with the massacre of schoolchildren. Let me put that in another way. He argues that my own deeply felt disgust, shock, anger and pain, when I hear about, and see, played out on my tv screen, those sorts of crimes, is not really real, because it isn’t connected to a non-material creator-protector god, which is how he defines objective morality. I find this a ridiculous argument, as well as an offensive one.
Firstly, Dr Craig’s version of morality is a sham because it exists nowhere. Dr Craig will not be able to give you a single instance of a command from his favoured deity. The decalogue, the ten commandments, were written by men, and though some of them may seem uncontroversial – don’t lie, steal, don’t kill – even these aren’t absolute. A starving person, in my view, would be justified in taking food belonging to another person, who had an abundance of such food, if the alternate was death. I have no difficulty with that. Some people would, as they have the view that private property is sacrosanct. And I could make similar arguments to justify lying, and even killing, under certain special circumstances. To me, there are no absolutes. Other commandments, such as keeping the sabbath day holy, I don’t take at all seriously, because I don’t believe a supernatural being made the world in seven days, though had I lived several thousand years ago, I might well have believed that. And so my morality would have been different then, just as my morality would be different if I were born, on the same day that I actually was born, but in the city of Basra, to a devout Moslem family. My morality, that I hold so dear, and which gives my life so much meaning, is the result of my particular upbringing, my peculiar variety of experiences and influences, the culture that I was born into, my genetic inheritance, and I’m sure there are other factors that I’ve left out. One thing I’m happy to leave out, though, is the command of a deity. I’ve never experienced such a command, and I have no reason to believe anyone else has either.
Now, there are atheists I know who argue for an objective morality, but obviously not grounded in a deity. Personally I find such rational arguments a bit weird, and I’ll say no more about them here, except to make the obvious point that being an atheist doesn’t commit you to any specific moral position, as it’s simply an absence of belief in a deity. That’s all.
What I do want to focus on is the claim that morality without a deity is merely subjective and not really real. That’s to say, without a deity we can do whatever we like and call it morality. Well, that’s not how I feel about morality, and it’s not how morality, and laws relating to morality (and most laws have some sort of moral reasoning behind them) have developed in our increasingly secular society. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is entirely secular, and I think it’s a grand step forward in global human interaction. And it’s more of an effect than a cause, it’s symptomatic of a gradual shift in our attitude to other cultures, in our attitude to race, whether the concept is a valid one or not. In the attitude of men to women, in the attitude of heterosexuals to homosexuals, in our attitude to and respect for children, and in our attitude to and respect for other species on this planet. All of these attitudes have changed drastically in the past 150 years or so. Living in an eternal present as we often do, we can easily overlook how thoroughly transformational these essentially moral developments have been, and they’ve owed nothing whatever to religion, which has generally dragged its heels at the rear. Look, for example, at the Catholic Church.
I’m an avid reader of history, and as such I’ve noted the social changes, particularly in western Europe, that occurred over the past 400 years or so. What has always struck me, in reading about the Thirty Years’ war or the English revolution of the 17th century, or the early slave trade, is how often and regularly God (the Judeo-Christian one) is invoked in the primary documents of those times. God appears on every page, often several times on every page, of every legal document. I’ve described the 17th century, and the centuries before, as a ‘god-besotted age’. And yet the everyday brutality, the callous inhumanity, the cruelty, the viciousness, the inequity, the impoverishment of basic human values of those times, were everywhere on display. If you think you’ve got problems now, transport yourself back to pre-Enlightenment Europe for a wake-up call. Arbitrary rulers, upstart priests, popular revolutionaries, all invoked the divine in order to invest themselves with authority, as still happens today. Think of the divine right of kings, and papal infallibility, and the dear leader and great leaders of North Korea, who promoted themselves as divine. In the past, monarchs regularly passed laws in the name of the god whom they represented. Nowadays, elected politicians pass laws in the name of the people who elected them. It seems to have been a great improvement.
Our morality and our laws are grounded, it seems to me, in our common, but changing, evolving human nature. This is not mere subjectivity. In fact it’s all we have to go on. We don’t make up our own morality as individuals because we’re essentially social beings who rely on each other for our survival and our thriving. We’re empathic because we see ourselves in others and others in ourselves. And we’ve evolved that empathic capacity to embrace species other than our own, which I think is a great step forward.
The theist has no ground for objective moral values because no single moral value, claiming to be objective, has ever been shown to come from a deity. I have no doubt that they’ve all come from human beings.
keep up the pressure
This guy, Tarcisio Bertone, a cardinal, blames it all on homosexuality
Big problems for the college of cardinals in electing the next pope – and that’s a cardinal’s only real job. A number of them are under scrutiny for their action and lack of action over abusive clergy, and under pressure not to participate in the election, and much of the pressure’s coming from catholics themselves, in Italy and in the cardinals’ home territories. It’s an unprecedented situation, and it seems unlikely to me that this trend will be reversed – it’s more likely to grow. Cardinals under the spotlight include Justin Rigali and Roger Mahony (USA), Sean Brady (Ireland) and Godfried Danneels (Belgium).
Story from Nicole Winfield of Associated Press.
alchemical fun
Here in Adelaide, a show called The Illusionists has recently started a 2 week season at the Festival Centre. On this morning’s ABC breakfast news show, we were informed that, after a ten-year doldrum period, magic is back in fashion. Great!
So it was with some amusement that I happened to come across, today, in my holiday reading of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the tale of a dastardly magical trick, which involved a priest, a canon, and that most riveting of medieval delusions, the alchemical philosopher’s stone.
