Sexual Abuse In Canada

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Recommended: History of child sexual abuse in Canada

Canada’s first cases of sexual abuse begins in the early 1990’s. Damian Lawrence Cooper, a Vancouver priest, was first accused of sexual abuse in 1994. After twenty years, Father Cooper is finally being sued in the B.C. Supreme Court along with the Archdiocese of Vancouver, with a court date of September 29, 2014 (Aihiokhai). The plaintiff went for counselling to the priest and was 16 years old when the sexual abuse began. Media coverage of the lawsuit unearthed the fact that despite initial claims of having removed Fr. Cooper permanently from the priestly ministry when the abuse was first admitted in 1994, the Archdiocese of Vancouver instead sent Fr. Cooper to work in an Archdiocese on Long Island NY, where he then committed "problems of …show more content…

Paul Bailey, the Crown Attorney for Chatham Kent, reportedly described the case as being the "largest case of non-residential school sex abuse by a Roman Catholic priest" in North America (Aihiokhai). Sylvestre was given a sentence in October 2006 of only three years, and died January 22, 2007 after only three months in prison. Sylvestre’s case and trial was documented by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Documentary series, The Fifth Estate (Formicola). Bernard Ambrose Prince was ordained in 1964 pleaded guilty to charges of sexual abuse of thirteen young boys from 1964 onward, and was sentenced to four years incarceration in 2008(Formicola). He was laicized by the Roman Catholic Church in 2009, and paroled in 2010 . His crimes were known in the Canadian Catholic Church and in the Vatican, before he was appointed to Rome in 1991 …show more content…

In 1990, Manitoba leader Phil Fontaine revealed that he had been sexually and physically abused in a Catholic residential school. He claimed that sexual abuse was common in residential schools in general. "In my grade three class, if there were 20 boys, every single one of them would have experienced what I experienced. They would have experienced some aspect of sexual abuse.” Canadian author and artist, Michael D. O'Brien, has also spoken out about his painful experiences of residential school abuse, revealing that the sexual exploitation of the young has been epidemic in Catholic residential schools and orphanages (Aihiokhai).

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