Why boys are turning into girls

Girls will be girls and boys will be girls: everyday ‘gender-bending’ chemicals are feminising increasing numbers of babies Photo: Getty Creative

“Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.”

– Bertrand Russell, “The Impact of Science on Society”, 1953

Gender-bending chemicals are largely exempt from new EU regulations, warns Geoffrey Lean.

Telegraph | Oct 23, 2009

Here’s something rather rotten from the State of Denmark. Its government yesterday unveiled official research showing that two-year-old children are at risk from a bewildering array of gender-bending chemicals in such everyday items as waterproof clothes, rubber boots, bed linen, food, nappies, sunscreen lotion and moisturising cream.

The 326-page report, published by the environment protection agency, is the latest piece in an increasingly alarming jigsaw. A picture is emerging of ubiquitous chemical contamination driving down sperm counts and feminising male children all over the developed world. And anti-pollution measures and regulations are falling far short of getting to grips with it.

Sperm counts are falling so fast that young men are less fertile than their fathers and produce only a third as much, proportionately, as hamsters. And gender-bending chemicals are increasingly being blamed for the mystery of the “lost boys”: babies who should normally be male who have been born as girls instead.

The Danish government set out to find out how much contamination from gender-bending chemicals a two-year-old child was exposed to every day. It concluded that a child could be “at critical risk” from just a few exposures to high levels of the substances, such as from rubber clogs, and imperilled by the amount it absorbed from sources ranging from food to sunscreens.

The Disappearing Male

The results build on earlier studies showing that British children have higher levels of gender-bending chemicals in their blood than their parents or grandparents. Indeed WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund), which commissioned the older research, warned that the chemicals were so widespread that “there is very little, if anything, individuals can do to prevent contamination of themselves and their families.” Prominent among them are dioxins, PVC, flame retardants, phthalates (extensively used to soften plastics) and the now largely banned PCBs, one and a half million tons of which were used in countless products from paints to electrical equipment.

Young boys, like those in the Danish study, could end up producing less sperm and developing feminised behaviour. Research at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University found that boys whose mothers were exposed to PCBs and dioxins were more likely to play with dolls and tea sets and dress up in female clothes.

And it is in the womb that babies are most vulnerable; a study of umbilical cords from British mothers found that every one contained hazardous chemicals. Scientists at the University of Rochester in New York discovered that boys born to women exposed to phthalates had smaller penises and other feminisation of the genitals.

The contamination may also offer a clue to a mysterious shift in the sex of babies. Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls: it is thought to be nature’s way of making up for the fact that men were more likely to be killed hunting or in conflict. But the proportion of females is rising, so much so that some 250,000 babies who statistically should have been boys have ended up as girls in Japan and the United States alone. In Britain, the discrepancy amounts to thousands of babies a year.

A Canadian Indian community living on ancestral lands at the eastern tip of Lake Huron, hemmed in by one of the biggest agglomerations of chemical factories on earth, gives birth to twice as many girls as boys. It’s the same around Seveso in Italy, contaminated with dioxins from a notorious accident in the 1970s, and among Russian pesticide workers. And there’s more evidence from places as far apart as Israel and Taiwan, Brazil and the Arctic.

Yet gender-benders are largely exempt from new EU regulations controlling hazardous chemicals. Britain, then under Tony Blair’s premiership, was largely responsible for this – restricting their inclusion in the first draft of the legislation, and then causing even what was included to be watered down.Confidential documents show that it did so after pressure from George W Bush’s administration, which protested that US exports “could be impacted”.

Now the Danish government is planning to lobby to have the rules toughened up. It is particularly concerned by other studies which show that gender-bending chemicals acting together have far worse effects than the expected sum of their individual impacts. It wants this to be reflected in the regulations, citing its discovery of the many sources to which the two-year-olds are exposed – modern slings and arrows, as it were, of outrageous fortune.

Body Worlds plans cadaver show dedicated to sex

 

German anatomist Gunther von Hagens and his wife Angelina Whalley (L) pose in front of a plastinated human body during the media preview of the Koerperwelten (‘Body Worlds’) exhibition in Zurich September 10, 2009. The exhibition by von Hagens, famous for his Body Worlds shows of plastinated human bodies, runs from September 11 to February 28, 2010. Reuters

“We have discussed whether it is proper to show homosexuality and in what way. This is a very delicate subject.”

Reuters | Sep 11, 2009

By Jason Rhodes

ZURICH (Reuters) – German anatomists plan a new show dedicated solely to dead bodies having sex as part of the Body Worlds exhibitions.

Gunther von Hagens and his wife Angelina Whalley show corpses prepared using a technique invented by von Hagens called “plastination,” that removes water from specimens and preserves them with silicon rubber or epoxy resin.

“It’s not my intention to show certain sexual poses. My goal is really to show the anatomy and the function,” Body Worlds creative director Whalley told Reuters in an interview, adding the sex exhibition may open next year.

