BY MARCI A. HAMILTON
Newsday.com
Marci A. Hamilton is a professor of public law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and author of the forthcoming "Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children."

November 9, 2007

Who would have thought that the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa, could be a place where girls could be physically and sexually abused by one of the dormitory matrons?

Winfrey, after all, has been a vocal and active advocate for survivors of child abuse, having experienced this horror as a child herself. You can only imagine her anguish when she heard that the institution she created to nurture girls was doing the opposite.

There is a lesson here for everyone: Those who abuse children typically select careers close to them. Whether they choose to be teachers, dormitory matrons, clergy or Boy Scout leaders, they position themselves to have the greatest access to children.

They are scheming and devious to serve their sexual compulsions. Even when the one who is supporting the organization is especially sensitive to child abuse, as is Winfrey, these are people who are very hard to identify.
(more…)

By RICHARD KOE

Christian News Northwest

    PORTLAND — More than 70 pastors and church leaders got a heavy dose of information about sex offenders in the church and faith community at a seven-hour advanced workshop on Oct. 25 at the Quality Inn & Suites in northeast Portland.
    The main message they received from four featured speakers — a treatment specialist, lawyer, and police members of a child abuse team — was to simply report any incident of child sex abuse in a church or faith community, and let the professionals investigate and follow up.
    The conference was organized and co-sponsored by Eric Bahme of Eastside Foursquare Church and Jim Cottrell of Freedom House, Noting that some 3,500 churches nationally have responded to allegations of sexual misconduct in programs involving children and youth the past 10 years, they said the conference sought to help reduce the rate of child victimization in the faith community.
    Cory Jewell Jensen, co-director of the Center for Behavioral Intervention in Beaverton, treats adult sex offenders and provides training or consultation to the National Center for the Prosecution of Child Abuse as well as law enforcement and advocacy groups.
    She suggested a safety plan for churches regarding child sex offenders who may frequent their organization, such as treating everyone the same, training the pastor and staff, reviewing work contracts, checking a person’s history, requiring workers to sign a release, and encouraging offenders to keep up their training.
    Churches have been too forgiving and gullible and need training, Jensen noted. Leaders should be informed of any sex offender in their midst, and share that information with other churches and within their denomination.

(more…)

Kelly Clark, Esq.
O’Donnell and Clark Annual Firm Dinner
September 19, 2007,
Monarch Hotel
Clackamas, Oregon.

A Defense of Our Work.

Mark asked me to speak to you tonight about the work on the child abuse cases that I and the litigation team at O and C have done for the last several years. Many of you know something about these cases, some of you probably know very little. Anyway, I told MOD I was happy to do it, but that it didn’t seem to me to fit the general context of our dinners– which have always been concerned with some aspect of public policy. "Well," he said, "you blame everything else on the Democrats; I’m sure you can find some way to blame them for child abuse." Hmmm… tempting.

As I thought about it, however, it did occur to me that, while these cases against churches, schools, youth groups and such do not lend themselves directly to a political discussion, yet there are aspects of this work that, I have come to believe, do raise interesting questions of public consequence. It will be my goal tonight to explain what is at stake in these cases, why it is important to bring them– first of course for the survivors, for whom it is all about justice and healing. But also, more to the context of our dinner, why it is important for society that the institutions of trust in which these cases usually happen regain and retain our trust. For I will argue that these institutions of trust– elsewhere called Mediating Structures, elsewhere called 1000 Points of Light– are a critical component of any free society, an important guardian of liberty. And I will also argue that the litigation we bring against them is necessary, a radical surgery, but one unavoidable if the infection of child abuse is to be healed and these entities cleansed.

Now if it sounds like this thesis is a bit defensive, I confess defensiveness. So often I am confronted by those who, of course do not condone child abuse, still seem confused or even angry that we would regularly sue such rightly revered institutions as the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, the Mormon Church, schools, athletic leagues, youth organizations and others. I know very few people who are not loyal to one or more of these groups, and I often sense they are troubled in some way that they seem not to be able fully to articulate. Well, I will try tonight to articulate what it is that troubles them, and you, about these cases, and at the same time to offer a defense of our work– an apologia pro labore sua, to borrow a phrase from John Henry Newman.

(more…)

The Register Guard
Op-Ed
by Kelly Clark
April 29, 2007

Amidst all the congratulations going around these last days concerning the long-awaited resolution of the Archdiocese Bankruptcy, I have noticed a particular tendency among nearly all involved to want to move on and put the past behind us. At one level, I wholeheartedly agree with those sentiments. It is time for this Archdiocese to heal. As a lawyer who has represented over one hundred individuals with claims against the Catholic Church, including forty-one in this Bankruptcy, I have pledged my assistance to the Archbishop, and to his lawyers, in doing whatever I can do to facilitate that healing. The Archdiocese needs it, the larger faith community needs it and our city and state need it.

At the same time, however, the duty I have to the courageous men and women I have represented requires me to remind the community that, while it is all well and good to say let us move on, it is not that simple for the abuse survivors. Between the long delays of the bankruptcy, the breathtakingly broad gag orders, and the natural tendency of child abuse survivors to stay silent, their voices have not been heard in many, many months. As I have listened over the last fifteen years to the stories of boys and girlsnow men and womenwho were abused by priests, teachers, nuns, and others they trusted from a Church they loved, and then as I have heard comments from the community these past days and months, I am reminded that there is still much misunderstanding about the nature of priest sexual abuse and its impact. The people who came forward to name their abuse have struggled too hard, for too long, too courageously, to let any misconceptions about what happened to them go unanswered. The misunderstandings and myths we have often heard about child abuse and its survivors in the past years need to be corrected.

(more…)