WINDOWS OF SHAME
This is one of those news reports that is almost unbelievable. We all should wish it did not exist, but here it is. What a sad story.
The Bishop England High School has just been sued for $300m. When the new school was built in 1998 on Daniel Island, it was designed to have 4 foot windows looking into the boys' and girls' locker rooms from inside the school. This means the architect and the school authorities deliberately placed the windows there. What were they thinking? They claim now it was for "safety." Safety for whom, the students or the voyeurs? Invasion of privacy issue aside, this was an invitation for child abuse. Sure enough, it happened, videos and all.
This shocking news is another item in the record of child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston. In 2007, the diocese lost a class-action lawsuit of child abuse and was made to pay $12m to the numerous victims. In 2019, the diocese published a list of 42 priests "credibly accused" of child sexual abuse.
Designing a school with large windows looking into the locker rooms may have been an innocently foolish blunder. Let us hope so rather than something more nefarious. This issue is certain to come up in court if this suit actually goes to trial. The school could settle out of court.
Unfortunately, child sexual abuse has been a global scandal in the Roman Catholic church. And, it is not just the abuse itself, but the cover-up that magnified the wrong doing. The RC church had two great moral failings in the past century. One was insufficient opposition to Nazism and fascism. Adolf Hitler, arguably the most evil person in modern history, and a nominal Catholic, has never been excommunicated by the church, not even chastised. The other great failing was the world-wide child abuse scandal which included both the abuse and the cover up.
Thus, the church has a lot of work to do to reestablish its moral and ethical leadership. The new $300m lawsuit in South Carolina may be a step along the way to recovery.