Body Worlds exhibitions, visited by 27 million people across the world, have been criticized for presenting entire corpses, stripped of skin to reveal the muscles and organs underneath, in lifelike and often theatrical positions.

Von Hagens has already triggered uproar with a new exhibit which shows just two copulating corpses.

German politicians called the current “Cycle of Life” show charting conception to old age “revolting” and “unacceptable” when it showed in Berlin earlier this year because it included copulating cadavers.

The way a plastinate is exhibited can vary from country to country to reflect local sensibilities. A vote of local employees decided that one of the copulating female cadavers should wear fewer clothes in Zurich than was the case in Berlin.

“Switzerland is the first country that already said from the outset that we could show whatever we wanted,” said von Hagens.

“Zurich is ready … but it’s maybe not so easy in every other town,” he said. “We have discussed whether it is proper to show homosexuality and in what way. This is a very delicate subject.”

Von Hagens and Whalley said they both intended to donate their bodies for plastination, but would not leave instructions about how to display them, dismissing this as vanity.

“I find it a great opportunity to give something to others by donating my body, namely self-awareness,” said Whalley.

Von Hagens said he and some other body donors even saw plastination as an alternative to burial or cremation, giving them more certainty about would happen to their bodies after death.

“Cremation for me is hell,” he said.

Grandmother who objected to gay march accused of hate crime

Daily Mail | Oct 25, 2009

By Andrew Levy

Shock: Grandmother Pauline Howe had never been in trouble with the law before

After witnessing a gay pride march, committed Christian Pauline Howe wrote to the council to complain that the event had been allowed to go ahead.

But instead of a simple acknowledgement, she received a letter warning her she might be guilty of a hate crime and that the matter had been passed to police.

Two officers later turned up at the frightened grandmother’s home and lectured her about her choice of words before telling her she would not be prosecuted.

Mrs Howe, 67, whose husband Peter is understood to be a Baptist minister, yesterday spoke of her shock at the visit and accused police of ‘ wasting resources’ on her case rather than fighting crime.

‘I’ve never been in any kind of trouble before so I was stunned to have two police officers knocking at my door,’ she said.

‘Their presence in my home made me feel threatened. It was a very unpleasant experience.

‘The officers told me that my letter was thought to be an intention of hate but I was expressing views as a Christian.’

Mrs Howe’s case has been taken up by the Christian Institute, which is looking into potential breaches of freedom of speech and religious rights under the Human Rights Act, either by Norwich City Council or Norfolk Police.

And homosexual equality pressure group Stonewall has branded the authorities’ response ‘ disproportionate’.

Mrs Howe claims she was ‘verbally abused’ while distributing ‘Christian leaflets’ at the march in the centre of Norwich in July. She said someone ‘whispered something in my ear and disappeared’. She fired off a letter to the council describing the march as a ‘public display of indecency’ that was ‘offensive to God’.

She wrote: ‘It is shameful that this small but vociferous lobby should be allowed such a display unwarranted by the minimal number of homosexuals.’

The letter went on to describe homosexuals as ‘sodomites’, said homosexuality had ‘contributed to the downfall of every empire’ and added that ‘gay sex was a major cause of sexually transmitted infections’.

But Mrs Howe told the Sunday Telegraph her comments were an expression of her beliefs, not homophobia. She received a response from the council’s deputy chief executive, Bridget Buttinger, who said it was the local authority’s ‘duty… to eliminate discrimination of all kinds’.

She went on: ‘The content of your letter has been assessed as potentially being hate related because of the views you expressed towards people of a certain sexual orientation.

‘Your details and details of the contents of your letter have been recorded as such and passed to the police.’

The two police officers later turned up at her home in Poringland, near Norwich, and informed her the contents of her letter had caused offence.

The incident has echoes of the case of a pensioner couple who were lectured by officers from Lancashire Police on the evils of ‘homophobia’ and ‘hate crimes’ after criticising gay rights in a letter to Wyre Borough Council. Joe Roberts and his wife Helen, both Christians, were later awarded damages.

Christian Institute spokesman Mike Judge said yesterday: ‘People must be free to express their beliefs  –  yes, even unpopular beliefs  –  to government bodies without fear of a knock at the door from police.

‘It’s not a crime to be Christian but it increasingly feels like it.’

Stonewall’s chief executive, Ben Summerskill, said: ‘Clearly her views are pretty offensive but nevertheless this [response] is disproportionate.’

Norfolk Police defended their treatment of Mrs Howe, saying: ‘We investigate all alleged hate incidents. In this instance the individual concerned was visited by officers, the comments discussed, and no further action was taken.’

Sex abuse rife in other religions, says Vatican

“Of all priests involved in the abuses, 80 to 90% belong to this sexual orientation minority which is sexually engaged with adolescent boys between the ages of 11 and 17.”

