Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A 12-year-old girl in the Geneva area was forced to commit fellatio by a group of youths, two of whom she knew from school, last Friday 4 February, and the family has pressed charges, reports the Tribune de Geneve.
The girl and a friend were returning from a party when they were stopped by the boys and after some discussion, the assault reportedly took place. The friend called for help without success, it appears. The incident was not reported by the traumatized girl to her parents until an older sister discovered it after the weekend, when police and the school were notified. The newspaper says that according to the older sister the boys had threatened the girls to remain silent, but they had then boasted about the incident to others.
A man in the central province of Santa Fe, Argentina has been charged with raping and beating his daughter, now 43 years old, and fathering 10 children by her since she was 13. The investigative judge in the case, Virgilio Palud, has likened the case to that of the Austrian Josef Fritzl, convicted in 2009 of keeping his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathering seven children with her.
The woman, Juana Elvira G of Nicanor Molina, said “There was no room for pain . . . just punishment, threats, torment and children to take care of.” The abuse by her father began when she was 13. Her first child, a boy, committed suicide when he was 17 after he found out who his father was.
The man has denied the charges but DNA tests on the children have proved conclusive. The man faces more than 20 years in prison if convicted.
Links to other sites: La Capital (Spa), Vancouver Sun
Police in Belgium raided offices of the Catholic Church Thursday, sparking a storm of protest. “The Church’s headquarters, the Palace of the Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, was sealed off, while officers searched for related material. Bishops meeting there were barred from leaving the premises or telephoning outside for several hours,” reports the BBC. Several other offices were included in the raid, part of continuing investigations into sexual abuse and pedophile crimes by Church clergy. The Bishops Conference, which is conducting its own investigation, was a target, and spokesperson Eric de Beukelaer protested afterwards that its work was compromised by the raid, given the confidential nature of some of the information given it by victims.
Roger Vangheluwe, the bishop of Bruges, resigned in March after saying he had sexually abused a boy 20 years earlier.
Links to other sites: Aljazeera, BBC, New York Times
Swiss Catholic church to take harder stance
Over 100 cases were presented to church officials
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Swiss Bishops Conference ended 2 June with several announcements that seemed to indicate a new era of “openness” by the Catholic Church.
For the first time, detailed statistics of sexual abuse complaints were presented (104 cases), the Bishops also urged victims to come forward and present their complaints, and they announced closer cooperation with authorities.
The 104 cases reported between January and May this year, span from alleged abuses commited during the past 50 years.
© Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
Catholic Church leaders in Switzerland say they underestimated the problem
Fribourg, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Switzerland’s Bishops Conference, the highest body in the Catholic church in this country, has publicly apologized for problems of sexual abuse by its clergy, saying it grossly “underestimated the extent of the problem.”
The Conference notes in a statement (pdf) issued Wednesday 31 March, the most public acknowledgment made to date of the problem, that “Diocesan leaders and those in religious orders made mistakes, and we apologize for those mistakes.”
An estimated 1,000 people known as Forgotten Australians were part of a large crowd that attended a ceremony in Canberra, Australia Sunday 15 November where Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized to the estimated 70,000 people who were abused in state care from about 1930-1970, many of them part of a group of British children forced to migrate to Australia and work as forced labour on farms, some of them sexually abused as children. The British prime minister will also formally apologize in 2010 for the British forced migration policy, his office has announced.
Links to other sites: ABC, Australia, BBC, Sydney Morning Herald
Geneva, Switzerland (20 Minutes, Fre) – Fifteen children under the age of 12 were hospitalized and treated for sexual abuse by other children at the HUG (university hospitals) in 2008. but doctors there say they are seeing only a portion of cases. In an interview with Giancarlo Mariani at 20 Minutes they were unable to provide an estimate for the number of children being sexually abused, but they did say they are seeing several new kinds of cases.
