Visualizing the Transfers of Abusers in the 2009 Ryan Report Emilie Pine, Susan Leavy, Mark T

Visualizing the Transfers of Abusers in the 2009 Ryan Report Emilie Pine, Susan Leavy, Mark T. Keane

Éire-Ireland, Volume 55, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2020, pp. 247-251 (Article)

Published by Irish-American Cultural Institute DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2020.0010

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/763497

[ Access provided at 8 Oct 2020 08:40 GMT from University College Dublin ] Emilie Pine, Visualizing the Transfers Susan Leavy, and of Abusers in the 2009 Mark T. Keane Ryan Report

The 2009 publication of the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (the Ryan report) marked the conclusion of a nine- year, state-funded, licensed investigation into residential care for Irish children at institutions managed by the Catholic church.1 It comprises five volumes, totaling more than 2,600 pages, including testimony from 1,712 witnesses. As Mary Raftery put it, the Ryan report “painstakingly charted the vast scale of abuse of tens of thou- sands of children within institutions.” It established once and for all the systemic nature of abuse in Irish institutions, “giv[ing] us a com- pelling vision of the hell to which so many children were consigned.”2 The presentation of these conditions includes analysis of the Cath- olic congregations’ repeated response to allegations of abuse. For example, the report states in regard to the Christian Brothers, “The records of the congregation show that on a number of occasions individuals who were accused of sexual abuse were transferred to other

. See the website of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, available at http://www.childabusecommission.ie. The original report is available on this site. The digitized, searchable version of the report is available on the website of the Industrial Memories project, https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie/ryan-report. . Mary Raftery, “Report a Monument to a Society’s Shame,” Irish Times, 21 May 2009. The Ryan report is one of several reports into the abuse of children by the Catholic religious orders. See also the Ferns report (2005), the Cloyne report (2010), and the Murphy report (2009). See also Carole Holohan, In Plain Sight: Responding to the Ferns, Ryan, Murphy, and Cloyne Reports (Dublin: Amnesty International Ireland, 2011).

Éire-Ireland 55: 1 & 2 Spr/Sum 20 The 2009 Ryan Report 247 residential or day schools.”3 Transferring an abuser became one way to protect the reputation of the institution and the order by minimiz- ing conflict and the potential for public awareness and scandal:

In some cases brothers who had been sexually abusing children were, in their later careers, appointed to senior positions within the prov- ince. When asked at the phase I hearing for Letterfrack how this had happened, Br. Gibson explained that because the leadership in the congregation changed every twelve years, there was no memory within the organisation of offences committed before that. He acknowl- edged that there was a personal file for each brother and concluded that these files were not consulted in making appointments.4

Gibson blamed an amnesiac system for the promotion of abusers; the cause, however, was not amnesia. As Marie Keenan argues, “an unusually consistent pattern has emerged in the handling of abuse complaints by Catholic church leaders.”5 This pattern includes denial, cover-up, and in the case of staff employed at residential institutions, the transfer of abusers from one institution to another in the wake of allegations of abuse. The congregational response to abuse—to transfer, to pretend to forget, to avoid public knowledge—was not limited to a few occasions or solely to the Christian Brothers. The report notes the repeated transfer of one priest, Father Santino of the Rosminian Order:

With the knowledge that the order possessed about his past history and attitudes, they must have been aware of the likelihood that he would sexually abuse boys in this institution. It follows that the order was prepared to put boys at risk in order to find a place for somebody who might cause public scandal if he were to be located elsewhere.6

Again, the report contends that “transferring abusers to other institutions where they would be in contact with children put those children

. Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Dublin: Stationery Office, 2009; hereafter cited as Ryan Report), vol. 1, chapter 6, para. 85. . Ibid. . Marie Keenan, Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Gender, Power, and Organizational Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xxiv–xxv. . Ryan Report, volume 2, chapter 2, paragraph 148.

248 Éire-Ireland 55: 1 & 2 Spr/Sum 20 The 2009 Ryan Report at risk.”7 It also notes the transfer of problematic nuns in and out of the Sisters of Mercy institution at Cappoquin. The Ryan report’s authors conclude, “When confronted with evidence of sexual abuse, the response of the religious authorities was to transfer the offender to another location where in many instances he was free to abuse again. . . . The safety of children in general was not a consideration.”8 Despite this evidence, no consistent analysis of transfers as a system-wide pattern of response to abuse is offered, for the Ryan report is structured as an in-depth narrative focusing on one institution at a time. This organization generates a thorough story about each institution and certain individuals singled out for analysis; however, it also means that if readers seek to understand systemic congregational responses to allegations of abuse in more than one institution at a time, they must be familiar with the entirety of the document. Missing in the report is a section that specifically analyses the series of events that lead to and follow the transfer of staff between institutions. Such an analysis of organizational responses to abuse would not only indicate how congregations responded in its aftermath; it could also illustrate a link between behavior and response. As Don- ald Palmer and Valerie Feldman argue, organizational “structures . . . shape member attitudes and behaviour.”9 In other words, organizational responses are not only reactive but also influential; how an organization responds shapes the behavior of abusers, so that transferring abusers or ignoring their abuse not only enables but encour- ages abuse to occur. The Industrial Memories project at University College Dublin— led by the authors—has digitized the Ryan report, seeking to make it more accessible by creating a new database version that is fully searchable (https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie).10 This database enabled the team to run searches for keywords that would indicate transfer (keywords included “transfer,’’ “move,” “removal,” “reassign,” “dis-

