Tell me about it! Apparently, some people in this thread simply cannot understand this point. Bishops, sometimes even cardinals, knowing about or actually hiding abusive priests is equivalent to what in secular world hierarchy? State senators, representative, mayors or even police chiefs? That’s the story here dummies! If someone shows me a pattern in a certain state where someone pretty high up is covering up child abuse and moving teachers around, then I’ll get all riled up.
Also, how the is “oh, it doesn’t happen anymore.” an excuse? The allegations are just coming out now, so we’re having a thread now. Since the Church handling this very clumsily, I don’t believe that this still isn’t going on at least in places where the Catholic Church is still very powerful.
I’d have to know what “inappropriate” entails before making that comparison. It’s not appropriate, for example, for a teacher to lose his temper and shove a student, but I can understand it happening as an isolated incident and the teacher not losing his career over it.
The problem I have with this reasoning is that these sorts of vaguely described incidents are the sort of thing where, the stated offense seems to be spurring a response that is far more draconian than would seem to be warranted. I have trouble accepting that a teacher has engaged in inappropriate behavior that justifies firing, but that same level of inappropriate behavior doesn’t merit going after their license.
It may be only my prejudices, but it really does smack to me of a deal “if you leave without a struggle, we’ll cover for you with some other school district.” Which is the allegation that BrotherCadfael is making, and seems to be borne out by the AP study I linked upthread: schools are perfectly willing to pass on pedophile teachers, rather than make an effort to prevent the next child from being abused, too.
Either the inappropriate hugging is worth someone’s job, or it’s a tempest in a teapot, dammit. And if it’s worth someone’s job - why the fuck did they allow her to retain her certification?
Again - the teacher in question resigned - and that stopped any investigation, or any further punitive measures.
These are just two stories from the past year, which I knew where I could find links very quickly. No Googling involved, and these are incidents that actually got publicized. Whether you choose to accept that they are indicative of greater problems is up to you. I strongly suspect that for every incident of this nature that does get publicized, there are several others that are hushed up even more effectively.
Quite frankly, I trust school boards, and administrations, about as far as I do the hierarchy of the RCC. I’m not going to pretend that I’ve offered proof that my mistrust is warranted, I do think that between the incidents I’ve brought forward, and the AP study I linked, the evidence is certainly suggestive.
It’s absolutely true that most sexual abuse happens within the family. I don’t have the statistics, and as I’m posting from my phone I couldn’t link anyway, but I’m pretty certain that far more than 1.5% of people have been sexually abused. From purely anecdotal experience, I’d put the figure at ten times that, but that is probably high for the general population. If people really think I’m wrong, I’ll find a computer later this week and research.
Ok, I googled “prevalence of sexual assault” and one of the first results was a report on the NSPCC website, so I expect it’s trustworthy. It contains the following statistics. For the most rigorous definition of assault, that is unwanted penetration or forced masturbation before the age of 18, 4% for women and 2% for men. For the least rigorous, any unwanted sexual contact, the figures were 59% for women and 27% for men.
I’m sure you’re right, Steophan. I just had a visceral reaction to the 1.5 figure. It’s horrifically high, and I suspect it’s a fraction of the true number, as the majority of cases probably go unreported. Also, a family member might molest a small handful of children at most, while a priest can victimize literally dozens upon dozens over the course of his career.
No busting open is needed; those of us who lived through the transition know the story from beginning to end.
But the equivalence here would be this: if the school boards were still trying to cover up, not for the molesting teachers, but for those who covered their trail back in 1968 or 1982 or whenever. If there’s an organization besides the RCC that’s doing this in a big way, please name names.
Maybe you’re right about that, Cisco, I’m not googling any more stats. I feel ill enough after reading those. My point, that I may have made badly, is that this is not a problem mostly confined to the church, and it is indeed possible that the church is safer than many other places. Which is all intensely depressing, frankly. Oh, one last depressing point. In families, it is frequently the case that one family member covers up for an abuser. I’ve read threads on this board talking about this. Now I’m off to MPSIMS for kitty pics or something
Because it’s all we’ve got. It’s the most comprehensive study there is. Anything else is just speculation. If you’ve got a better source, show it to us.
I agree with that. I just couldn’t find those stats in my limited googling. What I did find, though, was that no more than 4% of priests have even been accused, let alone been guilty. And that includes the 25% of accused priests that had allegedly been with 15-17 kids. So the amount of kids touched by their priests is, I’m guessing, less than 1%. But kids in school? 9.6% have been harrassed or molested. Priests 1, Teachers 0.