Catholic priests and nuns for decades terrorised thousands of boys and girls, while government inspectors failed to stop the abuse.

guardian.co.uk | Sep 28, 2009

by Riazat Butt, religious affairs correspondent, and Anushka Asthana

The Vatican has lashed out at criticism over its handling of its paedophilia crisis by saying the Catholic church was “busy cleaning its own house” and that the problems with clerical sex abuse in other churches were as big, if not bigger.

In a defiant and provocative statement, issued following a meeting of the UN human rights council in Geneva, the Holy See said the majority of Catholic clergy who committed such acts were not paedophiles but homosexuals attracted to sex with adolescent males.

The statement, read out by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s permanent observer to the UN, defended its record by claiming that “available research” showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse.

He also quoted statistics from the Christian Scientist Monitor newspaper to show that most US churches being hit by child sex abuse allegations were Protestant and that sexual abuse within Jewish communities was common.

He added that sexual abuse was far more likely to be committed by family members, babysitters, friends, relatives or neighbours, and male children were quite often guilty of sexual molestation of other children.

The statement said that rather than paedophilia, it would “be more correct” to speak of ephebophilia, a homosexual attraction to adolescent males.

“Of all priests involved in the abuses, 80 to 90% belong to this sexual orientation minority which is sexually engaged with adolescent boys between the ages of 11 and 17.”

The statement concluded: “As the Catholic church has been busy cleaning its own house, it would be good if other institutions and authorities, where the major part of abuses are reported, could do the same and inform the media about it.”

The Holy See launched its counter–attack after an international representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, Keith Porteous Wood, accused it of covering up child abuse and being in breach of several articles under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Porteous Wood said the Holy See had not contradicted any of his accusations. “The many thousands of victims of abuse deserve the international community to hold the Vatican to account, something it has been unwilling to do, so far. Both states and children’s organisations must unite to pressurise the Vatican to open its files, change its procedures worldwide, and report suspected abusers to civil authorities.”

Representatives from other religions were dismayed by the Holy See’s attempts to distance itself from controversy by pointing the finger at other faiths.

Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, head of the New York Board of Rabbis, said: “Comparative tragedy is a dangerous path on which to travel. All of us need to look within our own communities. Child abuse is sinful and shameful and we must expel them immediately from our midst.”

A spokesman for the US Episcopal Church said measures for the prevention of sexual misconduct and the safeguarding of children had been in place for years.

Of all the world religions, Roman Catholicism has been hardest hit by sex abuse scandals. In the US, churches have paid more than $2bn (£1.25bn) in compensation to victims. In Ireland, reports into clerical sexual abuse have rocked both the Catholic hierarchy and the state.

The Ryan Report, published last May, revealed that beatings and humiliation by nuns and priests were common at institutions that held up to 30,000 children. A nine-year investigation found that Catholic priests and nuns for decades terrorised thousands of boys and girls, while government inspectors failed to stop the abuse.

School calls emergency assembly to tell children a 12-year-old male pupil was having a sex change

Boy, 12, is having sex change, school announces

A school called an emergency assembly to tell children that a 12-year-old male pupil was having a sex change.

Telegraph | Sep 18, 2009

By Murray Wardrop

The youngster arrived for his first term at secondary school wearing a dress and with long hair in ribboned pigtails after his parents changed his name to a female one by deed poll over the summer holidays.

However, the boy, who is preparing to undergo hormone treatment and sex change surgery, was immediately taunted by classmates who recognised him from primary school.

As a result, the 1,000-pupil school in south east England decided to call an emergency assembly ordering children to treat him as a girl and use his new name.

Related

Sex swap children: gender dysphoria at a young age

But parents have reacted angrily after some youngsters were apparently left in tears by the news. They claim that the head teacher should have informed parents of the matter beforehand, so that they could have discussed gender issues with their children.

One mother, whose daughter was a classmate of the boy at primary school, told The Sun: “She [my daughter] told me that the pupil is already a target for bullying.

“What has really upset the parents is that the school didn’t see fit to send us a letter first so we could explain it to children in our own way.

“Maybe we could have explained sexual politics and encouraged our kids to be more sensitive.

“They were simply told, ‘You may notice one pupil is not present in this assembly – that is because the pupil is now a girl’.

“The girl, as she now is, will go through hell because of how this has been handled.”

It is understood that at primary school, the boy’s head teacher insisted that children treat him as a boy, despite his feminine behaviour, which included wearing a bikini for swimming lessons, wearing his hair in pigtails and using riding a pink scooter.

However, the secondary school has provided him with a separate lavatory and changing room in its sports hall.

The boy’s mother told The Sun: “We are committed to ensuring the very best for our child. We are working with other agencies to ensure our child’s welfare is protected.”

