Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania sexually abused thousands of children over a 70-year period and silenced victims through “the weaponization of faith” and a systematic cover-up campaign by their bishops, the state attorney general said on Tuesday.

An 884-page report made public by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro after a two-year investigation contained graphic examples of children being groomed and sexually abused by clergymen. It was largely based on documents from secret archives kept by the dioceses, including handwritten confessions by priests, he said.

“It was child sexual abuse, including rape, committed by grown men – priests – against children,” Shapiro told a press conference.

Representatives of the six Pennsylvania dioceses included in the report could not be reached for comment.

The attorney general said it was the most comprehensive report on Catholic clergy sex abuse in American history, nearly two decades after an expose of widespread abuse and cover-up in Boston that rocked the Roman Catholic Church.

Several of the dioceses issued statements apologising to victims and saying they were taking steps to ensure any criminal behaviour was stopped. “The grand jury has challenged us as a Catholic diocese to put victims first and to continue to improve ways to protect children and youth,” Bishop Lawrence Persico of the Erie Diocese said in a statement.

As accusers wept behind him, Shapiro described alleged abuse by priests in six of the state’s eight dioceses, including a group of Pittsburgh clergymen accused of ordering an altar boy to strip naked and pose as Christ on the cross while they photographed him.

“The pattern was abuse, deny and cover up,” Shapiro said, adding that church officials sought to keep abuse allegations quiet long enough so they could no longer be prosecuted under Pennsylvania’s statute of limitations.

“Priests were raping little boys and girls,” Shapiro said. “They hid it all for decades.”

The report cited 301 priests, some of whom have died. Only two of the priests are still subject to prosecution.

A few of the clergymen accused in the report succeeded in having their names redacted, and Shapiro said he would argue at a Sept. 26 court hearing for making all the names public.

He said the grand jury identified about a thousand victims, but believed there may be many more.

Shapiro said that one priest had molested five sisters in one family, he said. The diocese settled with the family after requiring a confidentiality agreement, he said.

The attorney general said that Catholic bishops covered up child sexual abuse by priests and reassigned them repeatedly to different parishes. “They allowed priests to remain active for as long as 40 years,” he said.

Describing the “weaponisation of faith” to silence victims, Shapiro cited several examples including one priest who allegedly told children “how Mary had to lick Jesus clean after he was born” to groom them for oral sex.

“Children were taught that this abuse was not only normal but that it was holy,” Shapiro said.

Since the Boston abuse scandal erupted in the 1990s, accusations involving American clerics have sporadically surfaced.

Theodore McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington, resigned as a cardinal last month after accusations resurfaced that he abused a 16-year-old boy decades ago.

In recent months, Pope Francis accepted a number of resignations from Chilean bishops in a sex abuse scandal that has rocked that country.

Two special envoys sent by Pope Francis to investigate a child sex abuse scandal in Chile were meeting priests and church workers at a university in the Chilean capital last month when aides rushed into the room with an alarming development: police and prosecutors were about to start raiding church offices.

The envoys were 90 minutes into a seminar on how to investigate allegations of sex abuse committed by fellow clergy following revelations that hundreds of children might have been molested. For decades, the Roman Catholic Church in Chile quietly investigated such allegations without alerting police, but it now stands accused, even by Pope Francis himself, of a cover-up that allowed abusers to operate with impunity.

One of the clergymen listening to the envoys was Jaime Ortiz de Lazcano, the legal adviser to Santiago’s archbishop. The aides rushed to his side and told him, ‘”Father, go to the (church offices) because there’s going to be a raid”,’ Ortiz later recounted.

Police and prosecutors were staging simultaneous raids on church offices less than a mile away from the university and outside the capital, looking for evidence of sex crimes the Church had not reported to police.

The surprise sweeps, ordered by Emiliano Arias, a provincial prosecutor, marked the start of what experts who track sex crimes in the Roman Catholic Church say is one of the most aggressive investigations ever undertaken by a judicial authority anywhere in the world.

Since that cold June afternoon there have been five more raids on church offices to seize documents, phones, tablets and computers, leaving the Vatican scrambling to respond to a rapidly unfolding scandal that is the worst image crisis of Francis’ papacy, now in its sixth year.

Leading the charge against the Church is Arias, 45, who is experienced in fighting organised crime and has a showman’s fondness for taking television news crews on the raids.

Arias told Reuters in an exclusive interview that documents seized by his team contained 30 cases of alleged abuse dating back to 2007 that the Church had not reported to the police. While Reuters was allowed to film his investigators poring through seized documents, he declined to give details from the files because he said they named victims of abuse.

