richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

316 THE GOD DELUSION
driven parents to panic. Today's Just Williams, today's Huck Finns,
today's Swallows and Amazons are deprived of the freedom to
roam that was one of the delights of childhood in earlier times
(when the actual, as opposed to perceived, risk of molestation was
probably no less).
In fairness to the News of the World, at the time of its campaign
passions had been aroused by a truly horrifying murder, sexually
motivated, of an eight-year-old girl kidnapped in Sussex.
Nevertheless, it is clearly unjust to visit upon all pedophiles a
vengeance appropriate to the tiny minority who are also murderers.
All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers
whose affection for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety.
That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless if, fifty years on, they
had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child
murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defence, even
as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless
experience).
The Roman Catholic Church has borne a heavy share of such
retrospective opprobrium. For all sorts of reasons I dislike the
Roman Catholic Church. But I dislike unfairness even more, and I
can't help wondering whether this one institution has been unfairly
demonized over the issue, especially in Ireland and America. I
suppose some additional public resentment flows from the
hypocrisy of priests whose professional life is largely devoted to
arousing guilt about 'sin'. Then there is the abuse of trust by a
figure in authority, whom the child has been trained from the cradle
to revere. Such additional resentments should make us all the more
careful not to rush to judgement. We should be aware of the
remarkable power of the mind to concoct false memories, especially
when abetted by unscrupulous therapists and mercenary lawyers.
The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the
face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for
people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem,
to the victim, every bit as real as true memories. 137 This is so
counter-intuitive that juries are easily swayed by sincere but false
testimony from witnesses.
In the particular case of Ireland, even without the sexual abuse,
the brutality of the Christian Brothers, 138 responsible for the