Male bass in many US rivers feminized, study finds

AP | Sep 14, 2009

by Seth Borenstein

WASHINGTON – Government scientists figure that one out of five male black bass in American river basins have egg cells growing inside their sexual organs, a sign of how widespread fish feminizing has become.

The findings come from the U.S. Geological Survey in its first comprehensive examination of intersex fish in America, a problem linked to women’s birth control pills and other hormone treatments that seep into rivers. Sporadic reports of feminized fish have been reported for a few years.

The agency looked at past data from nine river basins — covering about two-thirds of the country — and found that about 6 percent of the nearly 1,500 male fish had a bit of female in them. The study looked at 16 different species, with most not affected.

But the fish most feminized are two of the most sought-after freshwater sportfish: the largemouth and smallmouth, which are part of the black bass family. Those two species were also the most examined with nearly 500 black bass tallied.

“It’s widespread,” said USGS biologist Jo Ellen Hinck. She is the lead author of the study, published online this month in Aquatic Toxicology. She said 44 percent of the sites where black bass were tested had at least one male with egg cells growing inside.

Past studies have linked the problem to endocrine-disrupting hormones, such as estrogen from women’s medicines. While the fish can still reproduce, studies have shown they don’t reproduce as well, Hinck said.

Intersex fish are also seen as a general warning about what some experts see as a wider problem of endocrine disruptors in the environment.

The egg cells growing in the male fish’s gonads can only be seen with a microscope after the fish has been caught and dissected.

The study used data from 1995 to 2004, when the government stopped funding the research. The only river basin examined that didn’t show any problems was Alaska’s Yukon River Basin.

The Southeast, especially the Pee Dee River Basin in North and South Carolina, had the highest rates of feminization. In Bucksport, S.C., 10 of 11 largemouth bass examined were intersex. In parts of the Mississippi River in Minnesota and the Yampa River in Colorado, 70 percent of the smallmouth bass had female signs.

Hinck said black bass seem to be more prone to the problem, but researchers don’t know why. She also found one common carp that was female with bits of male testes growing inside.

ArmorGroup Kept Kabul Security Contract Despite Questionable Record

A poster found on the door of an embassy guard in Kabul. Project on Government Oversight

NY Times | Sep 12, 2009

By GINGER THOMPSON and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — When a security guard at the United States Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, was leaving for breakfast Monday morning, he froze at the sight of a crude poster of a rat hanging on his door.

“Warning!” the poster said in stark, black letters. “Rats can cost you your job and your family.”

The guard was a whistle-blower who had told of security lapses and lewd, drunken bacchanals by fellow workers, sparking an outcry and enraging Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Now he wonders whether he should have kept his mouth shut.

“Threats are still running rampant here,” he said in a telephone conversation from Kabul, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “So even though it looks like State may finally turn things around, no one’s ready to celebrate yet.”

Such skepticism may be warranted.

A review of two years of e-mail messages, letters and memos reveals that the State Department had long known of the serious problems with ArmorGroup, the contractor chosen to protect its embassy. The complaints went beyond the lurid pranks that made headlines, the documents show, and included serious understaffing, bullying by management, petty corruption and abusive work conditions.

In fact, the deficiencies became so severe that they threatened the security of the compound, the documents show, and State Department officials withheld payments to ArmorGroup as a way to compel it to comply with the terms of its agreement. On a few occasions, government officials warned the company that if it did not correct the most egregious problems it would lose the five-year, $189 million deal.

Yet both times the contract came up for renewal, in 2008 and 2009, the State Department opted to extend it, officials confirmed.

The troubles with the ArmorGroup contract, and the State Department’s frustrated dealings with the company over two years and through two administrations, illustrate how the government has become dependent on the private security companies that work in war zones, and has struggled to manage companies that themselves are sometimes loosely run and do not always play by the government’s rules.

With a stretched military, the government relies on the security companies themselves to vet, train, and discipline the guards, all at the lowest cost.

“It’s expensive for the State Department to withdraw a contract from one company, rebid the project and award it to a new one,” said Janet Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who represents one of the ArmorGroup whistleblowers. “So businesses know that once they get a contract, State may ding them around a little bit, but it’s not going to fire them.”

The perils of this reliance were most graphically illustrated in Iraq in 2007, when security guards from another contractor, Blackwater, were involved in shootings that left 17 civilians dead on a Baghdad street. But interviews and documents show that the ArmorGroup affair, in its mundane, unsavory details, offers perhaps a more representative look inside the troubled relationship between contractors and the government in war zones.

State Department officials acknowledge they had a litany of complaints about the company, none of which, they insist, compromised the security of the embassy. But they profess to being deeply embarrassed by reports of parties where security guards were photographed naked, fondling and urinating on each other.

“I’ve been doing this for 37 years; I’m proud of what I do,” said Patrick F. Kennedy, the undersecretary of state for management who oversees outside contractors. But, he added, “This is humiliating.”

