'APPLYING SYSTEMS THINKING TOTHE RYAN REPORT ' blog.topic  

APPLYING SYSTEMS THINKING TOTHE RYAN REPORT

The blogs  by the editor of the Jesuit Quarterly Review, Fergus O'Donoghue, about the 2,500 page Ryan Report on the horrific sexual, psychological and physical abuse of 30,000 Irish children consigned by the state to the  'care' of the ( ha ha) Christian Brothers  and other Roman Catholic institutions are wonderfully revealing of  many kinds of authoritarian mind-sets at work.

After asking "Why did so many Catholic institutions fail so appallingly?",  O'Donoghue says that three reasons come to mind: 
First,  "undue respect for authority (which was self-justifying and rarely self-critical);
Second "religious authoritarianism (government of communities by self-perpetuating cliques, who rarely saw the need for fresh thinking); and
Third, "a rancid clericalism (the product of a religious culture that increasingly turned in on itself)."

To a humanist, the term "rancid clericalism" is tautologous, but more seriously, commentators like O'Donoghue make no attempt to examine the nature of and the alternatives to, the pervasive authoritarianism of Catholic Ireland.Rather he devotes his efforts to arguments that attempt to excuse the Catholic church for the horrors
that were perpetrated by its members.  In so doing , he  arouses the fury of one of his readers, who quotes the Executive Summary of the Ryan Report saying that:

‘When confronted with evidence of sexual abuse, the response of the religious authorities was to transfer the offender to another location where, in many instances, he was free to abuse again. Permitting an offender to obtain dispensation from vows often enabled him to continue working as a lay teacher.
Men who were discovered to be sexual abusers were allowed to take dispensation rather than incur the opprobrium of dismissal from the Order. There was evidence that such men took up teaching positions sometimes within days of receiving dispensations because of serious allegations or admissions of sexual abuse. ‘

‘In general, male religious Congregations were not prepared to accept their responsibility for the sexual abuse that their members perpetrated. ... 'Congregational loyalty enjoyed priority over other considerations including safety and protection of children.'

These points are well taken,  but as a humanist, I must point out that the abuse of children in residential institutions is not a purely Catholic phenomenon. Dickens wrung our hearts with the fate of the children in the
'care 'of the vile though secular Mr. and Mrs. Squeers at Dotheboys Hall.  Many children put into 'care' by local  authorities have also been routinely abused by the secular staff who enjoy unlimited and largely un-monitored
power over them. Ditto, the regimes of abuse and humilation of many 'exclusive' public schools.

So,  much though I would like to join in the well-deserved kicking of the Catholic Church, and much though I believe individual abusers and their protectors deserve to be prosecuted and imprisoned, to the limits of the
law and much though I would encourage every Catholic  - all one billion of them - to quit their chronically corrupt Church and become  happy humanists, as a systems thinker, I have a duty to offer another point of view.

For a start, why does no-one seem to remember the Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971?

Thirty years later Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who served as the principle experimenter became APA President and is now a professor-emeritus of Stanford University. 

In 1971, as a youn academic, he designed an experimental prison simulation in which twentyfour volunteer  students were randomly divided into 12 prisoners and 12 guards.

The prisoners were given a briefing-sheet with an account of their 'crimes'. They were árrested' and handcuffed by Campus police and brought to the 'prison' (some adapted rooms in the University basement ) to be
'incarcerated' twenty four hours a day for a planned two week stay. 

While in 'prison', they were addressed just by a number, and dressed in ill-fitting smocks and caps.

All the guards were issued with wooden batons and mirrored sunglasses and all wore identical khaki shirts and pants.  They worked in  three eight hour shifts, with three guards in charge of the twelve prisoners. 

Their basic instructions were to maintain law and order, prevent escapes and avoid physical violence but  Zimbardo and his co-researchers also invited them to create a sense of boredom, fear and powerlessness in the prisoners.
 
Day One went quite smoothly, but on Day Two, the guards started to subject the prisoners to sadistic and humiliating treatment. At first the prisoners rebelled but they were harshly suppressed by the guards who even attacked them with fire extinguishers. Thereafter they  submitted to whate ver the guards decreed. By the fifth day many showed symptoms of severe emotional traumas.

On Day Six, Zimbardo cut short the  simulation,  because the situation had  become both dangerous and psychologically damaging to the volunteers.

One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early.

Zimbardo concluded that his instructions and suggestions to the guards, and the other components in the system he designed had created ' an evil place', and in such a place, normally 'good people' do very bad things. 

What the Stanford Prison Experiment and many similar studies, teach us is that the abuses described in the Ryan Report, and in all such closed authoritarian systems, are 'emergent properties' of the system itself. 

From these studies we now know that many otherwise perfectly decent ordinary people put in positions of  unfettered authority in closed institutions are likely to become abusers of whoever is nominally in their care.  Time and time again, the details of  institutional scandals are scrupulously documented  by judges or other establishment worthies,  dozens of recommendations are made, politicians lament, heads roll and millions of words are written by  victims, journalists, experts and commentators. 

Rarely, if ever, however, are the insights that have been gained by studies such as that at Stanford incorporated into an understanding of how the ensemble of components that make up various kinds of authoritarian  'systems', (uniforms, vast differences in power, strict and arbitrary rules, punishment regimes) will usually give rise to more or less terrible abuses.

So, to every local authority, church, government department, NGO or other institution charged with the care of vulnerable, frightened, inadequate, inarticulate, angry, traumatised children and adults, the Stanford Prison
Experiment should form part of the process by which they design the systems with which they discharge their responsibilities. Otherwise, the Ryan Report will just be one of a series that will go on for as long as such
institutions exist. 

And, instead of the three wholly speculative reasons that  he gives for the Industrial Schools scandal, with some very unjesuitical humility and the guidance of someone such as, say, Professor Zimbardo,  Fergus O'Donoghue might be able to offer his co-religionists and future generations of care-givers, some genuine help in their search for understanding and reform. 

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