He also alleged that some local Church officials had tried to destroy documents but that his team – made up of two prosecutors, three lawyers and a unit of specialist sex crime police – had salvaged them. He declined to say who had tried to destroy them or how they had tried to get rid of them.

Reuters was unable to independently confirm those assertions.

Víctor Villa Castro, head of communications for the Santiago archbishopric, said he could not comment on any cases under investigation by Arias.

“We would however say that we have no knowledge of the destruction of documents, nor the covering-up of crimes,” he said. “The victims are the first, and most important, in this and we will cooperate with the civil authorities in any way that can help to get to the truth of these matters.”

Arias says he wants to arrest both those who perpetrated the abuse and those who he says helped to cover it up. He arrested Oscar Munoz, a top aide to Santiago’s archbishop, Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati, after seizing church documents in which Munoz confessed to sex crimes. Munoz’s lawyer has acknowledged that some of the accusations in the documents are true but says he will challenge some others.

Arias last week named Ezzati, the most senior Roman Catholic in Chile, as a suspect, accusing him of covering up his aide’s alleged abuses. Ezzati has denied any wrongdoing and promised to cooperate.

Arias said he launched the raids after Church officials in Rancagua, the capital of O’Higgins region, told him he would have to make a formal petition to the Vatican to obtain information he was seeking because it was protected by ‘pontifical secret.’

A spokesman for the Rancagua archbishop’s office said they were told to do this by the Vatican and insisted they were cooperating fully with civil authorities. Vatican spokesman Greg Burke declined to comment.

The Roman Catholic Church says the ‘pontifical secret’ provision in canon law is intended to protect the privacy of all involved in sex abuse claims. Critics say bishops have historically used it as a shield to block inquiries from civil authorities.

“We are not talking about a fraud, or a theft, we are talking about crimes against children,” Arias said in an interview in his office in Rancagua, explaining his decision not to submit the request to the Vatican and instead get a judge to approve the raids.

‘CULTURE OF ABUSE’

Allegations of sexual abuse of minors by clergy are not new, but under Chilean law governing the separation of church and state, the Catholic Church, a powerful and politically influential institution in this conservative Andean nation, has no legal obligation to report the allegations to police.

The sex abuse scandal came to a head after Pope Francis visited in January and was initially dismissive of claims by survivors of a cover-up by top Church officials there. A backlash among advocates for abuse survivors prompted him to dispatch an investigator, Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, who produced a confidential 2,300-page report on the allegations.

After receiving the report Pope Francis wrote an open letter to Chile’s faithful in May in which he decried “the culture of abuse and the system of cover up” by the Church in Chile.

He summoned all 34 of Chile’s bishops to Rome in May where they offered to resign en masse. He has so far accepted five resignations and is expected to accept more.

Arias speaks mostly without emotion during the hour-long interview until he talks about how, according to their accusers, priests convinced their victims that they were doing nothing wrong. Then he displays flashes of anger, sometimes so impassioned that he trips over his words.

“I have seen some tough cases but what shocks me about all this is the abuse of conscience – how an accused (Church worker) has entered into the soul of another person and is capable of convincing him that satisfying his desires is not even a sin,” said Arias, who describes his family as “very Catholic” but says he is lapsed.

Arias said he can prosecute senior Church officials for covering up the abuses if he can prove they knew about systematic abuse and failed to do anything to stop it, or hid evidence to prevent civil authorities from getting involved.

But first he must prosecute the abusers, said Maria Ines Horvitz, a senior lawyer at the State Defense Council of Chile, a public agency that provides legal advice to the Chilean state. And to do that he must find cases within the 10-year statute of limitations – a potential problem that has bedevilled prosecutors in other countries – or turn to the one court in Chile that still handles cases from before roughly 2000, which is backlogged.

PROSECUTORIAL ZEAL

The national public prosecutor instructed all provincial prosecutors last month to pursue sex abuse allegations more vigorously.

But Arias has gone much further than his colleagues in his zeal to bring prosecutions. He has repeatedly widened his remit, from a handful of cases to dozens, from his provincial base to the capital, and from investigating claims of abuse by 14 priests in Rancagua to the alleged complicity of Ezzati, Santiago’s archbishop, himself.

As a result of his uncovering new cases in Church documents, the national prosecutor last week authorized him to expand his investigation into other regions.