Mr. Kennedy, however, defended the State Department’s overall handling of the contract. The frequent letters of complaint the government sent to ArmorGroup, he said, were evidence that the department was keeping close tabs on the company. The “greatest majority” of the failures cited in the letters were addressed, he said.

Part of the problem, officials said, was that the guards are housed in a complex six miles from the embassy, Camp Sullivan, with little oversight by State Department officials.

Susan Pitcher, a spokeswoman for Wackenhut Services, the American subsidiary of the Danish company that owns ArmorGroup, referred questions to the State Department, saying only that it was cooperating with the government’s investigation.

On Monday, the independent Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan will hold a hearing to examine the State Department’s oversight of the contract. Christopher Shays, a former congressman and co-chairman of the commission, said there was “a serious failure on the part of the State Department in being unable to compel the contractor to fulfill its commitment.”

The disclosures, which were originally made by a nonprofit organization, Project on Government Oversight, deeply rattled the State Department. At a staff meeting following the release of the group’s report, senior officials said, Mrs. Clinton vented her anger about the lurid pictures. Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired Army general who became President Obama’s ambassador to Afghanistan last May, was livid, an official said, because he had never been briefed about the problems.

Despite their unease with contractors, officials acknowledged the department had no choice but to keep using them.

“In situations where there is a surge of intense security requirements, it is a real challenge,” said Jacob J. Lew, the deputy secretary of state for management and resources. “We cannot reduce the security presence.”

The State Department was not in a buyer’s market when it looked for a company to protect its embassy in Kabul.

It picked ArmorGroup in March 2007, after its previous choice, MVM, proved unable to marshal the necessary personnel or equipment, officials said. Of the eight companies that bid for the contract the second time around, only two were deemed technically capable. ArmorGroup was the cheapest.

The company’s most recent contract extension was granted in June this year, after a Senate hearing in which one of its executives, Samuel Brinkley, a Wackenhut vice president, said in sworn testimony that his company was in full compliance with the terms of its contract, and a State Department official, William H. Moser, a deputy assistant secretary of state, also under oath, said he was satisfied with the company’s performance.

In interviews, ArmorGroup whistleblowers said they felt betrayed by the testimony. By many measures, they said, things were worse, not better. After largely uneventful company barbecues morphed into what have been described as scenes from “The Lord of the Flies,” at least a dozen of the men started a document trail of their own, sending e-mail messages and photographs to the Project on Government Oversight.

According to interviews and those documents, from July 2007 to April 2009, the State Department issued ArmorGroup at least nine warnings, nearly one every other month, about contract violations that ranged from mundane concerns about the company’s ability to keep accurate personnel logs, to more critical concerns about corruption among company managers and the hardships faced by sleep-deprived, underpaid guards — the majority of them Gurkhas from Nepal — who could not understand simple commands in English.

While the Gurkhas were largely the source of the language problems, the lewd hazing rituals were largely the activity of the native English speakers, a mix of Americans, South Africans, New Zealanders and Australians.

In 2008, after ArmorGroup was acquired by the Danish company, G4S, Wackenhut informed the State Department it was taking control of the Kabul contract, and promised to fix any problems.

Government officials agreed to give the new owners a chance. According to their own correspondence, their optimism seemed to dim fairly quickly.

On Aug. 22, 2008, the State Department wrote to ArmorGroup to express concerns that staffing shortages were so severe the company might not be able to provide security after a situation with mass casualties.

On Sept. 21, 2008, the State Department deducted $2.4 million in payments from ArmorGroup, warning that its failure to provide a sufficient number of guards “gravely endangers the performance of guard services.”

In March 2009, the department again advised ArmorGroup that it had “grave concerns” about staffing shortages, noting that inspectors on a recent tour found 18 guardposts left uncovered.

In April, it denied ArmorGroup’s request for a third waiver to the requirement that it teach its foreign guards English.

A month later, without much explanation, ArmorGroup told the State Department that deficiencies relating to language and staffing had been resolved. And a month after that, a senior State Department official told the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight that “despite contractual deficiencies, the performance by ArmorGroup North America has been and is sound.”

“I sat in the audience that day, and shook my head in disbelief,” said James Gordon, a former ArmorGroup executive who has filed a whistleblower’s lawsuit against the company. He says he was forced out for complaining about the problems. “I knew that conditions at Camp Sullivan were deteriorating, that the contract continued to be understaffed, that the conditions in Kabul were getting more dangerous, and that the U.S. Embassy was facing grave threats.”

Italy grapples with accusations of sex abuse by Catholic priests

Gianni Bisoli, foreground, has accused Verona’s late bishop, Monsignor Giuseppe Carraro, of molesting him on five separate occasions while he was a boy attending Verona’s Provolo Institute for the deaf. Carraro is being considered for beatification.Photo: Luca Bruno, AP

“How could I tell my papa that a priest had sex with me? You couldn’t tell your parents because the priests would beat you.”