The tale is called ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’, and it describes the trick in masterly detail. The yeoman begins though, by describing at length, and at the same time cursing, for he’s a thorough sceptic, the various ingredients and utensils employed in the black art of ‘the transmutation of metals’. The ingredients included arsenic trisulphide, burnt bones, iron flakes, quicksilver, sublimated mercury, lead monoxide, Armenian red clay, borax, verdigris, reddening waters, sal ammoniac, brimstone, bull’s gall, unslaked lime, chalk, egg-white, various powders, ashes, dung, clay, urine, wax-sealed bags, vitriol, saltpeter, horse’s or human hair, alkali, oil of tartar, alum glass, yeast, unfermented beer, crude tartar, disulphide of arsenic, and of course a pinch of salt and pepper. There were also essential herbs such as agrimony, valerian, moonwort and others. The vessels and utensils included molds, assaying vessels, alembics, vials, crucibles, sublimation vessels, urinals, flasks and such, in which the ingredients underwent such processes as sublimation, amalgamation, coagulation, calcination, albification, cementing, fermenting, absorption and citronation, to name but a few.
And on top of all that was the vital ingredient, element, catalyst or whatever, the philosopher’s stone, or elixir, which was, of course, ever-elusive. And these ‘scientists’ were always recognisable by the burn marks over their bodies, the ever-present stench of brimstone, and their threadbare clothes, for none of them ever found what they were looking for.
Thus our canon’s yeoman sets the scene, then he introduces a peripatetic canon, far more subtle and tricky in his wickedness than the canon of the title. The canon comes to London, where he pays a visit to a wealthy but popular priest, begging him for a small loan which he promises to repay within 3 days – ‘And if you find me unreliable, have me hanged by the neck the next time’.
The kindly priest agrees, and the wily canon fulfils his part of the bargain 3 days later. Thus having cemented a bond, the fast talker promises to show the priest the secrets of the alchemical trade, and the great advances he himself has made in creating silver out of base metal. Of course the priest is more than eager to be acquainted with such developments, so, upon instruction, he fetches 3 ounces of quicksilver and a heap of coals, and they begin forthwith. Chattering all the while about the years it cost him to perfect his technique, and the expense of the powders he has obtained to do the job, he pulls a crucible from beneath his robe, sets the priest to firing it up with hot coals, and adding an ounce of quicksilver:
And the canon threw a powder into the crucible to deceive this priest. I don’t know what it was made of, but whether it was chalk, or glass, or something else, it wasn’t worth a fly.
Some coals were placed on top of the crucible to add to the heat, and, while distracting the priest with the supposed action of the powder, the canon slipped an imitation coal, made of beechwood, among the others. This false coal had a hole gouged into it, into which the crafty canon had placed an ounce of silver filings, ‘and the opening sealed tight with wax to keep the filings in’. The false coal was of course so placed that the filings soon found their way into the crucible mixture.
The canon then suggested to the priest that they go out together and get some chalkstone to fashion into a mold, and a pan of wate. He said he’d go with the priest, to assure him that he’d be up to no monkey business in the priest’s absence. So off they went, locking the door behind them.
Now, the canon had hidden in his sleeve a sheet of silver, weighing only an ounce, and he slyly made a mold from it without the priest noticing. When they returned, he picked up the materials from the fire, put them into the mold, and then threw the whole into the pan of water. When things were sufficiently cooled he asked the priest to rummage about in the pan for there surely must be some silver in there.
In short, the priest found the silver, and was beside himself with excitement. Not content with this trickery however, the canon took him on another ride. They went through the whole rigmarole again, with the quicksilver and the magic powder and the coals, but this time for variation, the canon stirred the concoction with a stick which was actually hollowed out and sealed with wax at the tip, and no guesses for what was secreted inside. Things continued on in this way, with the canon producing different variations on the theme, all of them completely hoodwinking the poor priest. They took the precious metal to a goldsmith, who confirmed that, yes, they’d produced the finest, purest silver. The priest begged to know the canon’s secret, and after much palaver, the canon agreed to sell the formula for the princely sum of ‘forty pounds in nobles’, no doubt a fortune in those days. The priest bought it good and proper, and the canon slipped away, never to be seen again.
So let’s not under-estimate the power of magic! Plus ça change…
how to avoid insulting a prophet?
The term ‘insult’ is probably impossible to define objectively. We all know of people who have been genuinely insulted at what we thought was a valid criticism, and the sceptical and atheist movements in particular have been strong lately on the idea that religions shouldn’t be exempt from valid and robust criticism, and even mockery when it’s called for. After all, there are some quite bizarre and ludicrous claims made from time to time in the name of religion. For example, the Catholic Church’s procedures for establishing a person’s ‘sainthood’ are laughable, and their regular calls for more exorcists to cope with demonic possession are best dealt with by a mix of mockery and the bringing of criminal charges.
With Islam, though, we’re in different territory. I know quite a few Moslems – I work with them and I teach them English. I get on well with them all, and never mention the subject of religion, and neither do they, except, say, to mention Ramadan and the practicalities around that. I don’t doubt though, that my avoidance of any mention of religion has a a degree of self-preservation about it. As an atheist I don’t want to put people on the defensive, but more importantly, don’t want to make myself a target. Watching demonstrations of hatred against those who ‘insult the prophet’, though those demonstrations might take place on the other side of the globe, is an intimidating experience for those of us – and there are many – who happen to believe that all human prophecy is bunk.
