Talking about Touching
Bishop Robert Vasa of the Diocese of Baker, Oregon, has gone on record as a critic of the current “safe environment” programs being offered by dioceses in response to the Scandal, such as “Talking about Touching” and “Good Touch, Bad Touch” and others. Rather than curse the darkness, the good bishop has decided to light a proverbial candle as described in his latest email sent out to various folks.
In brief, he is working with the Catholic Medical Association and others to craft a new program to address the shortcomings of what is available now, with the most basic goal of endeavoring to train the parents to teach their own kids, which is what the Church says we’re supposed to do in the first place.
It has been a while since I corresponded with you regarding the Safe Environment Programs which are being used throughout the Dioceses of the US. I write to give you an update, offer some hope and ask a favor.
UPDATE: In the Fall of 2006 the Catholic Medical Association issued a Report titled: To Protect and to Prevent: The Sexual Abuse of Children and its Prevention. This Report is available for purchase on the CMA website: Cathmed.org. One of the recommendations of the Report was: “We recommend that the energy and resources now directed to child and adolescent empowerment programs be refocused on the development of programs to assist parents in being the primary educators and protectors of their children.” As you can imagine this recommendation has not been accepted or acted upon by the producers of other Child Protection strategies.
HOPE: It does not appear that others will engage in the recommended work. Thus, I have been working with a small group of dedicated Healthcare Professionals and Priests to fulfill this recommendation. We have studied the issues more thoroughly and have been engaged in formulating the script and format for a 6 hour video series focusing on strengthening and reinforcing good parenting as a primary way to assure the safety of children. The proposed title of our effort might be something like: Strong Families: Safer Children. While it may be that our program will not be adopted by Bishops as the only mechanism for fulfilling the requirements of Article 12 of the Charter for the Protection of Children it is our hope that at least some Bishops will adopt this program as well as many priests in a variety of Parishes and that the families therein will be able to benefit from it.
The letter continued
Technorati Tags: Catholic | bishop | Talking about Touching | safe environment | pedophile | sex abuse |
Many of us have been saying it for a long time, but it’s nice to be backed up by experts. The Catholic Medical Association has released a 55-page report recommending the US bishops end “safe-environment sex education” programs like Talking about Touching because of the damage it does to children and to their relationships with their parents. (For a review of what I originally wrote about Talking about Touching.)
The group released a 55-page study, “To Prevent and to Protect: Report of the Catholic Medical Association Task Force on the Sexual Abuse of Children and Its Prevention,” Oct. 27 during the association’s annual conference in Boston. ... The study states that sex abuse prevention programs that empower children to protect themselves are ineffective, inconsistent with the science of the emotional, cognitive, neurobiological and moral development of the child and contrary to the Church’s teaching on the education of children in matters pertaining to sex.
John Brehany, executive director of the CMA, boiled the debate down into one question: “Are (the programs) well designed, effective in practice, consistent with the Church’s teaching on human persons, family and sexual love?”
If you read my initial report on Talking about Touching, you’ll see that it isn’t. It was written by a group whose founding principle was the legalization of prostitution and whose founder was a “Dianic Wiccan priestess.” Even setting aside those problems, it promotes a worldview that sets aside questions of morality in favor of a relativistic approach of “Is it a bad touch?”, i.e. is this wrong in my subjective view? It also makes children the front-line of their own defense and undermines parents’ authority. As I showed in the article, the implementation of such programs also frequently undermine parental rights’ and authority as set out in Church teaching. What these programs do is turn children in good witnesses for the prosecution; they don’t prevent abuse. But then identifying and isolating abusers is properly the role of parents and other adults, not the children.
Ignoring the causes, real solutions
Technorati Tags:bishops, Catholic, Catholic Medical Association, doctors, safe environment, sex abuse, Talking about Touching
Is there such thing as a good “safe environment” program or is the concept itself flawed? The Diocese of Manchester in New Hampshire was unsatisfied with the programs available to it (like Talking about Touching) so it created its own. In fact, it created two. One is a musical theater show performed at area Catholic schools to which parents and children are invited. Another is a mandatory program that takes place in Catholic schools and during religious education instruction for pre-K to 12th grade.
