Feb 4th 2016

SPOTLIGHT illuminates the unique power of journalism to uncover societal scandals

by David Pilgrim

Professor of Health and Social Policy, University of Liverpool


Like All The President’s Men before it, Spotlight, which was released recently to critical acclaim, reassures its audience that the American mass media is not all soundbites and superficiality at the behest of owners. Both films are stories of speaking truth to power. Both remind us that those in power anywhere in society will, as and when required, ignore, cajole, bully and bribe anyone who seeks to expose injustice and corruption linked to the status quo.

But whereas the case of All The President’s Men is limited to the corruption of one president, Spotlight is the story of an investigation into what was ultimately a global child sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. At the end of this film, the director makes a point of printing a long list of all the places worldwide where the problem has been exposed, leaving the audience in no doubt as to the continuing pervasiveness of the scandal.

The historical capacity of the Catholic Church to weather such storms is one theme in Spotlight, which portrays Church leaders blithely maintaining moral authority and a faux noble silence about their own wrongdoing. The investigative team at The Boston Globe was offered one window into that hypocritical denial, tracing 87 paedophile priests in the city and taking testimonies from their victims. Given the litigious character of American society, it is not surprising that there, more than elsewhere, the Church is being bankrupted by the scale of claims against it.

The team. eOne

Complicity

Marty Baron arrived at as editor of the Boston Globe from Florida in 2001, having previously edited the Miami Herald. It was Baron (who is Jewish) pushed for the story and, as an outsider to the city, he was not as subject to Boston’s power hierarchy – of which the Catholic Church was, and is, such an important part. This reflects a pattern: truth-seeking whistle blowers are often newcomers with little or no partisan investment in a culture.

As the story began to unfold, journalists started to become aware of the many ways in which the Church had protected itself. Mothers trying to make complaints were visited by priests; God’s representatives on earth. As often as not they were offered tea and biscuits with a smile. Bishops moved offenders from parish to parish, rather than reporting their crimes to the police. A cottage industry of lawyers struck out-of-court settlements with no paper trail, allowing the Church to evade public scrutiny. And when there were protests from religious staff about colleagues, their evidence was ignored by the Church hierarchy.

This systemic feature of complicity recurs in such cases all over the world. The story of clerical abuse has entailed more police collusion in countries, such as Ireland, where there has been more Church-State enmeshment. Secularism mitigates, but does not prevent, the Church being a law unto itself.

Late-night research. eOne

What all these points suggest is that the “bad apple theory” about child sexual abuse is not only empirically misleading, it also obscures the extensive complicity of third parties. It is not surprising that the “bad apple theory” is favoured by those seeking to cover up scandals and that “conspiracy theory” is a ready term of contempt from them. We need more credible theories of how conspiracies occur, rather being ashamed of our attempts.

Moral panics

The mass media has had a mixed attitude to paedophilia. On the one hand campaigns, such as those in the UK waged by The News of the World, have led to legal changes to protect children from potential perpetrators. On the other hand, at times the tabloids have vilified child protection workers for seemingly meddling in the private lives of harmless families. Social workers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

A common assumption in social science is that child sexual abuse is a moral panic, inflamed in large part by the mass media. But the ambivalence of parts of the latter undermines such an argument, especially when the journalism is not sensationalist at all, but instead takes up an investigative role usually reserved for the police.

In the case of the Catholic Church, the focus of the Boston story is on the powerful as perpetrators and as colluding with the perpetrators. Typically the powerful gain at the expense of the powerless from a moral panic being “whipped up” – but in the case of clerical abuse, the powerful Church hierarchy has attempted to suppress the moral panic.

This has resonance with the current scandals in the UK surrounding the children’s TV presenter Jimmy Savile – and also allegations made against politicians in relation to paedophilia. Such cases outline how powerful institutions can close ranks in an attempt to minimise damage. But thankfully, as Spotlight recounts in the case of the Boston scandal, journalists can still play a key role in uncovering wrongdoing.


This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.



David Pilgrim has spent the past 30 years dividing his time equally between work in the NHS and in higher education. He is a clinical psychologist and medical sociologist and his clinical work was mainly in acute psychiatry and secure provision. His academic activity has been mainly in the field of mental health policy and the history of ideas in relation to mental abnormality. He has a wide experience in the postgraduate teaching of psychologists, social workers and psychiatrists, and has supervised several research students to PhD completion and dozens to Masters level in psychology and social work.

He has a wide experience in the postgraduate teaching of psychologists, social workers and psychiatrists. He has supervised several research students to PhD completion and dozens to Masters level in psychology and social work.

His current research interests include mental health policy and the history and philosophy of mental health and mental disorder.

David Pilgrim's published articles include:

Pilgrim, D. (2012) 'Child abuse in Irish Catholic Church settings: a non-reductionist account'. Child Abuse Review 21, 6, 405-413.

Pilgrim, D. (2011) 'The child abuse crisis in the Catholic church: international, national and personal policy aspects'. Policy and Politics 39, 3, 309-324

David Pilgrim is the author of the upcoming book Understanding Mental Health: A Critical Realist Exploration (Routledge).