And the fact is that, as communities become more mixed and mobile, Moslem demonstrations are taking place in every major western city these days. Like most demonstrations, at least in the west, the majority of participants have peaceful intent, but there is a hostile and violent, usually testosterone-driven periphery.
But demonstrations in the west in recent decades have not featured religion as a major theme, and this raises the question of whether Islam, though still a minor presence, population-wise, in Australia as in other western countries, is a potential threat to the secular state. When we look at countries where Islam is the dominant religion we find it also playing a dominant role in the political organisation of those countries, and recent calls by the President of Indonesia, the world’s largest Moslem country, to criminalise blasphemy [worldwide?], incoherent though they may be, should be a warning to us all of the dangers of religious dominance of any kind.
And I mean of any kind, for anyone familiar with European history will know how horrifically dangerous it is when political figures claim the backing of religious authorities, and, worse, supernatural creator beings, with all the righteousness that this entails.
Moderate Islamic leaders have expressed dismay that legitimate demonstrations against those who refuse to respect long-held beliefs have been hijacked by the angry few. While I sympathise to some extent, it’s clear to me that a long-held belief, or a belief system that has a long history, doesn’t automatically deserve respect on that basis. The argument from antiquity is a well-known logical fallacy. The real form of the fallacy is that a belief’s antiquity has no bearing on its truth. I’m taking the slightly different line that a belief’s antiquity has no bearing on whether or not it should be respected – though you can tie those together by arguing that only the truth is worthy of our respect.
The recent Islamic protests, resulting in the loss of scores of lives, are supposedly caused by an apparently shoddily-made video [I’ve not seen it] which mocks the ‘prophet’ Mohammed. I say ‘supposedly’ because any of us who write about and research religion on the net will know that there are a multitude of anti-Islamic hate sites out there, sites that would certainly out-insult this particular video by a mile, as well as Islamist anti-western and anti-Christian sites of a similar nastiness. Hard to imagine that these protesters, or a proportion of them, don’t know about these sites.
Anyway, regardless of the trigger, the fact is that there are a lot of angry and intolerant Moslems out there just itching for a bit of mayhem, and we need to hold our nerve. I was happy to hear Obama speaking up for free speech, with an almost casual dismissiveness, in response to Yudhoyono’s call for blasphemy laws, just as I was disappointed that a New Zealand politician expressed approval at the arrest of the video’s maker [apparently unaware that the arrest was on unrelated charges]. As far as I can see, the only thing this individual has done wrong is to make a crappy, dishonest video. If this was a serious crime, most of Hollywood would be in jail right now. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.
We live in a bitsy, complicated world, in which neuro-anatomists, paleo-anthropologists, not to mention doctors, lawyers and tribal chieftains live alongside fervent religionists who know nothing about evolution and would hate it if they did. We have children in our neighbourhoods who are sent to special schools or no schools, to avoid their being tainted with any kind of modern knowledge, while others are groomed to be cutting-edge theorists of the coming singularity. Holding all this diversity together and trying to be optimistic about it is no mean feat. It’s a diversity that we’ve created through our belief in freedom, in non-coercion, with regard to knowledge and behaviour – within obvious limits. I share this belief, together with the hope that, given all the options, we’ll find our way to the best understanding of our world and ourselves, and how that understanding can best guide our actions. It’s on this basis that I hope we can stand firm, defend and argue for the spirit of inquiry and constant questioning – of religion and science and everything else. Inquiry involves criticism – of the claims of so-called prophets, of saint-makers and the producers of crappy videos. They’re all fair game.
What Stephen Fry made me do: more on the Assange drama
Equador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patino
I signed up to Twitter three and a half years ago, tweeted something into the nethersphere, and haven’t been back until today. Since all the advice I read and hear is to network, network, network, linking blog to podcast to facebook to twitter etc etc, I decided to resurrect my Twitter account, and since I have no friends I thought I’d give Stephen Fry a go as I’ve heard he’s a big tweeter and would probably benefit from my friendship. Anyway, amongst the great morass of subjects he manages to tweet about daily, he tweeted this link, a rather defensive piece by a Swedish law professor complaining about how the Swedish justice system has been impugned on the international stage by the Assange case.
The professor got me offside with his opening line, ‘Julian Assange’s bizarre bid for political asylum in Ecuador’s embassy in London has claimed headlines everywhere…’ I know enough of history, and of the crushing ruthlessness of major military and economic powers throughout history when they feel that power is under the slightest threat, to find Assange’s bid for asylum, in Equador or anywhere else, to be anything but bizarre. He then went on to make rather bland and general assurances about the normality, openness and complete lack of corruption of Swedish justice. He went as far as to say that it’s more than likely that, after questioning, Assange will be released without charge. He finishes off the piece with this assurance:
Finally, no, the Swedish police will not place Assange on a CIA-chartered plane as soon as he arrives at Stockholm airport. They, like all other Swedish authorities, will discharge their duties according to the law.
Okay, no wucken furries then.
I don’t know if I need to say more, but I will. Assange would have to be fucking insane to allow himself to be hauled off to Sweden, for what clearly wasn’t a major legal infringement, if it was an infringement at all. I would urge everyone who hasn’t seen it to view the recent 4 corners program on this.
