The United Nations and other humanitarian systems have sought to address sexual abuse on missions for decades. Chen Reis, director of the humanitarian assistance program at the University of Denver, writes that ending sexual abuse in these contexts requires an active, comprehensive approach.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof brought new media attention to Woody Allen’s past over the weekend, when Kristof published a letter from Allen’s adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, restating her claim that Allen had molested her. In Russia, Jamaica’s bobsled team arrives in Sochi without their equipment. And a UN committee denounces the Vatican’s handling of child sex abuse, all in today’s Global Scan.
The Vatican has long been a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. But today was the first time the Catholic Church had to answer the UN’s questions about its repeated failure to protect children from abuse.
Within the 6,000-plus pages of documents released by the Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee is evidence that Archbishop Timothy Dolan moved money that may have gone to victims of childhood sexual abuse into a fund for cemetery care. Dolan calls the charges “old and discredited attacks.”
In Pakistan, almost one-third of both girls and boys suffer some sort of sexual abuse. Often it comes at the hands of their own family members — and they seem to have nowhere to turn for help. So they suffer in silence, in the shadows, often for years.