. Ryan Report, volume 2, chapter 2, paragraph 216. . “Executive Summary, Conclusions: 22,” Ryan Report. . Donald Palmer and Valerie Feldman, “Toward a More Comprehensive Anal- ysis of the Role of Organizational Culture in Child Sexual Abuse in Institutional Contexts,” Child Abuse & Neglect 74 (2017): 23. . This research project was funded by the Irish Research Council (2015–19) under the New Horizons scheme.

Éire-Ireland 55: 1 & 2 Spr/Sum 20 The 2009 Ryan Report 249 miss,” “dispense,” “resign”) in order to identify individual staff members who had been transferred within the system as a result of allegations or evidence of abuse. These results were filtered to ensure reliability—for example, to remove references to the transfer of children between institutions. Using the above search terms and filters enabled the identification of 462 moves made by abusers within the system, including transfer to another school or order house, and dispensation or dismissal.11 Performing further textual analysis of each of these 462 moves identified 86 individuals whom the report docu- ments as moving within the system.12 Combining such quantitative analysis with close reading of the case histories of those 86 individuals allowed the Industrial Memories project to map their trajectories within the system (see figure 1).13 In figure 1 each circle represents one of the following: an institution, an alleged abuser who was moved, or an outcome. The larger the circle, the more activity is represented by that node—i.e., the more moves by an individual in or out of an institution. The circles are grouped together and color-coded to represent the different religious orders. Perhaps most striking are the crisscrossing lines. These lines indicate multiple transfers of abusers, showing how abuse spread unchecked across the system. The graphic representation of this information, in contrast to the written report, immediately communicates the movement of abusers within the system and between different institutions. Viewers can see that based on the evidence in the report, the Christian Brothers’ institutions were most likely to

. A “dispensation” granted permission for a nun or brother to leave the religious order. . The transfer graph is based solely on the evidence of transferring abusers noted in the Ryan report; the figure of 86 thus reflects the number of staff that the report identifies as having been a result of allegations or evidence of abuse. The number of abusers working within the system was much higher, given that many abusers were never transferred. The number of staff transferred was also probably higher than recorded in the report, given that the Ryan report did not specifically profile transfers. Thus there were likely transfers that the report’s authors did not include. Only access to the underlying evidence files—those of the commission and of the religious orders—can give an authoritative picture. . See Mark T. Keane, Susan Leavy, and Emilie Pine, “Retrospective Analyses of Child Abuse Reports: Using Data Analytics to Gain Insights from Past Inquiry Reports on Historical Cases of Clerical Abuse” (forthcoming) for discussion of the data analytics methodology behind the transfer analysis.

250 Éire-Ireland 55: 1 & 2 Spr/Sum 20 The 2009 Ryan Report have staff members transferred into and out of an institution, with the Artane school having the highest number of transfers. Indeed, the transfer record for the other orders is significantly less—partly a reflection of the smaller scale of these institutions—suggesting that transferring abusers was a more prevalent organizational norm for the Christian Brothers than for other orders. Additionally, looking at the trajectories of abusers in different orders makes clear that the Rosminians were more likely to transfer abusers to the order house where they would have no contact with children, whereas the Chris- tian Brothers were more likely to transfer an abuser to a day school where abuse also took place. There are limitations to this form of visual representation, not least because it is not based on the primary-research material—the records of the commission are unavailable to researchers.14 As a result, researchers do not have access to the records to recover the full range of transfers, including evidence of decision-making; nor do they have access to information about transfers or abuse available in the records of the Department of Education or captured in victim testimony. Furthermore, the graph can neither express the stories behind each of the individual staff members nor the scale of the damage they inflicted on children. As a result, this visual representation will always function as a secondary narrative to the report’s comprehensive linear narrative. However, the graph instantly communicates the systemic nature of transfer. The eighty-six named staff members, the lines connecting institutions, and the crisscrossing lines of multiple transfers illustrate how abuse happened not in isolation, but across the system. The graph thus conveys to an audience unfamiliar with the report’s 2,600 pages or with the full story of the institutions the operation of a transfer system—a strategy that protected serial abusers. More than preventing “scandal,” this system enabled the chronic abuse of children by Ireland’s Catholic congregations.

. At the time of writing, the proposed Retention of Records Bill (2019), if en- acted, would seal these records for seventy-five years. See Conall Ó Fathárta, “Abuse Survivors’ Concern Over Plan to Seal Records,” Irish Examiner, 16 Aug. 2019.

Éire-Ireland 55: 1 & 2 Spr/Sum 20 The 2009 Ryan Report 251 Figure 1. Mapping the transfer of alleged abusers in the industrial-school system.