And of course the point is most definitely not about the Swedish legal system. It is about the USA. It has always been all about the USA. We’re told that, since Assange hasn’t actually been charged with anything, he’s only wanted for questioning. If that were true, then Swedish authorities should be permitted to come to Britain and question him there. That seems an obvious solution, at least a temporary one. If the Swedish authorities then feel that they have enough evidence to charge him, then yes we have another crisis. And this is what would make me feel suspicious if I were Assange – in fact I might feel a lot more than just suspicious, because Assange probably knows more about the USA’s involvement in the case than we know that he knows. Even if he doesn’t know anything specific, he’s been working on the USA’s foreign policy bullyings for years. He’s anything but naive about that particular beast.
Even what we know about the behaviour of the Swedish authorities would make us alarmed. They just want to question him but they won’t go over to the UK to do it. This would surely suggest that they have more than questioning in mind. The way the case has been handled so far would give cause for concern. It was virtually dropped before suddenly being taken up again, and at least one of the women appears to be quite upset and angry at this. Newspapers often make claims about rape charges, but there was no rape in the case of these two women, neither of whom withheld consent, and neither of whom were assaulted. The issue seems to have been about the use or non-use of a condom. People may argue about whether this is a serious matter, but I can’t see how questioning Assange would help them arrive at a decision as to whether he was wearing a condom on both or either occasion. And if it did help them, why wouldn’t they go over to London to question him? It just seems as if they’re doing everything they can to entice him to Sweden.
Why? Well, both the UK and Sweden have extradition treaties with the USA, but the treaty with the UK has been a cause of conflict for both countries for years, whereas, the Swedish arrangement appears to be much cosier….
there is a bilateral treaty between the US and Sweden that allows for extradition without consent from the UK or minimum tests. This is the temporary surrender/conditional release regime – automatic extradition on a loan basis. It is highly likely that the United States will soon request Julian Assange’s extradition from Sweden and this mechanism will be used while Julian Assange is in Swedish custody.
This admittedly comes from a pro-Assange site, but I for one would be advising Assange to be staying exactly where he is, and I commend the Equadorian government for its actions. As Greg Barns points out in a piece written just the other day, the USA’s heavy-handed and occasionally stomach-churning interference in the internal affairs of many Latin American countries makes Equador’s actions less surprising, but perhaps all the more admirable.
agriculture, religion and genocide
I saw a debate some months ago, staged for our ABC, between believers and non-believers, entitled ‘is atheism true’ or ‘are atheists real’ or ‘are atheists human’ or some such crap [sorry it’s new year’s eve and I’m getting pleasantly pissed here within the bosom of the family], in which the religious side, or one of their team, tried on the hoary old argument about Stalin and Hitler being arrant atheists who would never have embarked on their path of destruction had they been practising Christians. The Believer team [Christians all of course] seemed to have decided to go ‘for the throat’, trying to link atheism to mass-slaughter, as well as to shallow materialism, and to passing fashion. All to no avail, as the shallow, murderous and trendy ABC crowd voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Unbelievers, as was pretty well inevitable. It all tended to highlight the questionable value of such exercises to yours truly.
Even so, I was seriously annoyed that the Christians got away with this ‘atheists tend to kill people more’ crapola. The debate was set up so as not to actually be a debate [don’t you just hate that?], but a set of three set-piece speeches from each side, followed by voting.
I mention all this because I’ve recently been reading a book that describes much in the way of genocide – slaughter, extermination, extirpation and the like – throughout history. It’s called Blood and soil, by the Australian historian Ben Kiernan. The book begins with the depradations of the Spartans, and goes on to describe the senseless destruction of Carthage and all its inhabitants by the Romans, after a relentless propaganda campaign by the thuggish Cato the Censor, but mostly it treats of more recent genocidal attitudes and events, and in particular with the agricultural ideology, adapted from John Locke among others, that if you don’t work and enrich the soil, then you cannot be said to possess it, and so your removal in favour of those superior beings who can use the land more effectively is entirely justified, even if it means your destruction as a race or culture. This was the ideology that decimated the Aborigines in the days of white colonisation, and it was equally devastating to the indigenous inhabitants of that other ‘new world’, the Americas, with the arrival of Europeans.
Kiernan’s focus on agricultural ideology means that religion as a primary cause of genocide is only indirectly touched upon, and my own view is that religion is almost impossible to isolate from a host of other contributing factors, but it’s certainly there. The prominent nineteenth century journalist Horace Greeley, one of the most liberal writers of his time, had this to say of the Indians of the Great Plains:
These people must die out, there is no help for them. God has given this earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it, and it is vain to struggle against his righteous decree.
This was the enlightened liberal view. The majority white view was much more black.
Note though how the ideology of agriculture is attached to a religious ‘promised land’ belief system. This type of thinking was widespread among whites of the time.
Of course, in the early days of European contact, the days of the Spanish conquistadores, the aim wasn’t so much colonisation as plunder and enslavement. Even so, religious comparisons and promised land terminology were prominent. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda [1490-1573], historian and cheerleader for the conquistadores, wrote of the Indians as ‘natural slaves’, and compared the Spaniards to the heroic Romans who ‘justly subjugated the other nations of the world’. The ignorant Indians were like ‘the Amorites and Perizzites and other inhabitants of the Promised Land [who] were exterminated by the Children of Israel,’ though with the charming inconsistency of religious fanaticism, Sepúlveda favoured the extermination of the Jews.