Browse articles by author

More Movie Reviews

Oct 4th 2023
EXTRATS: "Sir Michael Gambon, who died on September 28 at the age of 82, was a hugely versatile actor who enjoyed numerous and varied roles in film and television throughout the course of his long career." .... "Though he retired from the theatre in 2015, Gambon continued to act in film and TV until just before his 80th birthday. It was that mesmerising combination of rage and vulnerability that always made him a compelling screen actor to watch, making audiences always care about the characters he inhabited."
Oct 4th 2023
EXTRACT: "....to my mind, in order to elevate acting to that kind of level, there has to be a deep undercurrent of human empathy. Of course, I never met Michael Gambon, but I imagine those who knew him and worked with him would confirm that."
Aug 5th 2023
EXTRACT: "This propulsive show understands the total unwavering commitment that kitchen brigades feel. Our research, informed by interviews with 62 elite chefs, indicates that chefs work in the region of 12 to 20 hours per day. Such perceived commitment to their work translates to ideas of a strong and resilient professional that has to choose between having a family and doing a job they are really good at. So is it really as stressful for these chefs as The Bear depicts? Yes chef, it really is."
Oct 13th 2021
EXTRACT: "Having watched both the original and Hagai Levi’s remake, I am struck by the intensity of both and, in contrast to many reviewers of the new HBO mini-series, many who disparage it, I assert that Levi has, in fact done a sterling job of both recreating and, indeed, increasing the intensity of the original. The performances by Chastain and Isaacs are marvelous, moving, and in each episode, both hold the viewer with their immersions in the roles."
Sep 11th 2021
EXTRACTS: "I have questioned before whether certain works explicitly thematising traumatic events amount to a meaningful response. They could be criticised for rendering the trauma aesthetic. This has the potential, as cultural theorist Theodor Adorno warned in response to art after the Holocaust, of enabling people to derive pleasure from it, and that can be heinous. I would not wish to argue that composers, or other artists, should refrain from engaging with such events, nor that there have not been immensely successful works of this type."
Feb 4th 2021
EXTRACT: "As the skeleton of the ship emerges from the sand, it is a metaphor for the transience of human life, particularly poignant with war looming. Edith says to Brown, “We die and decay and don’t live on.” He counters, “From the first human hand-print on a cave wall, we’re part of something continuous, so we don’t really die.” The idea that all human lives are connected through the thread of the past is at the heart of burial archaeology, which is not about treasure but unearthing relationships between the living and their memories of the dead."
Nov 17th 2020
EXTRACT: "Peter Morgan’s fourth season of The Crown faces perhaps its greatest challenge so far. The 1980s was one of the most documented, catalogued, debated and scrutinised decades of the House of Windsor. Morgan will, no doubt be keenly aware of viewers using telephoto lenses to, once again, see if the program-makers “get it right”....... They do.
Feb 9th 2020
EXTRACT: "Camera moves were choreographed to allow two scenes that were filmed in the same location at different times to be taken into the computer and “stitched” together as if they were one complete shot. Doing this over and over enabled the illusion of one continuous sequence. Like many films though, 1917 used a host of other visual effects techniques that were unseen. This is often regarded as the pinnacle of success in visual effects – an effect that can’t be seen versus one that is smacking you in the face with a large, wet fish."
Jan 18th 2020
EXTRACT: "Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) has received Oscar nominations in several of the same categories as her solo directorial debut, Lady Bird (2017). Most notably, another writing nomination for Gerwig, this time in the adapted screenplay category. However, Little Women, unlike Lady Bird, did not earn her a nomination for best director. The shortlist for that category is, for the 87th time in 92 ceremonies, all male, and some might say, all rather macho to boot."
Nov 27th 2019

 

Whistle-blower: Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun.
Nov 5th 2019
Extract: "From October 16-27, over four hundred films were screened from 68 countries. I saw thirteen of these. The most inspiring was Varda by Agnés—and I’ll close this essay with her: Find her films, see them, cherish them. The list that follows runs from two—I can’t help but say this—clunkers to all the rest that are well-worth seeing—if you can find them."
Oct 16th 2018
........one hopes, Asia will become a bigger part of Hollywood culture, with more films featuring Asian locales and actors. Produced for just $30 million (compared to over $300 million for Disney’s “Avengers: Infinity War”), “Crazy Rich Asians” has already grossed over $200 million worldwide.
Sep 18th 2018
Yes, life is unreliable. Yes, life sometimes is unbelievable. Yes, life will bring us to our knees. And, yes, this much-criticized film will get you in the heart, but not through the manipulation it is being criticized for, but through its narrative insight that shows us how, despite all that brings us down, a story can get us to see that we must get up off our knees.
Jan 23rd 2018

The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government

Nov 27th 2017
Casablanca, which brought together the combined star-power of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, remains one of the best-loved movies ever produced in Hollywood. But the film, which hit the silver screen on November 26 1942, is more than just a love story set in Morocco.
Oct 30th 2017

The 53rd Chicago International Film festival ran 150 films from October 12-27, 2017. Directors, screenplay writers and actors attended many of the films from fifty countries.

Oct 30th 2017
The cinematic experience continues to be dominated by digitally led projects and audiences who increasingly expect more and more technical innovation. So it is refreshing when a mainstream cinema release consciously chooses to place traditional, artist-led techniques at its very heart.
Jun 8th 2017

Sofia Coppola’s triumphant win at Cannes as best director for The Beguiled is the latest in a series of notable successes for a director quietly but forcefully blazing her own tr

Feb 24th 2017

Having won five BAFTAs, including coveted awards for Best Film, Best Director (Damien Chazelle) and Best Actress (Emma Stone), La La Land is likely to

Jan 7th 2017

The blogosphere has been awash this month with reviews of Martin Scorsese’s latest movie, Silence.