I found the quote in multiple places. Perhaps it’s a misquote, but I see no evidence of that. Here’s a .pdf of the study she wrote, though. Caution: it’s big.
Because there’s nothing left to do to a dead guy. There’s nothing anyone can do. So where is the culpability for the RCC? It’s not like the Church was transferring a dead priest from cemetary to cemetary every time he fondled a corpse. And why should I stop using excuses that the Church uses? The accused party uses something in their defense, and that’s automatically off the table? Why? Because you’re presuming guilty?
Careful with your math, though. Let’s assume that, first of all, the 1.5% that were accused are actually guilty. Let’s further assume that all priests have access to more or less the same amount of kids.
In order for 1.5% of “eligible” kids to be molested, the 1.5% of priests would have to diddle their entire parish. But if they only touch 1 out of 100 kids (which I think is probably too high), then it’s only .015% of kids. That’s much less than the 2%-4% of kids overall, and a hell of a lot less than the 9% figure found in our schools.
Careful with the assumptions that undergird your math! You’re implicitly assuming that each parish has just one priest, and each priest stays at just one parish.
I don’t think the former is normally the case, and for the molesting priests, we know that part of the problem was that they would be moved to new stomping grounds every several years.
This is going nowhere. You really and truly don’t see the difference between a local, secular school board here or there engaging in a one-time cover-up, and the international, “godly”, RCC engaging in a systemic, institutional, decades-long cover-up? If you can’t grasp the significance of these differences, well, it’s no wonder you hold such foolish views on the matter.*
*To try to help you out, I’ve color-coded and bolded the differences. This usually helps make the idea more easy to visualize. For my six-year-old. :rolleyes:
One other thing: You apparently have only a very vague approximation of what the word “bigot” means. Here’s the AHD definition of the abstract noun in question. After you finish figuring out the conceptual distinctions in the practice passage above, try to identify where my hatred of the RCC differs from the definition of “bigotry”.
And remember to completely fill in the circle that corresponds to your selected answer, and erase any stray marks on your answer sheet. You can do it. I believe in you.
Your link is to a table of diocesan responses, first of all. The tipoff that there was something funny about your numbers was that there were four columns, and in addition to the 1671 ‘credible’ allegations listed, there were another 1872 ‘substantiated’ allegations.
‘Substantiated’ is more solid than ‘credible’, right? But you ignored those numbers altogether.
Wasn’t sure how to make sense of the table at the link, either, so since the table came from the John Jay Report, I went back to the original Wikipedia article on the JJR. It says this:
OK, we’ll include 'em. That gives us 8000 allegations about priests then living, with 6700 substantiated, 1000 that could not be substantiated, and we’ll round to 300 exonerated.
If the 3300 not investigated because the priests were dead have the same ratios, that would have yielded about another 2800 substantiated allegations, 400 unsubstantiated allegations, and 100 exonerated priests.
So that’s just shy of 10,000 allegations that were either substantiated, or likely would have been.
The 6700 substantiated allegations implicated ~4400 distinct then-living priests. The 2800 allegations against deceased priests that would have likely been substantiated if they’d been alive would have implicated another ~1800 priests.
So we’re talking about over 6000 molesting priests, not 1671.
First, with the bigot thing: Thanks for the definition. It’s exactly what I thought it meant, and it’s exactly what you are. You’re intolerant of a creed. You’re a bigot.
Second, with your color-coding: No, it’s not any different, you asshat. Parishes are local, too, so WTF is the difference if there’s a scandal at a school or a scandal at a parish? Same thing. Second, “secular”. I have no idea why that would matter. Evil is evil, whether it’s secular or religious. Third, the rest of your assertions are completely false. Where the fuck are you getting this “one-time” coverup bullshit? School administrators do it all the time, repeatedly, for decades, over hundreds of different schools. And there’s nothing “systemic” or “institutional” about the RCC coverups. We’ve already shown that it’s no more a problem in the RCC than it is school, and it’s absolutely dwarfed by the number of relative-on-child molestations that occur.
Errr… no.
Credible means “that which can be believed”. As in, the allegation is not laughable on its face.
Substantiated, as in “that which has been given substance”, means the victim’s allegation was proven or corroborated by evidence or other testimonies.
Parishes are local branches of one big centralised organisation in a way school boards are not, dickbrain.
But you know that which leaves me wondering why you invest so much time flailing about defending an indefensible organisation covering up and enabling child abuse.