The conquistadores, Catholic to a man, destroyed whole civilizations and slaughtered and worked to death an incalculable number of ‘savages’ and ‘inferiors’ in the Americas. On the island of Hispaniola alone [now divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic], the local population, estimated at anywhere between a few hundred thousand and two million, were all but wiped out. Bartolomé de Las Casas [1484-1566], a heroic critic of the genocidal behaviour of the Spanish, estimated that more than 12 million men, women and children had been exterminated in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America by 1542, fifty years after the arrival of Columbus. No doubt it’s an unreliable estimate, but considering that they didn’t have at their disposal the genocidal technologies developed in the twentieth century, it was an extraordinary slaughter by any measure, and arguably more lasting in its impact on the victimised cultures than even the Nazi holocaust.
Again, this wasn’t about religion, though religion was invoked frequently enough. It was more about greed and racial ideology, an ideology that has only recently been laid to rest [though it is persistent, even rampant, in some enclaves]. Many factors have led to its demise as a mainstream motivating force, and religion is certainly not one of them. Education, globalisation, telecommunications and population genetics are terms that can be separately analysed to show how they have led to a greater understanding of universal human qualities and conditions, eroding the differences between us and emphasising our social needs and our interdependence. Steven Pinker, in The better angels of our nature and in talks such as this one , gives a number of possible explanations for the general decline in violence in the west, including the development of the modern state, the general diminution of suffering and the growing sense of comfort and ease, the perceived advantage of non-zero-sum ‘games’, such as trade relations and defence treaties, and the expanding circle of sympathies brought about by developments in these other areas. Genocide may not yet be a thing of the past, but the old ideologies, such as those that equated cultivation of the soil with cultivation of the mind, or those that took the biblical concept of the promised land seriously, or those that treated purity of blood and race as something real and positive, these ideologies have been rendered untenable by modern understandings of how the world really is, and how we have managed and still manage to survive in all our diversity, and with all our essentially common goals.
on the allegations of John Hepworth: part two
Hepworth meets Cardinal Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
At the moment, the case surrounding the allegations made by John Hepworth is at something of an impasse, with two very senior religious figures in the spotlight, neither willing to back down, and having everything to lose if they did. It would seem obvious that one of them is lying [Hepworth himself has said that it comes down to one person’s word against another] – but maybe not. A lot of recent scientific research has shown that there is virtually no correlation between our certitude about a specific memory and the accuracy of that memory. Could Hepworth have convinced himself of events that didn’t actually occur, or could he have mistaken the identity of the perpetrator?
We should remember though that Hepworth’s allegations haven’t been confined to Dempsey. He has claimed that he was repeatedly raped by three priests from 1960, when he was fifteen. Two of those priests, Pickering and Stockdale, were serial sexual abusers whose guilt appears more than likely [though with the Catholic hierarchy’s addiction to secrecy, it’s unlikely anyone else will get to examine the evidence]. Pickering’s activities were particularly egregious, and he was protected by the Church for decades before being finally exposed. The identity of the third priest is unclear, but apparently it wasn’t Dempsey. Hepworth has also claimed that he was sexually abused by others during his seminarian years, which suggests a climate of abuse, a climate all too common within the Catholic clerical system. In his essay ‘Religion and violence’, Tamas Pataki considers the forces that create such a climate:
…both the [Catholic] Church doctrine and organisation, especially the teaching and the practice in the training institutions, are causally implicated in the character malformations that are likely to lead to [child sexual] abuse…. The Church is a hierarchical and authoritarian institution that organises relationships through dominance and submission. The aspirant who wants to get ahead knows he has to submit to his father-bishop and mother-Church. That structure of dominance encourages sadomasochistic modes of relating and, of course, attracts people with such needs. It is likely to stimulate rage and cruelty in one direction, combined with submissive, inhibited attitudes in another. These attitudes, reinforced by Church teaching valorising suffering, may lead to the victimisation of powerless young individuals, and indifference to their suffering. The institutions are also infantilising in recreating structures of dependency: the priest’s feeling of powerlessness in relation to the seemingly omnipotent parental representatives may be countered by a reversal in which the child abuse is an unconscious attempt to identify with omnipotence while projecting his own powerlessness onto the victim.
This strikes me as a cogent account of the kinds of abusive relations described, for example, in Colm O’Gorman’s Beyond Belief, and elsewhere. It’s worth noting, apropos of this idea of the valorisation of suffering, that Dempsey, in a recent open letter to his Brighton parishioners, compared his sufferings under these allegations to the suffering of Jesus and Mary Mackillop. Bad taste, but very Catholic.
There are many vociferously held positions on side issues to this case – the use of parliamentary privilege, the presumption of innocence, the impact on various careers [besides those of the immediate protagonists], the abstrusuosities of sectarian politics and so forth – but I’m trying to keep my focus on two main issues [while recognising that those side issues are by no means irrelevant] . First, whether or not the allegations are likely to be true, and second, whether or not the Catholic Church is doing its utmost to find out whether or not the allegations are true.
On the first issue, little can really be said. Hepworth says that Dempsey raped him ‘several times’ and Dempsey stoutly denies it all. It’s pretty well certain that one of them is lying, and I have no idea which one. However, serial rapists usually have more than one victim in their profile. Nobody else has made a claim against Dempsey, though his name, associated with these alleged crimes, has only been in the public domain for a fortnight or so. Time may bring more to light.
However, I’m bugged, as I trawl through newspaper reports of the allegations, by their lack of clarity as they pertain to Dempsey. Christopher Pearson wrote this in The Australian on September 17:
Since The Weekend Australian broke the story last Saturday of Archbishop John Hepworth’s allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of two dead priests and one still serving in the Adelaide archdiocese, there have been all sorts of spin and further revelations. Politicians from the main parties have latched on to the idea that the proper course of action for Hepworth from the outset was to make his accusations against the still serving priest, Monsignor Ian Dempsey, to the police.
