Add the US Swim Team to the list of organizations that tries to ignore problems in hopes that they will go away:
What do you mean, “a hell of a charge”? Are you really under the impression that priests are far more prone than other men, e.g., teachers, to commit child sexual abuse?
No, Shodan’s perfectly right: there is no evidence that incidence of sexual abuse among Catholic clergy is higher than among males in general. Cite.
The Church hierarchy has a much more heavily soiled record of institutional cover-up of such abuse than most other organizations where it has occurred (although it looks as though the Boy Scouts may give them some competition). But that’s not the same as saying that they actually have a disproportionately higher number of abusers.
:eek:
That would have to mean that everyone personally knows such men. Even the 1 in 10 figure would indicate that.
Nonetheless, the part about the insurance companies, who are more concerned with incidence of abuse than the number of abusers, surprises me. If there are roughly the same proportion of pedophiles in the Catholic priesthood as in the adult male population generally, but the Catholic hierarchy systematically covers up incidents of child sexual abuse and enables abusers to find greener pastures in new parishes from time to time, you’d expect a higher frequency of abuse per pedophile in the Catholic priesthood than by ministers, Sunday school teachers, etc. in other denominations where covering up may have happened from time to time, but wasn’t systematic.
And while I am not questioning the information in your cite, it’s certainly a counterintuitive result, at least per my intuition :), that there’d be no greater concentration of pedophiles in the Catholic priesthood than among adult males generally. If you’re a straight male Catholic, the Church says you can have a sex life if you don’t join the priesthood, but can’t if you do: you have to give up something pretty damned important to join. But if you’re gay, or a pedophile, then the Church says you can’t have sex either way: there’s one less barrier to joining the priesthood than is there for straight males. Logically, if you’re placing a filter like that for one group, but not for others, you ought to filter out more of that one group and wind up with a higher concentration of the others.
So I agree with Czarcasm that it IS ‘a hell of a charge’ to toss out there without evidence, even though the evidence seems to back it up.
Those figures definitely seem high. In fact, they are significantly higher than the known incidence of child sexual abusers among Catholic clergy, which in about a half-century has had about 1 in 25 priests accused (not all necessarily convicted) of abuse.
But if we consider that about a quarter of a million child abuse sex crimes are reported to the cops every year, and then start trying to make some plausible (but admittedly unverified) guesses about the data…
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Seems reasonable that the actual occurrence of such crimes would be significantly higher than that, because there’s a lot of disincentive to report them. But let’s stick with the quoted figure of 250,000. (And let’s assume for simplicity that they’re all committed by males, which isn’t true but is close enough for this exercise in WAGgery.)
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There are about 120,000,000 adult males in the US.
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If only, say, 1 in 100 adult males was a child molester, we’d have 1,200,000 men responsible for 250,000 reported molestation incidents annually. On average, each molester would be responsible for a reported molestation every four or five years or so.
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When you consider (in light of the Gladwell article above) that abusers often go for years at a time without molesting anybody, and that many abuses don’t even get reported, that doesn’t seem unreasonable. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the rate were several times higher than that, which would put us at our 1-in-25 or even 1-in-10 estimates suggested by the data.
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Yes, I agree that the 1-in-5 figure is either incomprehensible or horrifying. However, one de-randomizing factor is the apparent influence of child sexual abuse on its victims’ own behavior as adults. Child sexual molestation might be disproportionately concentrated in certain families rather than being totally random among all our acquaintances.
This concludes our exercise in wild-ass guessing, none of which I bothered to look for any cites for except the initial figure of annual reported incidence of child sexual abuse.
Nothing more than the Carny Decade equivalent of the the bogus “Satanic Cult Abuse” accusations of the 80’s and 90’s. In other words, pure made up bullshit.
But mark my words. It will be the Girl Scouts next… 
Your argument sounds very reasonable, but I think the “counterintuitiveness” of the data about the non-disproportionate frequency of abusers among Catholic clergy may be exaggerated.
While I’m on a WAG roll, let’s consider the possibility that there might be a bimodal distribution of tendency towards child molestation among Catholic clergy, with peaks on both the high and low ends.
That is, the priesthood might get a disproportionate percentage of men who are strongly inclined to molestation, both because they’re not dissuaded by the prospect of renouncing sex with adults and because the priestly lifestyle offers lots of opportunities for contact with children. But it might also get a disproportionate percentage of men who are strongly disinclined to molestation, because they’ve got a very idealistic view of the sacred calling of the priest and the need to be very dedicated to their parishioners’ welfare and etc. etc. etc.
So that could explain why the Catholic clergy might have both a special attraction for child molesters and a percentage of child molesters not significantly greater than that found among males in general.
Didn’t someone report that all three organizations have signed a pledge to reduce molestation to “acceptable levels”?
I would like to know what these levels are. All this time I’ve been molested at an unusually high level! Who knew?
Next you’ll claim they weren’t legitimate.
Why would that even be surprising? I’d expect to find somewhat more pedophiles in any place that offered both access to troubled children and a modicum of generic social trust in the “goodness” of people in the profession: Teaching, priesthood, social work, scoutmaster, etc.
In the church it may well be men saying “I know I have bad urges, going into the church may help me stop them”. Which of course, fails miserably. In the Boy Scouts, it cannot be anything but “This lets me go on camping trips with boys”.
Hmm, I think you may be overestimating the amount of mental and moral clarity that some pedophiles have about their tendencies.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there have been a lot of Scoutmasters desperately insisting to themselves that their affectionate concern for boys is normal and healthy, that helping them acquire Scouting skills is a praiseworthy act, that there’s no unhealthy attraction involved in their feelings of good clean manly fellowship, etc. etc.
And then they find themselves in a situation where they have an opportunity to molest, and their desires overpower their denials.
And considering that many merit badges have a “Scoutmaster Examination” requirement (several of mine did, anyway), a “cocksucking merit badge” is… Ummm… problematic, at best, under the circumstances. silenus, you do not begin to comprehend how much assholishness you were saved from by fate…
The irreproachable Father Ted:
Like the kids you were about to harass, and about to be an asshole toward, would you have known? Would they have understood the distinction?
Asshole is as asshole does. Don’t be an asshole. I put you in the ‘Asshole’ category. Sorry, nothing personal, but you are an asshole. And an idiot. You molest kids, politically, and can’t understand why they don’t get it. The idiot in question is you.
Da hell? silenus made it very clear that he abandoned the notion of making a jerk of himself to a troop of Boy Scouts precisely because they were kids:
And metaphorically equating snide obscene taunts about a discriminatory BSA policy with actual child molesting?! For heaven’s sake, Cheshire Human.
Somewhat surprisingly, given how enthusiastic he originally was about the prospect, it’s not silenus whose asshole-idiot behavior is really standing out here.
(How do you like that, silenus? Not only did you fail to make an ass of yourself to the Boy Scouts but you haven’t even managed to out-ass Cheshire Human in this thread. Maybe you’re just having a bad day with your ass chops.)
I love debating with a fellow math geek. 
My problem with that argument is that you don’t get much in the way of reduced incidence out of people who are strongly disinclined to molestation, as compared to normal disinclination, because even normal disinclination is the absence of pretty much any interest in having sex with children. For that reason, I just don’t think that pole of the bimodal distribution you propose can do much in the way of balancing out the other pole.
Well at least we now know of one catholic priest who is clearly not at all creepy. No siree.
That’s not a stick…