BishopAccountability.Org, which tracks allegations of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests, says the only comparable investigation into sex abuse in the Church was in Belgium in 2010 when police launched coordinated raids on Church offices and the home of a cardinal. That investigation did not lead to any prosecutions because of the statute of limitations.

Arias is carrying out his investigation in the absence of any public backing from the centre-right Sebastian Pinera government. Shortly before becoming president in March, Pinera criticized the Church for its “defensive” attitude to the scandal and “insufficient” investigations but has remained silent on the issue since.

A government spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

WHY NOW?

For decades allegations of sexual abuse by priests swirled through Chilean society, but little was done to address them. The Church was largely left to police itself.

But this year that suddenly changed.

Church watchers say several factors contributed to this watershed moment – the international attention received by several victims who went public; the pope’s initial poor handling of the claims; and the ripple effect of the global #MeToo movement.

The Church’s grip on Chile is also weakening, public opinion polling shows, even though the formerly predominately Catholic nation remains largely conservative on social issues.

The waning support for the Church was evident when the pope visited Chile in January – there were many empty seats at his public masses. This was “a turning point for Francis’ papacy”, a Vatican official said. “It is when he realized that he was listening to the wrong people about the real situation in Chile.”

For Arias, the pope’s subsequent mea culpa that the Church had covered up abuses gave him the impetus he needed to act. “His description of what was happening in Chile was powerful and should concern us all,” he said.

Individual Pleads Guilty to Islamophobic Assault on Muslim Woman Wearing the Hijab

A North Carolina man admitted on Friday that he ripped off a Muslim woman’s head scarf during a flight to New Mexico last December after saying, “Take it off! This is America!”

Gill Payne, 37, pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court in New Mexico to one count of using force to intentionally obstruct the woman from freely exercising her religious beliefs, prosecutors said.

“No matter one’s faith, all Americans are entitled to peacefully exercise their religious beliefs free from discrimination and violence,” said Vanita Gupta, head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

An attorney for Payne did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Payne admitted that on a flight last December, he approached the aisle where the Muslim woman was seated shortly before landing in Albuquerque, and stopped next to her seat, Prosecutors said.

Payne then told the woman, a stranger identified in court documents as K.A., to take off her hijab, saying something to the effect of “Take it off! This is America!” prosecutors said.

Payne then grabbed the back of the hijab and “pulled it all the way off,” leaving her head exposed.

“As a result, K.A. felt violated and quickly pulled the hijab back up and covered her head again,” prosecutors said in a statement.

A sentencing hearing for Payne has not yet been set, prosecutors said.

The guilty plea comes in the wake of a number of anti-Muslim incidents in the United States.

Earlier this week, a Muslim advocacy group said a California student was embarrassed and distressed after her name was incorrectly listed as Isis, the abbreviated name of the Islamic militant group.

In late April, a New Jersey school board member resigned after drawing fire over anti-Muslim Facebook posts, including one saying, “America needs to get rid of people like you.”

In the wake of deadly attacks by Islamist militants in Paris and California last year, Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican White House nominee, called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States.

The post ‘This is America’ air traveler says guilty of yanking Muslim’s scarf appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Much has been said about social media platforms though we have seen some significant and positive changes in Twitter and Facebook over the last year.

We have seen a real desire to reach out and to listen to organisations working with communities and in areas such as tackling hate incidents and crimes. Both organisations are making changes and supporting counter-speech and this is to be welcomed. Interestingly, changes are taking place on these platforms much more regularly and which take into account feedback by users.

For example, today, we have learnt that Twitter provides this much needed reporting in facility. The facility allows users to report in multiple tweets, thereby providing greater context on the information and actions of perpetrators of abuse. The greater the context, the more information that can be acted on.

Tell MAMA has been working with Twitter in trying to ensure that the context of hateful and abusive messages are taken into account. We are one of a handful of organisations who have made this case and we are very grateful that Twitter has listened and responded. We are starting to see a strong desire from Facebook and Twitter to make relevant and useful changes to tackle abuse and these steps are warmly welcomed. They will help victims of abuse.

The post Twitter Develops Multiple Reporting of Tweets to Provide Context appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Since Jack Straw’s comments exactly a decade ago, the Niqab has been in political debate which at times have become heightened. Currently, there are reports that the Prime Minister is considering a ban on the veil in schools, courts and other public institutions. No doubt, the Niqab will become the subject of much debate over the coming months.

