A question for parents

[max-greece]

After numerous accounts of child sexual abuse that has been reported WHY continue letting your children be alone with religious officials?

Because children will be safe under the supervision of the average clergyman. Now, what do you make of the fact that teachers are more likely to be child molesters than Catholic priests? No parent should ever allow his child to be left alone with teachers, correct?

Except that in the event that a teacher does abuse a child there isn't a huge organisation behind him or her that will go to extraordinary lengths to protect, hide and move the culprit on to pastures new where they can safely prey on other children.

The problem is not that there were paedophiles in the ranks of Catholic (mainly) churches. The problem is the reaction of the church and the fact that its actions exposed more children to abuse.

Its hard to imagine how the church could have handled the problem in a worse way.

Yet again therefore - God provides no perceivable, tangible benefit for a real horror story. In fact, one could argue that, yet again, God made the problem worse by creating an institution that felt it could not admit wrong-doing in its clergy.

[jesus_wept]

There are more reports of child molesting teachers in the news than there are such reports about child molesting clergymen. The teachers, especially women ones, get off with just a slap on the wrist.

The victims of clergymen usually wait until the priest is dead before filling a claim. That way they can score some easy money.

I think the main reason there might be more reports of child molesting teachers than priests is because the teaching organisations prosecute teachers instead of covering the abuse up and moving them to another school.

[Aractus]

After numerous accounts of child sexual abuse that has been reported WHY continue letting your children be alone with religious officials?

I'm - wow. You cannot be serious.

I have known more than six different people who have been sexually abused, and everyone was abused by either a parent or an uncle/aunt. In every single case almost no one knows they were abused. I'm a life-long Christian I've been around the church for a very long time, I've never met a single person that I know was sexually abused by a member religious clergy - or even by a lay person for that matter.

The vast majority of sexual abuse to children happens in the family home by the parents.

In any case, churches are not the only "public institutions" where abuse occurs - sports clubs, non-religious charities, schools, etc - no organization large enough is immune from having members that abuse children.

Question for you: How many people have you met first-hand who have told you "I have been sexually abused"? Have you actually known (personally) anyone sexually abused by Church clergy?

AFAIK there has been one clergy person (or rather ex-clergy as he would have been derobed/defrocked) in the Canberra-Goulburn Anglican Diocese to be guilty of this, and as I said it in no way represents the organization it simply means that a large enough group of people will have someone that does the wrong thing. Think about it this way: if 100% of the world was Anglican then 100% of child sex abusers would be Anglicans, but that would tell you nothing about correlation nor causation nor anything else. We Anglicans will derobe clergy for committing sexual sins far less serious than child molestation you know, we'll derobe those that commit adultery - that certainly doesn't happen to Catholic clergy!!

[thesummerqueen]

Well, both the Bible and the Babylonian Talmud condones baby raping. So the clergymen do have that going for them as a defense or justification for their actions.

Well, fortunately our laws happen to be secular, not biblical. When we become theocracies, we can let them use that as a defense.