From this passage, it seems clear that Dempsey was the third priest involved in a series of rapes over twelve years, beginning at age fifteen. A number of reports also use the term ‘violence’ in association with these rapes. But Andrew Bolt’s account in the Herald Sun on September 24, taken from stories Hepworth told to The Australian and to the ABC, presents a very different story. Here is the story told to The Australian:
Hepworth says he was at least 24 years old when X allegedly raped him; X was one year older. This is not the stereotype of an older priest intimidating a boy. He told The Australian he’d been invited to the beach one night by two priests, one of whom “stripped off and began wrestling with me”.”He was stronger than me,” Hepworth said. “Or perhaps I was just weary of it all … I remember cold, wet sand and forced sex.” But then comes a caveat: “I want to state quite clearly that I never fully consented to sexual activity …” Never “fully” consented? What does that mean? In fact, Hepworth describes his reaction hours later as not one of anger, but guilt: “I had an awareness of the illegality of homosexuality, a sense of gross sinfulness, but also a sense of the glamour of the group with which I had been involved.”
ABC: Why were you unable to stop it?
Hepworth: Even though I was six foot two and I was fairly light in those days, but I always thought myself a very small person, very weak person. I was trying to befriend a few people, priests. I think it was out of a sense of loneliness, also a sense of an effort to belong. And then the experiences of (his past abuse) particularly, of overtures that I couldn’t resist and didn’t know how to, repeated itself a number of times. And when I had come close to people whose company I found thrilling, entertaining, invigorating and then these events happened, I think I was confusing the expectation of sex almost with friendship.
ABC: Does that mean that the people with which you were involved in these episodes would have thought that you had consented?
Hepworth: No. I would say things that were negative. No, not this. No, don’t . . . I don’t believe anybody could have thought I was consenting. I was taken advantage of.
Cappo, acting on Wilson’s behalf, had told Hepworth “if he was alleging any form of abuse, including rape, that this is a criminal allegation and that he should go to the police”. But should he? Since 2007 Hepworth has said that he wasn’t interested in retribution or compensation but in reconciliation with the Catholic Church. As Wilson, a canon lawyer, must know, the church has stand-alone internal procedures to investigate and resolve such cases.
Pearson gets it very, very wrong here. Cappo and Wilson were right to urge Hepworth to go to the police, and indeed, given the heinous nature of the alleged crimes, they had a duty to report the matter to the police themselves, just as a priest who is told of a crime in the course of Catholic confession has a duty, or should have a duty, to report this crime to the police. This is because the criminal must be brought to justice. Pearson writes of Hepworth not being interested in retribution or compensation, but he neglects to mention justice. Perpetrators of violent rape need to be brought to justice for two clear-cut reasons. First to protect the public from any further attacks of this kind, and second, to uphold and constantly reiterate community standards of behaviour. To say, for example, that these events occurred more than forty years ago, so that there is now no longer any danger to the community from this person, is like saying we shouldn’t bring ex-Nazi war criminals to justice because they’re now too decrepit to harm a flea. It misses the point completely. And Catholic canon law most definitely doesn’t dispense justice, especially in the area of child sexual abuse, as Geoffrey Robertson’s book The Case of the Pope comprehensively argues.
It of course sounds rather harsh to say that victims of rape are derelict in their duty if they don’t report the crime to the police. Of course we have to be sensitive, we don’t want to punish the victims further, but we should encourage them into a state in which they recognise, above all else, the irresponsibility, and the danger to others, of not reporting.
Of course, I’m talking of clear-cut cases of rape here. There are other cases that aren’t so clear-cut and there’s a corresponding lack of certainty as to whether it’s a police matter. But Pearson isn’t looking at the Hepworth matter as a possibly fuzzy, borderline set of situations, he’s making the usual outrageous Catholic claim that their canon law is adequate to deal with this matter, in spite of mountains of evidence [made up of heaps of victims] to the contrary.
This brings me to the second issue, the way the Catholic Church, and in particular the Adelaide Archdiocese, has dealt with this matter. There’s a huge amount of conflict on this, and I’m not sure that I have the heart to try to sort it out. It does seem though that Hepworth is annoyed that the matter of Dempsey hasn’t been dealt with by the Adelaide archdiocese as expeditiously as the matters of Stockdale and Pickering were dealt with under other religious jurisdictions. Apart from the friendship between Pell and Hepworth, which would have helped, the fact is that when these matters were raised by Hepworth both of the accused were conveniently dead, their reputations already thoroughly trashed. Dempsey, who has been awarded the Order of Australia, seems a very different sort of person. Hepworth also denies that the Adelaide Archdiocese was given the go-ahead to investigate only in February this year. Under the Catholic Church’s ‘towards healing’ system for dealing with allegations of abuse, no investigations can take place without the victim’s express permission. In any case, given the nature of Hepworth’s testimony to The Australian and the ABC as quoted above, and given Dempsey’s categorical denials and the lack of corroborating evidence on both sides, it’s hard to see how the Adelaide Archdiocese would be able to make much progress in its investigations.
Or is it?
