Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments as follows:
Child sexual abuse is out-of-control at the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Instead of checking the problem, the Obama administration has decided to punish the whistle-blower, Dr. Michael R. Tilus, director of behavioral health at the Health Care Center on the reservation. According to the New York Times, he has been reprimanded, reassigned, barred from promotion for two years, and may lose his professional license. These are the conditions:
- a 2-month-old baby girl died in July 2012 after tribal officials received warnings of child abuse
- last year a 9-year-old girl and her 6-year-old brother were found dead, raped and sodomized inside their father’s home
- foster children have been sent to homes where registered sex offenders live
- a teenage girl who was sexually abused was placed in a tribal home where she was then raped
- the tribe hired a convicted felon as a child case worker
- a one-year old child covered with 100 wood ticks was discovered by a social worker yet was not taken to a hospital
- foster children have been illegally removed from homes and then assigned to new ones without conducting a safety check
- mandated background checks are not made by the tribe before placing foster children in new homes
- monthly visits by the tribe to check on children in foster care are not being made
- American Indians are 9 percent of North Dakota’s population but Indian children constitute nearly 30 percent of the state’s child abuse victims
There is no outcry coming from those who are quick to condemn the Catholic Church. We are pursuing several avenues of redress and will not allow this issue to die.