In a shift for the Vatican, Scicluna acknowledged that priestly sex abuse was an age-old problem.

Associated Press | Sep 13, 2009

By Nicole Winfield

VERONA, Italy — It happened night after night, the deaf man said, sometimes in the priest’s bedroom, sometimes in the bathroom, even in the confessional.

When he was a young boy at a Catholic-run institute for the deaf, Alessandro Vantini said, priests sodomized him so relentlessly he came to feel “as if I were dead.” This year, he and dozens of other former students did something highly unusual for Italy: They went public with claims they were forced to perform sex acts with priests.

For decades, a culture of silence has surrounded priest abuse in Italy, where surveys show the church is considered one of the country’s most respected institutions. Now, in the Vatican’s backyard, a movement to air and root out abusive priests is slowly and fitfully taking hold.

A year-long Associated Press tally has documented 73 cases with allegations of sexual abuse by priests against minors over the past decade in Italy, with more than 235 victims. The tally was compiled from local media reports, linked to by websites of victims groups and blogs. Almost all the cases have come out in the seven years since the scandal about Roman Catholic priest abuse broke in the United States.

The numbers in Italy are still a mere trickle compared to the hundreds of cases in the court systems of the United States and Ireland. And according to the AP tally, the Italian church has so far had to pay only a few hundred thousand euros (dollars) in civil damages to the victims, compared to $2.6 billion in abuse-related costs for the American diocese or $1.5 billion due to victims in Ireland.

However, the numbers still stand out in a country where reports of clerical sex abuse were virtually unknown a decade ago. They point to an increasing willingness among the Italian public and — slowly — within the Vatican itself to look squarely at a tragedy where the reported cases may only just be the tip of the iceberg. The Italian church will not release the numbers of cases reported or of court settlements.

The implications of priest abuse loom large in Italy: with its 50,850 priests in a nation of 60 million, Italy counts more priests than all of South America or Africa. In the United States — where the Vatican counts 44,700 priests in a nation of 300 million — more than 4,000 Catholic clergy have been accused of molesting minors since 1950.

The Italian cases follow much the same pattern as the U.S. and Irish scandals: Italian prelates often preyed on poor, physically or mentally disabled, or drug-addicted youths entrusted to their care. The deaf students’ speech impairments, for example, made the priests’ admonition “never to tell” all the more easy to enforce.

In this predominantly Roman Catholic country, the church enjoys such an exalted status that the pope’s pronouncements frequently top the evening news, without any critical commentary. Even those with anti-clerical views acknowledge the important role the church plays in education, social services and caring for the poor.

As a result, few dare to criticize it, including the mainstream independent and state-run media. In addition, there’s a certain prudishness in small-town Italy, where one just doesn’t speak about sex, much less sex between a priest and a child.

“It’s a taboo on top of a taboo,” said Jacqueline Monica Magi, who prosecuted several pedophilia cases in Italy before becoming a judge. “This is the provincialism of Italy.”

Breaking the conspiracy of silence, 67 former students from Verona’s Antonio Provolo institute for the deaf signed a statement alleging that sexual abuse, pedophilia and corporal punishment occurred at the school from the 1950s to the 1980s at the hands of priests and brothers of the Congregation for the Company of Mary.

While not all acknowledged being victims themselves, 14 of the 67 wrote sworn statements and videotaped testimony, detailing the abuse they say they suffered, some for years, at the school’s two campuses in Verona, the city of Romeo and Juliet. They named 24 priests, lay religious men and religious brothers.

Vantini said he, too, was silent for years.

“How could I tell my papa that a priest had sex with me?” Vantini, 59, told the AP one afternoon, recounting through a sign-language interpreter the abuse he said he endured. “You couldn’t tell your parents because the priests would beat you.”

Vantini named two priests and two lay brothers — three of whom are still alive — but asked that their names not be printed for fear of legal action. He spoke with the nervousness and agitation he says has accompanied him all of his life from being raped as a child by a priest.

“I suffered from depression until I was 30,” said Vantini, who attended the school from age 6 to 19. “My wife said it was good that I spoke out because it lifted this weight from my chest.”

Vantini’s one-time schoolmate, Gianni Bisoli, 60, named the same men in his written declaration and in an interview, as well as 12 other priests and brothers from the Congregation, accusing them of sodomizing him, forcing him to have oral sex and to masturbate them.

In his declaration, Bisoli also accused Verona’s late bishop, Monsignor Giuseppe Carraro — who is being considered for beatification — of molesting him on five separate occasions while he was a student at Provolo, which he attended from age 9 to 15.

A diocesan probe cleared Carraro of sex abuse. But the investigation interviewed none of the alleged victims, limiting testimony to surviving members of the Congregation, other school personnel and their affiliates, and documentation from the Congregation and Verona diocese.