In light of this, very rarely do women who wear the veil have the chance to speak about the impacts of people’s prejudices against them. How many newspaper reports, when reporting on political developments about the Niqab, have then interviewed women who choose to wear the veil. Very few have and in fact, we can’t recollect seeing a Niqab wearer being approached by news outlets when discussing the topic recently.

We want to highlight the other side of the coin – the fact that women who wear the Niqab are subject to prejudice, aggression and open hatred at points. It is also important to note that over the last 4 years of work within Tell MAMA, it is clear that women who wear the Niqab suffer more incidents of anti-Muslim hatred and more aggressive incidents of anti-Muslim hatred, including assault.

These are the words of a Muslim woman who wears the Niqab and who recounted her experiences for us.

“I’m worried about the day my 7 year old daughter suddenly tunes into the daily abuse, realises it’s her mother that these respectable-looking strangers – maybe parents of her schoolfriends during pick-up or drop-off, maybe the people behind us in the supermarket queue – are talking about / to.

“And what do I tell her? I’ve brought her up to believe people of all faiths are equally worthy of respect; the majority of her schoolfriends are Hindu or Christian. How can I explain to her that these people hate me because of the visible clues to my faith – particularly my outfit? Me, who taught my little girl that she should never care what other people thought about her appearance, to be proud of her mixed-race looks and unique dress sense (we’re talking Cinderella ball gown with trackie bottoms, or Batman cape over Hello Kitty dress).

“What if she’s ashamed to be seen with her mother? What if she’s angry with these strangers for hating on her mother, starts believing non-Muslims are abusive bad people who hate Muslims? What if she develops a fear of white strangers instead of her beautiful trademark confidence and friendliness? What if she’s present when the trolley-shoving, the jostling, the swearing, escalates into a more vicious kind of physical violence? There’s only so much verbal abuse and sly jostling/ shoving I can take passively before I turn round and tell them to have some manners.

“I’ve had women my mum’s age making explosion sounds at me and calling me ISIS, men my age telling me I’m disgusting, women younger than me telling me to f*** off back to Saudi. I’ve been called terrorist, dirty scum, f***** freak, Islamic whore, brown c********, Arab f****, Jihadi b*****…… All in front of my 7-year-old daughter. I had a trolley rammed into my belly when I was pregnant; it was after a bunch of skinheads made knife gestures at me that I stopped going out by myself until I gave birth and no longer felt like a walking target as a pregnant niqabi. I’m pretty confident that I could defend myself but I couldn’t risk the life of my unborn baby.

“If I’m out with my husband I get dirty looks and hissed insults at most; people only become audibly abusive or openly confrontational when I’m out without my husband – unfortunately the presence of my little girl doesn’t seem to silence them in the same way.”

The post With the Niqab Being a Political Football, Let’s Listen to the Voice of One Who Wears It appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Having just commented on the serious assault of an Afghan taxi driver  over the weekend, we were notified of another incident involving a Rotherham based taxi driver.

On Sunday morning at around 2:30 am a Rotherham based taxi driver of Pakistani heritage stopped off to drop off a passenger and was in a stationary position when his vehicle was attacked by a large white male who punched and kicked the car. The driver placed the central locking system on and was subjected to racial abuse and with threats to kill.

The driver of the vehicle then drove away from the incident with his passenger still in the vehicle and with the perpetrator now hanging off the roof of the vehicle as he would not let go of the vehicle. After several hundred yards, and after punching the windscreen of the vehicle, it is alleged that the police caught up with the vehicle and took a statement from the perpetrator.

We are in the process of ascertaining further details on the case and we have been in touch with South Yorkshire police on this case.

The post Rotherham – Another Taxi Driver Suffers Hate, But This Time Manages to Get Away appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Customers were shocked to find the following A4 poster (below) hanging in a Wetherspoon’s pub – the Moon on the Square – in Feltham in Middlesex. Using the WW1 iconic picture of Lord Kitchener pointing to the viewer saying, “Your Country Needs You“, the poster in the pub had a headline saying,

“Muslims – Are you unhappy with our countries? Are you offended by our culture? Would you prefer to live under Sharia Law? Then we have a simple solution for you. Get the f*** out of our countries, and go back to the monstrous s******** you came from. You can live under Muslim rule there and enjoy it as much as you like.”

The poster was produced by a group called the ‘Infidel Brotherhood’ and staff at the Moon on the Square pub took down the poster as soon as they were notified about it.  Nonetheless, what is of concern is that the poster was pinned in the pub and must have been seen by a number of members of the public.

The post Poster Tells Muslims to ‘Get the F*** Our of Our Country’ appeared first on TELL MAMA.