Yep, you would expect alter boys to be 50% female in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Good catch, Shodan.
Altar girls were permitted for the first time by the Vatican in 1994. Then it took awhile for female altar servers to match boys in numbers.
As such I would not expect a 50/50 split. Far from it.
You appear to be agreeing with me. The word “few” may be correct compared to “every Catholic anywhere ever” but it still covers a lot of people in a lot of places, often continuing their abuses throughout their careers and affecting thousands of children in the last several decades alone. That’s a big batch of eggs.
No counter5evidence, but as you’re basing this claim on a grand total now of 527 individuals, I think you still have a long way to go to back up your assertion. Or rather, they do. It takes 1010 respondents just to find out what the president’s approval rating is.
Also, it’s not only altar boys who were molested by priests. I’m not even sure if it was mostly altar boys. It was also, if not chiefly, students at Catholic schools.
Some parishes, like mine, were using female servers before then, though. It was in 83 or 84 that I started being an altar girl.
So, all the evidence points one way. You have zero evidence to the contrary but you want more evidence? Classic bullshit evasion to adhere to your preconceived notions.
And 1010 respondents assesses the mood of about 250 million people. Since there are far, far fewer pedophiles than that 527 is not that bad. (Need a statistician to tell us what a decent sample size is for pedophiles.)
If it walks like a duck has feathers like a duck and quacks like a duck the smart money is it is a duck even if you will only accept a DNA test to prove it isn’t really an alien that looks like a duck.
Cool but the altar girls were certainly fewer in number back then than altar boys were.
I have also heard that some places will not allow altar girls because they feel the spots should be filled by boys in order to make it more likely to produce priests (which women obviously cannot become). Not sure how many are like that but it remains that till relatively recently there were far more altar boys than altar girls.
Many Catholic schools are boys or girls only. Till you do a breakout of the numbers showing where molestations occurred compared to the percentage of accessible girls your statement doesn’t tell us anything.
Yeah, I would assume girls were still less than 50% for the church as a whole, though the interesting thing in my parish was that the girls very quickly became the majority of the servers. Like 75%, or thereabouts.
Well, no. I’m not asserting anything about human sexuality, you are. You’ve used a total of 527 instances, in which a researcher made a judgement (no criteria listed) as to what the sexual orientation each abuser had, if any. Some of them were evaluated in the 1970s, when psychology and social sciences were very different, and Freud was being taught as science. Also, the abusers evaluated were not representative: if I recall my women’s stidues class from college (Women & the Criminal Justice System), the vast majority of sexual abusers are not arrested. Also, the 527 instances aren’t really 527 instances, since not all of the abusers in one study could be evaluated.
Finally, the studies purport to describe human sexuality, so would require a considerably larger sample size than your average Gallup Poll
The article notes its limitations.
Nevertheless all the evidence so far is against you, none even hhints at support of your viewpoint, yet you cling to your contrary view.
I suppose there needs to be more evidence before you believe evolution is real. :rolleyes:
Why would the priests confine themselves to altar boys? Surely you are not so naive as to think that only altar boys were attacked - your own logic shows that can’t be the case.
If priests only attacked altar boys, and there were no altar boys in the 50s and 60s, then no girls should have been attacked, let alone 19%,
Regards,
Shodan
Could a Catholic who grew up in that period please tell Shodan why a priest might have more access to a young boy than a young girl back then, even if they weren’t alter boys at the time? I could do it, but it would only be second-hand information form me.
Yes, the article does note its limitations. Perhaps you would be more convincing if you did too. So far all the evidence is statistically insignificant. What there is comes largely from value judgements by people who thought Freud was science, based on interviews with prisoners.
Oh gosh, not the rolleyes. Well, you got me there. Do you really believe that there’s this little evidence for evolution? If you do, you are sadly mistaken. If a scientific theory was based on this little evidence, it wouldn’t be considered valid.
I did grow up at that time, and priests had access to pretty much any student at school. They saw the altar boys in the sacristy, but that was the sum total of the extra access they had to them. I went to Catholic grammar and high schools.
Ephebophiles/child molesters/gays* knew that the Church would protect their secrets, and that there’d be no questions why they didn’t have a girlfriend or wife. It’s only natural the Catholic priesthood would attract such people.
- That is not meant as a slam at gays; it’s just pointing out that they too wanted to keep their sexuality secret, although they shouldn’t have needed to.
Perhaps not, but the scandal was that the Church hierarchy was protecting priests who’d been accused of sexual abuse against children, often moving them around from parish to parish even after multiple allegations had been made against them, instead of investigating the charges and involving the police. Catholic priests might not be more likely to abuse children than anyone else who’s working with children. But the Church created for them a situation where they could abuse over and over with impunity.
To take a slightly more charitable view than Der Trihs, a pedophile or ephebophile who happened to be Catholic might decide “I know that these impulses I have are wrong, and that I don’t have the impulses I should. Therefore, the moral choice for me is to live a life of celibacy.”. Having already decided on a life of celibacy, then at the least one of the major disincentives against entering the priesthood is removed, which alone would lead to a disproportionate number of pedophilic priests. Even more so if the pedophile decided that the priesthood might provide a support structure that would make celibacy easier, or that it was the only socially-acceptable way to remain celibate.
This. Any Catholic priest may not be more likely to sexually abuse, but those who already have, have gotten away with it, have been moved to a new place where no one knows them, and have only their own solemn promise to prevent them from doing it again, are certainly more likely to abuse than your average man on the street. It actually seems like the old South Park episode sometimes, when you get the details of these cases. The hierarchy were putting very disturbed individuals exactly where they could do the most possible harm.
Also, even ignoring other considerations the fact that the Church protected child molesting priests would cause it to accumulate them over time, even if they started out with no more molesters than any other group and if they were no more attracted to the priesthood than any other group. If Organization A protects molesters (or other types of criminals) who are caught and Organization B kicks them out, then Organization A over time will end up with a surplus formed of the ones who aren’t kicked out.