This author asserts that 1 in 20 Catholic priests is guilty of child abuse. That number seems suspiciously high. Does anyone here know of a story that might be misconstrued to suggest such a high incidence?
http://www.williamkwolfrum.com/2012/06/01/weve-all-accepted-that-catholic-priests-molest-children/
I have seen nothing that indicates the % of priests being molesters is higher than the general male population. You just read about it more.
I am not sure about that. The biggest part of the sex scandal first broke in the Boston archdiocese. The problem wasn’t just the systemic abuse but the magnitude and the institutionalization of it throughout decades. This is all freely admitted today and is easily searchable if you don’t believe it.
To give some numbers there were 159 priests in the Boston archdiocese with pending sexual abuse allegations against them publicly named and another 91 who were not named because they had either died or already left the archdiocese. There are less than 1000 priests in the archdiocese. That gives disproportionate number of molesters compared to the general male population. A few of them could be innocent but the church itself made the list and it is more likely that others were never accused even if they did do it.
In this location, it safe to safe to say that the Catholic church was a safe-haven for child molesters and other similar scandals broke throughout the world shortly after those revelations.
Unless someone can show that 20% or more males in the general population engage in predatory child sex abuse (not all sex crimes in general) I think the numbers are greatly skewed.
On what basis are you saying this? Do you have any evidence that the number is lower?
What is the percentage of pedophiles in the general adult population? A very quick Google search isn’t helping. I’m tired and don’t really feel like pursuing this right now, maybe later.
Yeah, that seems higher than average but not suspiciously so. If the percentage of people who were abused growing up is correct (i.e. well over 1 in 10), then considering abusers have multiple victims usually, the 1 in 20 stat seems at the higher end of the right ballpark.
All of the figures i have seen that were that high cover an incredibly wide range of “abuse”, and the majority of it is reported for late teenage girls 15-17.
The ~10% figures include such events as a 15yo girl who has her bra strap snapped by her brother being the victim of family sexual abuse, a sexually active 16yo girl who willingly makes out with an 18yo boy being the victim of repeated, severe childhood sexual abuse or a 17yo girl who is shown porn on a cell phone by her own 17yo boyfriend being the victim of sexual abuse. Seriously, those are all events that have gone into compiling the sexual abuse figures and they make up the vast majority of sexual abuse cases.
Here is an example of the typical breakdown.. As the report itself notes
IOW less than half a percent of pre-pubescent children are physically sexually abused, only 5% of teenagers are physically sexually abused, and of those who are, two thirds are “abused” by other children, not by adults
In short, the incidents that contribute to the 10% statistic aren’t at all comparable to the acts that priests are guilty of, which are direct, coercive sexual abuse involving the genitals, apparently usually of pre-pubescent children, by an adult.
In the real world only 5% of people report physical sexual abuse. Of those 2/3 are committed by other children, leaving 3.3%. In reality almost all of those are incidences of a teenage girl having her bum pinched or being forcibly kissed. But even if we assume that fully 10% of the reported incidents involved genital contact of some sort (a ridiculous assumption), that still leaves just .33% of people reporting genital contact with adults.
Even if we assume that every adult, physical abuser had 50 victims each, we still wouldn’t reach a figure of 20%.
How does it compare with the 5% in the OP?
I don’t see why the 5% figure in the OP would be referring only to genital contact. The only restriction would be that it be committed by a priest.
(While the OP doesn’t specify, the quote specifically refers to molestation by priests, and thus only sexual child abuse can be used. But sexual does not equal genital.)
Right but the spirit of the question is asking if the number is way too high. In fact, it is way too low in some areas and easily provably so. The Boston archdiocese statistics are way higher than that and the Catholic church had to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to the victims, close some churches, and sell off valuable properties to make those payments. The Boston Archbishop Bernard Francis Law had to be relocated out of the U.S. to the Vatican because of his part in relocating priests known to be child sex offenders.
I am surprised this isn’t common knowledge by now. Other similar child molestation scandals in the Catholic church broke all over the world shortly thereafter. I am not Catholic and don’t have a particular problem with the Catholic Church but this is an great example of true conspiracy. There have a lot of fall-out to the Catholic church since then and they have had to pay out serious money because of it. New revelations have been going on for over a decade now. I am surprised that anyone would ask this question. I have no idea what the real incidence rate is but I would be pleasantly surprised if it was only 5% in the U.S. or worldwide.
All you have to do is google ‘Catholic Church sex abuse’ to find out all the background on this question there is a whole lot.
Yes, but I doubt that the OP is referring to incidences of a priest letting a 17yo boy watch a dirty movie at his house or a priest pinching a 17yo girl on the bum.
