2023-09-19 10:02:05
Nearly fifty complaints (47) were filed for cases of sexual violence within the Church between July 1, 2022 and June 30, 2023, according to the latest data communicated Tuesday by the Conference of Bishops of Belgium. This brings the total number of complaints to 764 since the creation of the Church’s contact points in 2012 and up to 1,392 reports if we include the denunciations recorded by the Arbitration Commission.
French-speaking complaints represented 66% of the total number of complaints, compared to 34% in the north of the country. “While the proportion was previously around 80% for Dutch speakers and 20% for French speakers, the majority of complaints now come from the French-speaking part of the country. It might therefore be that the problems discovered in France played a catalytic role,” analyzes the Conference of Bishops.
In the majority of cases recorded between July 1, 2022 and June 30, 2023, it was the victim herself who denounced the transgressive sexual behavior. Thirty-six victims (or 77%) were over 40 years old when the complaint was filed and 27 (or 57%) were men. Among the perpetrators of violence, almost all were men. At the time of the events, 32 (68%) of the victims were under 18 years old and five victims (11%) were even under 10 years old.
Thirty of the reported incidents (i.e. 64%) date back more than 30 years and 21 of these incidents (i.e. 45%) date back more than 40 years. At the time of communication, 57% of abusers had already died. This explains the “low rate of referral to justice”, underline the Bishops of Belgium. The attackers were priests or religious, with the exception of two pastoral agents and a person responsible for a Christian institution.
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