I watched a documentary called Deliver Us From Evil on Netflix’s Watch Instantly service, about the Catholic church’s habit of covering up incidences of sexual abuse by priests. A claim made I think by Thomas Doyle in the film was that 10% of the graduates of St. John’s Seminary were actual offending (meaning acting on their desires) pedophiles. He didn’t offer a citation, or a definition on what exactly an offending pedophile is - somebody against whom a complaint has been made? A percentage taking into account the number of victims of sexual abuse who remain silent? Some kind of estimate from other data entirely? Wikipedia lists it as “citation needed”, like, you think? Because, like they said in the film, assuming that’s true, if 10% of the graduates at Yale were molesting children it would be a big deal, right?
Anyway, I’m sure there are people on this board a lot more familiar with the issue and the literature than I am. Any idea where that statistic comes from?
Additionally, are there are good readable studies on why priests, specifically, abuse children? I’ve heard a lot of possible explanations, but I don’t know what the state of the scholarship is.
Given the sensitive nature of this subject, this is just a reminder to posters to keep your answers factual and closely related to what the OP is asking. I don’t want to have to send it to GD (or the Pit), at least not immediately.
Have you read that recent study on priest’s abusing children in Ireland? It was a pretty large-scale study/inquiry. So it might give some objective measures as tho how’s and why’s, at least for that location and era.
Bear in mind that “children” are not the primary victims here. That is, the priests who’ve been charged with sexual crimes typically went after teenage boys, rather than 7 or 8 year olds.
That doesn’t make the situation better, but it DOES mean that classic “pedophilia” is not really the issue.
To have any kind of rigour, the claim would have to be more carefully stated. Apart from the issues you point to, don’t we need to identify a specific cohort of graduates? Are we saying that 10% of all graduates since the seminary was founded (about 125 years ago) have been offending paedophiles? It strikes me as very unlikely that data to sustain such a claim would exist.
I’m not sure that it is even established that priests, specifically, abuse children, i.e. that the proportion of child abusers in the population of priests is measurably higher than in the male adult population at large.
Most abuse occurs within the family, and the number of victims abused by an individual abuser is limited by the availability of victims within the family. Priests (and certain other occupations) may have access to a much larger pool of potential victims and so may abuse many more. Plus, of course, we currently notice priestly abusers. But when we control for these factors it may not be the case that priests are more likely to be abusers than anyone else. (I’m not saying that it isn’t the case; just that I don’t know that it has been established that it is.)
PBS’ Frontline did a show called the Hand of God about a specific pedophile priest victim. One of the topics they discussed was the St. John’s Seminary class of 1960 (I’m not 100% on the year) which produced a disproportionate number of the priests who the Church later admitted were pedophiles.
They didn’t discuss St. John’s specifically other than that one graduating class, though.
The Boston area Catholic priest sex scandal was the first large-scale one to break in the U.S. and it was a very, very big honking deal for a couple of years. It almost bankrupted the entire diocese and they could only save it by selling off valuable assets and having the Cardinal removed. He played a very active role in moving offending priests around to protect them and ignoring repeated reports about others. People are still coming forward and there have been hundreds of confirmed claims from the victims so far resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts. That doesn’t include those that choose not to report it due to shame. One priest get placed in a special protective unit in prison and was still murdered for it.
I can easily believe that 10% of priests are sex offenders based on what was confirmed here. The best theory that I have heard about why this happens is that the young priest know something is wrong and they want either a place where they can be protected for what they do or simply think that priesthood will be a way out of their desires. A vow of celibacy doesn’t seem to help matters and many turn to the easiest targets they can find.
Well the John Jay studysays that only 4.3% of priests have been accused. So even if we assume all accusations are true and generously say that there are twice as many incidents as accusations we’d still not reach 10%. However this does not speak to the percentages of priests from one seminary or class.
Without more information we can’t really say if the accusation is true. Is the clam that 10% of all priests ever graduating from that seminary are sex offenders? If thats the claim I doubt they have the data to prove it. Is it from one class? If it is from one class is that a real cause for concern or a case of misleading percentages? If you have nine offenders in a class of ninety its still not good (one is too many), but that could just be a case of random chance.
I can’t answer to the reliability of the 10% claim, but I can contribute to the ‘why.’
In high school, I had a great teacher who was Catholic and, as things often did in his class, a strange subject came up. We were reading The Canterbury Tales and someone asked what a ‘pardoner’ was. He explained it was a priest who sold pardons and indulgences, and someone murmured, “To the priests who molest kids?” Being Catholic, the teacher felt the need to defend his religion. His argument in a nutshell was that the priesthood doesn’t make you a molester, its that if you have those urges, the priesthood is obviously an appealing place. You get easy access to victims and your position of authority makes it much less likely that the kid will talk.
I find this to be a pretty compelling argument, as there seems to be nothing in the position itself that would seem to remotely cause that behavior if you weren’t already so inclined. I wouldn’t be surprised if similar rates of abuse were found in any other pastor/youth leader positions or things like scouting. Its just that when the abuser is a religious authority, the child would probably be more reluctant to report because you’re throwing God into the mix in addition to their regular authority.
On the other hand, the percentage of sex offenders among the general population of the US is 0.222%, according to this.