The late bishop’s beatification process was suspended pending the investigation, but is now going ahead to the Vatican’s saint-making office.

Five decades later, Bisoli still recalls the route he said he took from the institute, located on a quiet street named for the congregation’s founder, Don Antonio Provolo, along the serpentine Adige river to the bishop’s residence tucked behind Verona’s Piazza del Duomo.

Bisoli, who became deaf at age eight, said he was accompanied by one of his abusers and walked past the red brick Castelvecchio, an imposing 14th-century citadel, then along the main Corso Cavour thoroughfare or the more out-of-the-way pedestrian shopping street Via Mazzini.

“They brought me inside the curia (the diocese headquarters),” Bisoli recalled in an interview. “There was a servant who opened the door, then someone brought me inside. It was dark.”

Bishop Carraro appeared, he recalled. “The bishop started to touch me, grope me,” he said, running his hands up and down his body, pulling at his shirt and shorts to demonstrate. “I pulled away. But he continued to touch me for 15, 20 minutes. I didn’t know what to do.”

On a subsequent occasion, Bisoli says, the bishop tried to sodomize him with a banana. Another time, they were on the sofa and he sodomized him with his finger, offering him candy to appease him, Bisoli said.

Once, Bisoli said, the bishop offered him some gold crosses that had caught Bisoli’s eye.

“I said ‘at least give me 10,000-20,000 lire so I can buy a Coca-Cola or an ice cream,”‘ Bisoli recalled.

The current bishop of Verona, Monsignor Giuseppe Zenti, initially accused the former students of fabricating their claims in talking in January to L’Espresso, a left-leaning newsweekly. Zenti called the accusations “lies” and a stunt that was part of a long-standing real estate dispute between the Congregation and the deaf students’ association, to which the alleged victims belong.

But when one of the accused lay religious men admitted to sexual relations with students, Zenti ordered an internal investigation into the Congregation. The results found that some abuse occurred, albeit a fraction of what has been alleged.

According to the diocese probe, there were episodes of physical violence against two unnamed students between 1958 and 1965. From 1965 to 1967, two would-be priests with “sexual disorders” were kicked out; while between 1965 and 1990 a religious brother had sexual relations with an undetermined number of students, the investigation found. In all cases the accused were removed.

“There could have been some episodes, some bad apples are possible,” Carlo de’ Gresti, spokesman for the Provolo institute said in an interview at the school’s Chievo campus, where a lay staff now runs a technical school for poor teens. “It happens, even in families. That there could have been 26, 27, 25 pedophiles? There is no objective corroboration from anyone who isn’t inside the (students’) association.”

Advocates, however, says the diocese’s investigation was fatally flawed because it didn’t interview the alleged victims and only people with links to the school who may have something to hide.

“If they had wanted to shed full light on it, they wouldn’t have only heard from priests and lay brothers, but from the deaf as well,” said Marco Lodi Rizzini, a spokesman for the victims.

The investigation has been forwarded to the Vatican, said the Rev. Bruno Fasani, spokesman for the diocese. He claimed former students had been manipulated into denouncing innocent priests and accused some of harboring a long-standing animosity to the church.

Zenti, for his part, asked forgiveness from the victims.

“The feeling that prevails is above all one of profound solidarity with the victims of abuse,” Zenti said in a May statement. “To them and their families, a humble request of forgiveness is made.”

Among the cases the AP tallied, there were charges of inducing boys into prostitution, participation in satanic rituals, and one notorious case in which the church itself determined that an elderly Florentine priest was responsible for “sexual abuse, false mysticism and domination of consciences.”

Where there were sentences, they ran from a two-year suspended sentence to eight years in jail, although with Italy’s notoriously lengthy appeals process it’s unclear how many have been carried out. Where civil damages were awarded, which has been rare, the amounts ranged from about $22,000 to $220,000 at today’s exchange rates.

The cases in the AP survey involve civil or criminal cases and investigations. For that reason, the Verona figures were omitted, since no criminal or civil action is pending because the statute of limitations has expired.

In 2002, when the abuse scandal was erupting in the United States, the No. 2 official in the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Monsignor Giuseppe Betori, was quoted as saying clerical sex abuse was so limited in Italy that the conference leadership hadn’t even discussed the matter.

But Italian prelates and the Vatican now seem to be taking the problem far more seriously. Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican prosecutor in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — which handles cases of priestly sex abuse — acknowledged that public awareness of the problem in Italy had increased as a result of the “tsunami” of cases that came to light in the United States.

“There is a change of mentality, and we find that to be very positive,” he told the AP.

In a shift for the Vatican, Scicluna acknowledged that priestly sex abuse was an age-old problem that needed to be rooted out.

“I don’t think it’s a question of happening. It has always happened. It’s important that people talk about it, because otherwise we cannot bring the healing which the church can offer to people who need it — both the victims and perpetrators.”

