If you listened to Ireland’s publicly broadcast self-talk over the last 20 years, you would think no modern country had greater care for the protection of children or more zeal to discover the soutane-, habit-, or mitre-wearing perpetrators and enablers of the evils of child abuse.
Then comes a study from the University College of Dublin — not a journalistic report.
Summarized by John Power of the Irish Times:
Teenage girls in the care of the State are being targeted and sexually exploited by co-ordinated “gangs” of predatory men, according to a new study which calls for an “immediate investigation” into the problem.
The research details cases of girls being taken from residential care homes by taxis and brought to hotels, where they were then sexually exploited and abused, often after being supplied with drugs.
The study by University College Dublin (UCD) school of social policy, published on Thursday, is based on interviews with staff and organisations working with children in care.
It found multiple cases where girls in the care of Tusla, the child and family agency, were “being coerced or enticed to provide sex acts to multiple men in exchange for a variety of goods”.
There is still a great deal to actually investigate here. But the findings are troubling. “Most of the 21 staff interviewed for the study had a ‘strong impression’ the exploitation was being carried out by “co-ordinated networks, or gangs, of predatory men,” we’re told.
If the details hold up: Where was the alarm? Where were An Garda Síochána? Hadn’t the public read enough of the horrors of the grooming gangs in Rotherham in the neighboring U.K?