Please excuse me if I sound ignorant here, but I’m of the wrong generation and wrong religious background to know a lot about this, so everything I’m going on is just personal atedoctes, etc.
I have a couple of friends who are part of various lawsuits involving sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. I understand their positions, etc, and it makes sense to me that they are financially compensated for their suffering.
It lead me to wonder, though, about children who were physically abused in Catholic school. I have several friends - all between the ages of 45-55 who were horribly abused in grade school. Beaten - not just paddled for whatever wrongdoing, but punched, kicked, whatever, for nothing at all. One friend’s classmate was repeatedly punched in the face for asking a question (Age 7). I’ve been told really horrible stories; I won’t get into details, but it just seems really awful to me. It seems to me that it was common practice, and it seems especially common in Catholic school - those I know who went to public school didn’t have similar experiences.
Have there been lawsuits against the schools or churches because of this? Could there be? I’m sure there are statutes of limitations in place, but I’m a little curious about the differences in the abuse, limitations, etc, that makes it that there are lawsuits about sexual abuse, but not physical abuse, which seems to me to have been a lot more common.
Or - am I just mistaken about the frequency or severity of the abuse? Or was it considered normal in the 50’s and 60’s to punish students in this manner?
I think this is the answer. I’m young enough that this didn’t happen when I went to school, but between reading and conversation with older people, I’ve gotten the impression that " We didn’t tell our parents the teacher hit us, because then we’d get another beating at home" to be pretty common. There were apparently two cultural differences back then- physical punishment was seen as acceptable and parents would generally back the teacher over the child. The cultural acceptability might also have something to do with the lack of lawsuits. I believe the sexual abuse lawsuits all involve people much younger than 45-55 and I recall that such suits have to be filed within 5 (I think ) years of the victim turning 18. That 45 year old victim would have had to file a lawsuit 22 years ago, and probably without the support of his parents- after all, if they objected to the practice, he most likely would have told them about it and ended up being taken out of the school after the first incident.
Having been educated at several different Catholic schools in several different cities during the 50’s and 60’s, I can say two things with reasonable certainty.
“It was a different time back then, but not that different.” – A certain amount of corporal punishment was tolerated, perhaps even expected. That said, I never heard of any assault by teachers that went beyond paddling, shaking or occassionally slamming against the chalkboard.
“If you don’t like it, then leave.” That was the mantra of Catholic schools throughout the baby boom era. At a time when class sizes were almost always over 30, and often over 40, the Catholic schools were pretty much a seller’s market. Combine that with baby boomers’ parents, most of whom were either blue-collar or just getting into white-collar, and who attended (often) terrible schools during the Depression and WW2, and there wasn’t a lot of tolerance (either by the schools or the parents) for students who were considered rule-breakers.
Back when I attended (late '60s-early '70s) clergy, whether male or female, were held in just as high, or perhaps higher regard than parents because they did “God’s Work”.
To paraphrase the thinking, “If Sister/Father SoandSo did X to Bobby/Susie, then Bobby/Susie must’ve deserved it because Sister SoandSo would never have done X otherwise”.
In my parish, kids were sent to the rectory if they physically fought during recess or sassed a nun or lay teacher. After Monseignor’s lecture, he’d call their parents and insist the kids be picked up at the rectory so he could discuss what had happened.
One time I had a nun slam me against a wall because I had the supposed nerve to correct her during a geography lesson. I got away with a relatively light sentence because Monseignor agreed with me
