Sexual Abuse in Social Context: Clergy and other (Secular) Professionals.

[Paleophyte]

If you disagree, pls explain why with reasons. All child abuse is bad and we condemn it. Yet look at the %ages among Parents, Teachers, other Secular people, Clergy in other Demominations, in other Religions etc.

[Edit: the link https://www.catholicleague.org/sexual-ab...essionals/ ]

Well let's start with the fact that you're using information from a pro-Catholic website. That's about as reliable as a brochure from Novartis on why you need more Ritalin in your diet. This is the beating heart of why you have a scandal. You refuse to believe that you have a problem, do nothing about it, and all the while try to take the moral high ground.

The bias in your cited source is trivially easy to demonstrate. Note how it uses out of date newspaper surveys as the source for its "statistics" and only mentions the John Jay report in passing. The John Jay report was a relatively independent study commissioned by the Catholic Church and undertaken by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Written just two years before the article that you cite and significantly more thorough than a newspaper survey, it found that 4% of ordained Catholic clergy in the US had accusations of child sexual abuse made against them. Although reliable statistics are difficult to obtain due to the majority of child sexual abuse cases going unreported, 4% is roughly in line with the national average. It should be noted that the 4% figure from the John Jay report represents a minimum, as it relies exclusively on reported accusations, with untold abuse going unreported. But most similar sexual abuse statistics suffer from the same weakness.

The scandal isn't that the Catholic Church has more child abusers than the rest of society. It's that the church claims a higher moral calling, failed that calling, and then rather than do anything moral they instead silenced the victims while enabling the perpetrators, all in the name of protecting their image. For example, amongst the more horrific findings of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury was a child sex ring run by clergy in the Diocese of Pittsburgh that made sadomasochistic child pornography and marked its victims with gold crosses to identify them for other priests to abuse. There was also the priest who kept his position in the church after impregnating a girl and then arranging for an abortion, despite the latter act earning him an automatic excommunication.

You have a scandal because the Catholic Church behaves exactly like you do. Denial, cover up, justification.

What is interesting, and possibly worthy of discussion, is that child abusers within the Catholic Church appear to disproportionately target boys. The John Jay report indicated that boys were 4 times more likely to be abused than girls. This is in stark contrast to the national average, where girls are roughly 3 times more likely to be abused than boys. Assuming these statistics are correct it almost certainly reveals something interesting and horrifying about the culture within the church. I don't know what that is but I'd bet that forcing the clergy into a life of celibacy doesn't help any.