Broken Rites Australia, a support organisation for victims of Catholic priestly sexual abuse, has this intriguing account of the sorry saga of Hepworth’s experience. It accords well with the psychological description by Pataki quoted earlier, of a world of men, committed to celibacy, that ‘most unnatural of the sexual perversions’ as Aldous Huxley described it, and to love for a heavenly father, in a hierarchical system that is exclusive, elitist and both homophobic and homosexual in outlook. This description captures something of the helpless, heady confusion:
“Throughout the abuse, says Hepworth, he felt violated, fearful and confused. He liked the circle in which his abusers moved. There was money, and talk of music, the arts and culture. So he went along with it, but not, he says, by choice. He had been only 15 when it all started in Stockdale‘s rooms at the Adelaide seminary where he had been given alcohol and then violently raped. “In some way, he says, he knew no other life. And he was afraid of their threats that if he revealed what went on within the circle he would be expelled from the seminary. His parents would find out. There would be shame and ruination…”
It’s hard to investigate generations of hypocrisy, distortion of feeling, and destructive, stunted relationships just to get to the bottom of one case. Hepworth himself seems motivated largely by a desire to reunite with the Catholic Church, to put the past behind him and to uphold the true Catholic position of righteous homophobia. And so the hypocrisy and the secrecy will inevitably continue. In naming Dempsey, Xenophon said that the Catholic Church ‘only had itself to blame’ for its predicament. Perhaps he spoke a greater truth than he knew.
on the allegations of John Hepworth: part one
Nick Xenophon
John Hepworth
Ian Dempsey
Just as I’m not a philosopher, unfortunately, and I’m not a scientist, sadly, and I’m not a historian or an academic or a professional anything, I’m most definitely not an investigative journalist. I don’t have any sources that aren’t third or fourth hand, and I don’t have too many friends in high places, or low places for that matter. What I do have, I suppose, is a certain native curiosity and a reasonably active and sensitive pair of skeptical antennae, and these have been stimulated lately by a local story hitting the headlines here and being reported nationally. It’s about the Catholic Church and sexual abuse, an issue I’ve long been interested in, and it features as one of the principal actors the high-profile local-turned-federal politician, Nick Xenophon – hero and crusader to some, unabashed media junkie to others.
I’m starting out this post knowing virtually nothing about the issues of this case, beyond a few headlines and brief media grabs. But before I set out on this little investigative journey, I should declare two influences upon my thinking which might seem to clash. First, I’ve long been critical of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and its defence of Canon Law, that’s to say, Catholic ‘club rules’ that, it continues to believe, trump secular law wherever the Church operates. Canon Law is completely inadequate in dealing with clerical sexual abuse, with the result that this Church has lagged behind virtually every other western institution, secular or religious, in dealing with this issue, to the detriment of countless victims. Second, having myself been the victim of a false accusation of having perpetrated sexual abuse, I know very well how easily such claims can be made, and taken seriously, and I have a very personal attachment to the concept of the presumption of innocence.
Now to the case in question. It hit the headlines when Senator Xenophon threatened to, and finally did, name, under parliamentary privilege, a currently active priest who is alleged to have raped another currently active priest more than forty years ago. The alleged rapist, Monsignor Ian Dempsey, has publicly denied the allegation, made by Archbishop John Hepworth. I’m not entirely sure of Hepworth’s ‘archbishop’ status. Apparently he was formerly a Catholic priest, but became a member of a breakaway organisation associated with the Anglican church. So clearly he’s not a Catholic archbishop, and possibly not a bonafide Anglican archbishop either. He’s known around town as a political or social commentator, possibly on local radio. I haven’t heard him, though I’ve vaguely heard of him.
Apparently this matter is not in the hands of the police, and there’s much dispute as to why, and as to the handling of the case within the Catholic Church.
My long-suffering research team has uncovered some information about Hepworth’s background. He was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1968 at the age of 24, and he was received into the Anglican Church in 1976. As the allegations are about an event that occurred over forty years ago [forty-five years, I’ve read somewhere], that places it back in the sixties, probably before his ordination. I believe two other individuals, now dead, were implicated in the alleged rape.
Hepworth, as the above link indicates, is quite an important figure in religio-political circles:
He is currently the Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, an international body of continuing Anglican churches, and Bishop Ordinary of the Diocese of Australia in the Anglican Catholic Church in Australia.
Now, I’ve never heard of these august institutions, and I’m afraid nothing could be of less interest to me than the internal politics of religious sects, but Hepworth’s activities have certainly taken him into the political arena, in religious and in secular terms:
Hepworth has a degree in political science and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Adelaide in 1982 with a thesis about Catholic Action entitled “The Movement Revisited: A South Australian Perspective”. For five years he was lecturer in politics at Northern Territory University before becoming co-ordinator of international studies at the University of South Australia.[2] In 1998 he was elected to the Australian Constitutional Convention as a member of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy.[3] He was formerly chair of the Australia-Vietnam Human Rights Committee in South Australia.[4]
Hepworth is a regular radio commentator on 5AA, in Leon Byner’s time slot [Byner’s been around a long time – I used to listen to him as a high school kid, and found him mildly witty, until I realised the bully-boy nature of his tactics, cutting people off because he had the power to do so, then badmouthing them when they had no chance to defend themselves, the age-old method of shock-jocks everywhere. I’ve never listened to him since]. It’s fair to say, from all this, that he’s a prominent figure here in South Australia. This is important, I think, in considering the allegations.
The question of motive obviously arises. It seems unlikely that such a prominent figure as Hepworth would make an allegation of this nature without considering the consequences very seriously. Financial gain can surely be ruled out, and I can’t think of any other motive for making a false allegation. Spiteful or other motives would be too easily found out. From what I’ve heard [I would need to substantiate this] Hepworth left the Catholic Church precisely because of this alleged event. It’s not unreasonable to assume that he has been haunted by it, and he has finally decided to seek reparation, not from the law, but from the Catholic Church.