Here’s an initial reaction. Once again we have programs taking place during time that’s supposed to be set aside for religious instruction. Are our children so well-catechized that we can afford to give up more of the precious little time we have already? And since when it is a religious function to teach kids about “safe touching”?
The Manchester programs tried to address the deficiencies in other programs. For example, they say that parents complained they were left out of the planning process and implementation. In reality, the complaint is that children should not be exposed to material harmful to their innocence and that as the primary educators of their children, parents are the ones to determine both harm and appropriateness. Like I’ve said before, if a diocese wanted to have an education program for parents who would then decide how best to educate their children that would be appropriate, but going directly to children as young as four to make them their own first-line of defense is wrong. Our job as adults is to protect the children, not leave them to defend themselves.
What about the enablers and the bishop?
Technorati Tags:bishops, Catholic, Manchester, McCormack, safe environment, sex abuse
The Catholic Medical Association agrees with me that “safe environment sex education” programs like Talking about Touching are ineffective and possibly dangerous and should be abandoned by dioceses that have implemented them. I’ve been saying this about Talking about Touching since it was first proposed three years ago.
These programs were supposed to be a panacea “empowering” children, when in reality they stripped children of their innocence, made them their own front-line defense against predators, and treated them like potential witnesses for the prosecution. They also effectively let dioceses off the hook by giving them something to point at when asked about the Scandal and, to top it off, often supplanted religious education programs, leaving our children even less catechized than before.
The Catholic Medical Association, the CMA, had engaged a task force of physicians who specialize in the care of children to examine sexual abuse of children and adolescents, its causes and the effectiveness of popular prevention programs used in schools. The experts were asked to suggest “interventions for the prevention of sexual abuse, based upon scientific principles of child neurobiological and moral development. …”
The task force findings echoed the concerns of thousands of parents, that the programs in use had “the potential … to traumatize the child by introducing false and negative concepts concerning the meaning and dignity of human sexual relatedness and the potential to produce distrust for trustworthy parents.”
These parental cries of protest reached the Vatican, where the Pontifical Council for the Family logged pleas and petitions asking the Council to address the issue of so-called “safety education” programs used in their schools for the prevention of sexual abuse. The Congregations for Bishops, Clergy and the Doctrine of the Faith urged the CMA to continue with the work of their task force.
Absence of morality
Technorati Tags:Catholic, parent’s rights, safe environment, sex abuse, sex education
The debate over “safe environment sex education” continues in the Minneapolis-St. Paul archdiocese. Unlike other dioceses, concerned parents have been successful in getting the archdiocese to agree to allow parishes to choose between a Catholic-appropriate program and Talking about Touching, whose deficiencies I have detailed at length.
The parents’ group, Primary Educators, has updated their blog with information on the new push for the program as the school year begins. Among the key bits is the news that for the first time “the archdiocese has publicly stated in writing that the “Formation in Christian Chastity” or Harrisburg program is approved by Archbishop Flynn.” This is the alternative to the Planned Parenthood-endorsed Talking about Touching that parents were able to get officials to allow, if begrudgingly. The Harrsiburg program now has 36 schools using it, while Talking about Touching will be used in 31.
Speaking of the Planned Parenthood endorsement, in a Q&A in the diocesan newspaper, Sr. Fran Donnelly, archdiocesan director of the youth protection office, admits to the fact of the endorsement. This should embarrass everyone pushing this program as much as its roots in a pro-prostitution occultic feminist organization.
I hope someday soon people wake up and realize that these programs unnecessarily strip the innocence from children, make them responsible for their own protection from predators, and aim to make us forget that the reason priestly predators were able to do the damage they did was because bishops coddled and protected them.
Technorati Tags:Catholic, Minneapolis, safe environment, sex abuse, Talking about Touching
