Apparently not more than by the average clergyman, at least, judging by the risk assessments made by the companies that insure congregations against clerical sexual misconduct liability (see citation in my previous post).
Statistically, I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that insurance companies don’t consider Catholic congregations a higher sex-abuse risk than other congregations with the fact that the Catholic Church hierarchy has reprehensibly provided what seemed to be a uniquely lenient environment facilitating sexual abuse.
I’m afraid that the explanation may be that there’s a whole lot more institutional leniency facilitating sexual abuse everywhere than we realize or want to admit. (Not to mention personal individual leniency, as Ulfreida noted.)
More like to abuse children is not the same as more likely to be a child abuser.
Just like if I once got drunk in 1979 and got punished for it, then stopped, it does not mean I’m just as likely to abuse alcohol as someone who is drunk every day since then.
I’m an actuary. I once looked at pricing liability insurance for a non-Catholic religious group. Because a large fraction of their serious liability claims were for sexual abuse of minors, they presented us with both their claim history and what steps they were taking to protect kids. It was a sobering document, and they compared themselves unfavorably to the Catholic church in that document. More may have come out since then about the Catholics. But I am 100% certain that clergy abusing kids is not a uniquely Catholic problem.
It might be that - but another factor is that many other religious groups don’t have the same sort of institutional anything as the Catholic church.
Imagine some other religious group, where the clergy are not assigned by some central authority but are instead hired by hired by individual congregations, or the many non-denominational churches that are completely autonomous. If Pastor Bob is accused of sexual abuse and is fired by Congregation A and is later hired by Congregation B and the same thing happens and then he moves on to Congregation C, the new congregation may have failed to look into why he left he last one, or the old congregation may not have disclosed the problem to the new congregation that is thinking of hiring him - but neither of those is the same thing as a bishop removing Father Bob from Parish A , assuring the congregation that he will not be permitted to have contact with children and then assigning him to parish B where he is put in charge of the altar boys because even the pastor of Parish B wasn’t told of the allegations.
The church i rated did have institutional stuff. But you are right about how a large fraction of the world works.
Exactly. The same dynamic works with schools, too. A teacher might be fired for diddling students. But they can find another job at another, unrelated school, in another system. And do it again.
If the number of abused kids per abuser is in the dozens and 3-4% of people (men?) are abusers, wouldn’t the vast majority of the population need to be abused as kids. Not 5%, not 10%, but 40%, 50%, 60%.
I think “dozens of kids per abuser” is pretty rare. Most probably only have one or two victims. Outside of jobs that specifically entail being around a lot children, like “priest” or “teacher,” most predators don’t have access to “dozens” of kids to abuse.
In the French case the number of abusers was 2900 to 3200 and the number of abused was in the hundreds of thousands.
It’s possible I suppose that 10 priests abused thousands of kids each, and the other 3000 only a couple each, so that you can still say that the cases of abusing dozens of kids is rare.
The general populations. The report says that 3% of the priest were abusers and on average each abuser abused 80 kids.
If this was applied to the general population and if only men were abusers, 3% of men would literally need to abuse more than 100% of the kids to average 80 per abuser.
Either that or the proportion of abusers might be the same among priests and non-priests but the priests are abusing a lot more kids before they are stopped. A LOT more.
Right, but most pedophiles don’t have jobs that put them in close contact with hundreds of children, nor do they have billion dollar organizations actively covering for them. Most pedophiles abuse a family member - either their own kid, or a niece or nephew. They don’t have access or opportunity to abuse dozens of kids.
I suspect that a modified version of that is likely to be at least part of the explanation. Research suggests that
A minority of abusing priests may well have hundreds of victims apiece, while the majority probably have many fewer.
You mean, because 3% of the approximately 4 billion males in the current world population is about 120 million males total, and 80 times 120 million is over 9 billion, i.e., more than the total world population?
I think a piece of the math is missing here: namely, the fact that the victim toll is being counted over a 70-year period. A fair number of the abuse victims from that period are now dead and hence not counted in the current population.
Sure, if you’ll start off by explaining how you came up with your “more than 100% of the kids” estimate that I was trying to understand in my previous post. IOW, you show me your math, I’ll show you mine.
If you have 3-4% of half the population abusing 80 kids per abuser, that is more than 100% of the population being abused.
The time window does not matter. The abused die over time, but so do the abusers.
An abuser might abuse 3 generations of kids in his lifetime, but it’s not like those kids stop being victims once they are no longer kids. They aren’t currently being abused, but they are in the population of victims for the rest of their lives.