This issue of the law or the Church is key. As an atheist, I would naturally go to the law on such a matter, but we have to remember that Hepworth is a person steeped in religion and faith, and that his sense of outrage might well find a focus on the Catholic Church, both for its creation of the conditions in which these events occur, and for its lack of response to complaints. He would have felt personally betrayed, along with a crisis of faith [at least in that Church] and all that this entails. It seems that Hepworth’s exasperation has led to the matter being taken up by Xenophon, who has forced the issue by naming Dempsey as one of the alleged perpetrators. There are obvious problems with this, as naming amounts to shaming, and the public, not to mention the police and legal authorities, have no evidence before them upon which to base a judgement. Xenophon’s argument appears to be that the Catholic Church’s heel-dragging on this case is to blame. The Adelaide Advertiser [September 14] quoted Xenophon on the front page, from his speech which named Dempsey:
This creates a serious moral dilemma for me. It has put me as a representative of the people of SA in a situation where I have privileged information. And the problem with privileged information is that it can be misused to benefit only a select few. The question is do the people that attend this priest’s parish have a right to know that serious allegations of sexual assault have been levelled at their priest?
In an earlier interview with The Advertiser, Xenophon spoke about his intentions:
I’m reluctant to do so, but really this is a matter where the Catholic Church of SA bears, I believe, considerable responsibility.
One can only guess at the ‘privileged information’ Xenophon is talking about, but it’s reasonable to assume that Hepworth has confided to him the details of the alleged rape, along with his frustration at the Catholic Church’s lack of will to pursue the matter.
Now, to the details of the alleged rape. It turns out that the allegations aren’t about an isolated incident, but serial and violent rape over a period of twelve years, from when Hepworth was fifteen, in 1960, to 1972. Xenophon named in parliament the two other parties to these events, Ronald Pickering and John Stockdale. Claims against these two deceased priests were apparently settled in Melbourne, presumably by the Catholic Church there [George Pell, former archbishop of Melbourne, is a friend of Hepworth’s, who shares his conservative views].
Xenophon also targeted Monsignor David Cappo, South Australia’s high profile Commissioner for Social Inclusion, and Vicar-General of the Archdiocese of Adelaide, for failing to act, or to act with sufficient celerity, on Hepworth’s claims, first aired four years ago. However the Catholic Church hierarchy here in South Australia has come out strongly in its own defence. A few days ago I opened my work emails [I work part-time for a community centre that has been taken over by Centacare, the Church’s social welfare arm] to find that all staff had been sent the full text of a statement by Archbishop Philip Wilson in response to Hepworth’s allegations. Here’s what Wilson has to say about Monsignor Cappo’s role:
Monsignor Cappo who acts on my behalf has met with Archbishop Hepworth on multiple occasions since 2007. In fact at least eight meetings have been held, all of lengthy duration. Monsignor Cappo gave me a full briefing of each meeting, immediately following his interviews with Archbishop Hepworth. On my behalf Monsignor Cappo urged Archbishop Hepworth, at the end of each meeting, to give his permission to proceed with an investigation in the allegations. On each occasion Archbishop Hepworth declined, indicating that he was not in a proper emotional state to deal with an investigation.
The statement also claims that Hepworth was urged to take the complaint to the police as it was clearly a criminal allegation. Hepworth consistently declined to do so, but in February this year he sent a letter to the Church indicating that he was now ready to proceed, and giving permission for a [presumably internal] investigation to commence. Wilson goes on to say that this process is now well under way and that all necessary interviews will have taken place. However, Hepworth has been asked to provide a list of other people who might throw some light on these events. No reply has yet been received from Hepworth.
Wilson has supported Monsignor Cappo’s handling of these matters, which he says have been treated with compassion and sensitivity throughout. ‘Archbishop Hepworth himself has acknowledged as much on several occasions’.
The statement runs to three pages and is generally comprehensive and convincing. Perhaps the only question mark hanging over it is the refusal to have Dempsey stood down while he was being investigated. Wilson offers this:
Priests are normally stood aside from their ministry when accusations of child sexual abuse are made or where there is otherwise any risk posed by the priest’s continued ministry. In such cases this decision is clear and made as a matter of course. In this case, however, we are not talking about child sexual abuse. Despite the unfortunate suggestions made to the contrary in the past few days, the allegations refer to when Archbishop Hepworth was in his 20s. That is over forty years ago. And considering the presumption of innocence and the good standing of the priest under investigation, I would not stand a priest down in these circumstances.
All of this seems eminently reasonable. An earlier newspaper report suggested that Hepworth had been the alleged victim of rape over twelve years from the age of fifteen by three priests, but in fact the alleged rapes by Dempsey occurred some years after the rapes by Pickering and Stockdale. However, the claim by Wilson that Hepworth was in his twenties at the time of these alleged rapes is at odds with what Hepworth has told The Age newspaper, in an article published on September 14:
He says that he fled the Catholic priesthood in his 20s after serial sexual assaults over 12 years by a seminarian and two priests. He told The Age Monsignor Dempsey had subjected him to ”at least a half a dozen” sexual assaults over three years from when he was aged about 18, ”by which stage I was in a fairly bad state”.
Of course these events allegedly occurred a long time ago, and memory is unreliable, but eighteen is obviously more of a borderline age than twenty-something [the age of ‘adulthood’ would’ve been twenty-one at the time]. There are also other inconsistencies and concerns raised by this case, some of which I’ll look at in the next post.