A Bit More Detail

The small eastern Ontario city of Cornwall has just seen the end of an exorbitantly expensive inquiry into claims of an organized pedophile ring there. Triggered when police officer Perry Dunlop learned of a sexual abuse scandal that the Roman Catholic Church had quietly settled in 1994, matters quickly spiraled into speculation that dozens of men were systematically abusing young men. Following a series of failed trials, an inquiry into the who affair began, and was already going badly by the time that Dunlop skipped the inquiry. The whole situation is a catastrophe.

It wasn't long before the original premise grew to shocking proportions: a ring or clan of pedophiles that reached into the city's highest corners -- priests, a bishop, a Crown attorney, lawyers, probation officers, possibly senior police officers.

Because so many powerful people were involved, went the theory, the original investigation was blocked, forcing Mr. Dunlop to circle around his own police force. He was the whistleblower extraordinaire, unafraid to put his career on the line to protect abused children.

[. . .]

Mr. Dunlop's role in the case, however well intended, has contributed to a breathtaking expenditure of public resources -- time and money -- not to mention the stain on an entire community.

And Mr. Dunlop doesn't want to talk about it?

Briefly, there were two Cornwall police investigations in 1993, an Ontario Provincial Police probe in 1994 and, finally, the launching of Project Truth in 1997. It spared nothing: The allegations of 69 complainants were investigated, leading to 672 interviews.

Four years later, the OPP were satisfied there was no pedophile ring in the city, but laid 115 charges against 15 individuals. There was but one conviction.

[. . .]

At least one of the witnesses -- an original complainant -- has testified he never saw evidence of a pedophile ring, contrary to an earlier written statement. Those named in the statement? Nah, never saw them. The statement itself? Didn't even read it, he testified.

He claimed he was pressured into making the statements by one Perry Dunlop. Nor was he the only witness to retract outlandish allegations.

"I did anything (Mr. Dunlop) told me to do," said one alleged victim.

Even though the inquiry has, 53 million dollars later, come to the conclusion that there wasn't a conspiracy, the idea will still remain active.

An explanation that to some appears to debunk a conspiracy theory just further confirms others' suspicions, said University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson.

"It's very difficult to disprove a conspiracy theory, because every bit of disproving evidence can be just written off as additional evidence that these conspirators are particularly intelligent and sneaky," he said.

Conspiracy theories are usually started by people who are very untrusting and it gathers steam among others who are somewhat untrusting, Peterson said.

They're psychologically compelling because they neatly tie together troubling facts or assertions, he said. When things go badly there are often many explanations, and an orchestrated conspiracy "should be pretty low on your list of plausible hypotheses," Peterson said.

"A good rule of thumb is: Don't presume malevolence where stupidity is sufficient explanation," he said.

"Organizations can act badly and things can fall apart without any group of people driving that."

While Glaude made no definitive statements about a ring, he declared there was not a conspiracy by several institutions to cover up the existence of any such operation, rather that agency bungling left that impression.

By now, the majority of Cornwall has dismissed the allegation that once spread like wildfire there, but among a small group of people the theory will never die, said columnist Claude McIntosh with the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder.

When historical allegations of sex abuse started surfacing in the 1990s people were certainly talking about the issue, he said. Then a group of townspeople started a website and posted names of people they named as pedophiles.

They also posted an affidavit from one man detailing the most sensational allegation, that ritual sex abuse was performed by men in robes with candles on weekend retreats. He would later recant that allegation at the inquiry.

This sounds a lot like the various panics over alleged Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and 1990s, triggered by moral panic related to concern over the breakdown of traditional mores, like the nuclear family or conventional religion. What happened in Cornwall seems to me the consequence of the moral crisis triggered by revelations of clerical abuse. Cornwall is not only a strongly Roman Catholic community, it's a community that has experienced significant economic stresses with high unemployment and low education levels and a relative lack of investment in public facilities. A Roman Catholic priest really did abuse a child; the Roman Catholic Church really did try to cover it up. Especially when life is already strained, it's not such a big stretch go from a trusted religious authority betraying the public interest in a specific fashion to any number of trusted authorities engaging in orchestrated horrors. Besides, as Peterson notes, conspiracies tend to be more coherent than the idea that bad things just happen in isolation for no particular reason, more comforting in a way since they offer a sense of predictability and thus an ability to control the conspirators through public action.

I also recommend Religioustolerance.org's analysis.