15 victims of Jesuit priest abuse found on state’s reservations as search continues

Missoulian | Sep 3, 2009

By MICHAEL MOORE

For more than 30 years, Judy Reel kept quiet about the Catholic priest who sexually abused her in Helena in 1969.

Then, in 2002, when abuse by priests became a national disgrace, Reel started sharing her story, quietly and unseen by the public. She told friends, she told police and finally she told the church.

“I’ve been to Helena twice to talk to church officials,” Reel said. “I haven’t spoken to the bishop yet, but they know my story. They know what happened to me.”

On Thursday, Reel spoke publicly about the abuse, about the shame it caused, about the debilitating damage it served on her life daily.

“This was 40 years ago, but even now, talking about it is very difficult,” she said. “Just talking about it, well, I still just go to pieces.”

Reel spoke as part of a news conference held on the sidewalk outside St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in downtown Missoula.

The event was organized by a Chicago-based group called SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

“In part, we’re here today to stand up for those who are no longer here to stand up for themselves,” said David Clohessy, national director of SNAP. “But we’re also here to ask people who were abused or who may have seen abuse in Jesuit churches to step forward.”

The urgency is founded in a court order issued in February, when the regional order of Jesuits, called the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus, filed for bankruptcy.

That province covers Jesuit churches in Montana. Since 2001, Jesuits have paid out more than $25 million to sex-abuse victims.

The bankruptcy order requires the Jesuits to seek out possible victims, but Clohessy and attorneys already representing other victims are also trying to serve notice.

“We don’t have that much confidence in the church when it comes to victims,” Clohessy said. “We urge the church to do that job, to let the court know about possible abuse, but we also want people to know that they can come forward on their own.”

The urgency in terms of Montana comes on the heels of the discovery that two now-dead Jesuit priests – Augustine Feretti and Bernard Harris – who’d already been sued for abuse in other states spent part of their careers in Montana.

“We’ve already found about 15 people on the reservations here in Montana who were abused by Father Feretti,” said Spokane attorney John Allison, who along with Seattle attorney Tim Kosnoff and others represent victims in the Jesuit case. “It’s very difficult to find these people, and in many cases, they have no idea there’s a case going on that could affect them.”

Feretti, ordained in 1942 and known as Father Freddie, served in both Idaho and Washington. But he spent much of the 1950s and ’60s in Montana, including time on the Flathead and Rocky Boy’s Indian reservations.

“The damage done to Indian people by the church is profound,” said Kosnoff, who said a meeting for victims on the Flathead will be held early in the fall. “And yet, so many people in the Indian community don’t believe that anything will happen to the church. We’re trying to make sure those people’s voices are heard in this case.”

Kosnoff and Allison said Feretti, who died in 1982, and Harris, who worked at St. Francis Xavier during an unspecified period of years, fit a pattern for abusive Jesuit priests. Harris, who was sued for alleged abuse of four Oregon siblings from 1968-1972, died in 1999.

“Often, these guys were just moved around the region, which gave them a chance to abuse other kids,” Kosnoff said.

Those children were unlikely to report abuse.

“They’d been taught that priests were the voice of God,” Allison said. “They weren’t going to speak up about what those men did to them.”

Clohessy said far too many victims never come forward, with many taking their secrets to the grave.

Reel felt that way for decades. Because no one else took responsibility for what happened to her, she shouldered the blame herself.

“I just decided this was something that was my fault and I was just ashamed,” she said. “It really took others coming forward for me to see where the blame rests. But it’s sad. If perpetrators and the church won’t take responsibility, then victims do. And that’s wrong.”

To learn more about the bankruptcy case involving Jesuit churches in the Northwest, go to http://www.jesuitabuse.com. If you were abused by a Jesuit priest and want to understand your options regarding the bankruptcy, call attorneys Tim Kosnoff and John Allison at 1-888-667-0683.

Abuse victims say Jesuits keeping the truth from coming out by filing bankruptcy

Jesuit Bankruptcy

KECI | Sep 3, 2009

by Christian Hauser

Less than two months from now, anyone who was abused or molested by a Jesuit preist in Montana, or four other states, will run out of time to be a part of a settlement for the abuse. The Society of Jesus organization, has paid out over $25 million dollars to victims, but under a chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the period for filing any more claims is November 30th.

Two Montana abuse victims came to MIssoula today to encourage local churches to tell people to come forward. The victims say the church is keeping the truth from coming out by filing the bankruptcy.

David Clohessy, a victim and director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Preists, said “We think that this whole chapter 11 process stinks. We think it’ set up largely by the Jesuits largely for their own convenience and protection. And a victim should be able to come forward whenever he or she capable of it.”

We made severall attempts to call and e-mail the organization. However as of this writing we had received no response. On the groups website, Patrick Lee, a high ranking official says in a letter to the church members “This decision provides the best opportunity for healing, justice and fair compensation for those who have suffered.”