Madrid, October 28 2023, The Europe Today: More than 200,000 minors may have been sexually abused by clerics in Spain, according to an estimate published on Friday by an independent commission of enquiry into child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
The report does not give precise figures, but contains a survey of more than 8,000 people which estimates that 0.6% of Spain’s adult population of nearly 39 million may have been sexually assaulted by clerics when they were minors.
A slightly smaller number of Spaniards (0.53%) told the surveyors they had been sexually assaulted as minors by lay people working in religious institutions.
These estimates are contained in a report submitted to the Spanish Congress of Deputies on Friday by the Ombudsman, Ángel Gabilondo, following the work of the independent commission – the first in Spain created to assess the extent of paedophilic crime in the Catholic Church.
The report is critical of the attitude of the Catholic Church, deploring its “insufficient” response to cases of child abuse within its institutions.
Among the measures proposed in the report is the creation by the state of a fund to pay reparations to victims.
Mr Gabilondo told a press conference that the cases mainly concerned the period “from 1970 to the present day”.