Now, if we assume that that 4.3% figure is a roughly accurate measure of the actual number of molesters among the priesthood (say, half the accusations are actually true, but only half of actual offenders get reported), and figure that about 37% of the population are males over the age of 18 (based on census data, and assume that all sex offenders in the general population are adult males, then the percentage of molesting priests (4.3%) is nearly eight times higher than the number of molesters among the adult male population (0.56%).
So that’s bad.
ETA: And not just because of my giant run-on sentence.
This is useful. But you are comparing priests who have been accused of sex offencesagainst registered sex offenders in the entire population, i.e. those who have been accused, charged, tried and convicted, and whose specific offences fall within an applicable sex offender registration programme.
For a valid comparison, you need to find the percentage of priests who are registered sex offenders, and compare that with the figure for the adult male population.
The biggest problem with that is that is 100% confirmed that the Catholic Church simply moved sex offenders to a different area when the priests are threatened with molestation accusations. The victims were relieved enough to be rid of them and the new church was none the wiser. That happened time and time again in the Boston area spanning decades and certainly in other places as well. Sex offender programs are fairly recent.
I used the numbers from the Church’s own study. I don’t think it’s particularly unfair to the priests- and how many sex crimes are there that don’t require registration?
However I don’t think we can look at just the general population as it is too varied to provide an accurate comparison. Far better would be to compare the priesthood to jobs that provide similar access to victims as it is reasonable think that such occupations would have higher percentages of sexual abuses than the general population. However, such occupational based data does not seem to exist as far as my searches turn up. For example the best I can find is Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literaturewhich does not even attempt to put a percentage to the number of educators who are sexual abuse.
In my opinion .0001% of priests being abusers is too high, but I think that it is important to know whether it is a problem specific to the priesthood or is it a broader problem so that the issue can be better understood and thus combated.
I’m not quibbling with the source of the numbers, only with the way in which you are using them. What you’ve established is that the proportion of priests accused of sex abuse is almost eight times higher than the proportion of adult males registered as sex offenders, but this does not show that “the percentage of molesting priests . . . is nearly eight times higher than the number of molesters among the adult male population”, which is what you state.
We know that the number of priests accused of sex offences is considerably higher than the number convicted, for a variety of reasons. But of course exactly the same is true of sex offenders in the population at large. Credible accusations may be made, but without there being sufficient evidence to support a prosecution. Or necessary witnesses may be dead, or unavailable, or unwilling to testify. Or the lapse of time may degrade the evidence and make prosecutions unlikely to succeed. Or the person accused may be dead. Or whatever. So it’s likely that the percentage of the adult male population ever accused of sex offences is very much higher than the percentage who end up on the sex offenders register. And conversely that the number of priests who end up on the sex offenders register is very much lower than the number ever accused of sex offences.
I think you’re comparing apples and oranges here – or, perhaps more accurately, all citrus fruits and oranges. The proportion of priests on the sex offenders register is (in principle) knowable. Comparing that figure, if we had it, with the same figure for the adult male population at large would tell us something useful.
The other factor that we need to acknowledge is that its likely that a proportion of sex offences go unreported – no accusation is ever made. In terms of comparing priest and non-priest offenders, this doesn’t skew the comparison provided that the non-reporting phenomenon affects priest and non-priest offenders equally. But we don’t know that it does. On the one hand, priests can use the authority lent by their role, and their claimed religious authority, to try to persuade or deter their victims not to report; this might suggest that they are less likely to be reported. On the other hand, a large proportion of sex crimes are committed within the family – by fathers or father-figures, uncles, brothers, etc. There are powerful psychological factors that come into play there that could well mean that offences by family members are less likely to be reported than offences by priests. We don’t actually know which group has the higher non-reporting rate, but it matters crucially to the comparison.
Finally, my concern here is not so much fairness to priests as simply factual accuracy. It may well be that priest are more prone to offend than non-priest, but we need to know that, not just assume it. Child protection strategies and measures which are based on assumptions and misconceptions about where the risk to children arises are obviously flawed. And that’s a matter of justice to children, not priests.
One improperly placed apostrophe is egregious? You do know that “how’s” and “why’s” are both legitimate plurals since those words are used as words, right? While the practice is falling by the wayside, it’s not so bad as to be considered improper.
Oh, and for the grammatically disinclined: “priest’s” should be "priests’ ".
No, it should be a simple plural, the subject of a participial phrase: "a study on ___ " On what? Not on priests generally. Not on children generally. Not even on abusing generally. On priests abusing children. A plural possessive would be modifying a gerund or other noun – and “abusing” does not appear to be functioning gerundially, as in “The abusing continued for years.”
As one poster said, to really answer the OP question, we need to find out as much as we can, who was the target group being abused. Then you need to compare it to the general population. Then as a side, you’d need it to compare it to other Christian and non-Christian religious groups.
The basic argument people make is that Priests are sexually repressed so take their frustrations out on their young memebers. I use those words in a psychological sense.
The arguments seem to skirt around the real question is whether people who would molest children are drawn to the priesthood or does the priesthood make them do what they do?
I don’t think you’ll ever get a decent answer till you start really qualifying your data so it can be accurately compared.