The definition of “sexual abuse” is always going to lead to some problems of this sort, but I doubt very much that priests are being charged for these sorts of offences.
In retrospect, my question was way too general. When I think of the RCC’s child sexual abuse scandal, I’m assuming genital contact or anal rape. I don’t think exclusively of prepubescent kids. This is because of the stories I’ve seen in the news. Also, it seems that some of these kids suffered ongoing abuse over a period of years.
I’m in Philadelphia, where a jury is set to deliberate on a case of the Philly archdiocese being accused of covering up and/or facilitating abuse. I can’t really say why I thought 1 in 20 seemed suspiciously high, except that a) I didn’t want to believe it’s this high and b) I don’t know how many priests there are in the U.S.
However, Blake’s post makes me think maybe I was right.
I don’t know that you can compare the normal population statistics with the cohort of Catholic priests hired during that era. For a number of reasons the Catholic priesthood was apparently used as a go to vocational choice for men who felt conflicted about their sexual urges and sexual identities. That this resulted in an unusually large number of them acting out in inappropriate ways over time is not all that difficult to believe.
A few flaws in the math - this list goes back 30 or 40 years, plus an additional number going back up to 70 years. Obviously it is not complete, there could be unreported case. But… The number of preists has declined significantly. What was the turnover in number of priests in the diocese in the last 40 years, what was the population of priests 20 to 40 years ago when a lot of this happened?
I also suspect that the priests who did get caught or heard of others caught realized the repercussions were very minimal. Plus, the church swept things under the rug by transferring priests around, so for example a few priests were responsible for crimes in quite a few different locations… Not that there’s a lot of offenders, so much as they moved around and did the same thing in a lot of places.
But yes, when many teenage boys reach the age where their hormones rage and their entire peer conversation revolves around girls - someone who does not feel the same will likely decide, in a social setting where religion pervades everything, like Irish and Italian communities, that perhaps it is a sign that they are meant to “dedicate their life to God”. So I would not be surprised if there is a greater than normal concentration of gay men, probably also in denial. OTOH, a lot of Catholic “stage mothers” used to decide that one of their sons should be a priest and push him toward that, regardless of what he wanted.
One former priest writing in the 70’s said that he found the majority of priests “woke up”, stopped believing, and thought about leaving the priesthood within 5 years of joining. Of course, up until the 70’s priests could join the orders at 18 and begin their studies while they were still quite naive about the world. The guy got a lot of criticism for the assertion that the majority of priests did not believe and were simply “going along for the ride” because it was comfortable, free room and board, they had no idea what to do with their life if they left.
Also note that a lot of the cases reported are more about older teenage boys, so pedophilic tendencies seem no more common in priests than in gay or straight men in general.
Mostly anecdotal, but I was shocked by how many times these molesters violated their own beliefs-a former priest (James Porter, now deceased) admitted to molesting over 120 children in the course of his activities. This guy was not unusual-and given that some of these cases date back 70 years, it is not surprising.
Which makes the attitudes of their superiors quite amazing- they know what these perverts were doing, and yet covered it up…and transferred the perpetrators to places where their reputation was unknown.
It seems that we as a society are unable to envision a world where there are degrees of sexual abuse.
I remember, as a child, that sexual taunts, such as the “K I S S I N G” song, were very common. Is that sexual abuse because it is a verbal taunt with sexual implications? Does the fact that pretty much everyone had that song sung about them at one time or another in elementary school mean that we are all victims of sexual abuse?
I was reading a while back about “Sex Offender Treatment” programs that occur in prison, probation, and parole contexts and it seems that one of the essential elements of it is to free the offender from their “cognitive distortion” that the acts of abuse were not serious and make them acknowledge the severe effects of sexual abuse. Now, certainly, someone who thinks it’s ok to kidnap his 10 year old niece and rape her repeatedly in his basement is far far more messed up and in need of real therapy than some guy who thinks its funny to snap a girl’s bra. Are we, as a society, going to implement a one-size-fits-all solution to a wide variety of perpetrators, some who are in need of serious help because they are really messed up and some who are good, honest people who just got a little carried away in terms of boundaries?
In no way am I justifying sexual abuse, I’m just saying that I think that the “Zomg protect the children! Abusers can’t be reformed, they are teh evil!” has made us a bit paranoid and unable to see the big picture of the actual danger of sexual abusers.
I’m not even sure where you’d begin in terms of looking for a number. What about “pedophiles” who never actually commit a sexual crime and spend their life normally? How would you locate them?
Is there a psychological examination you can give to a random guy without a criminal record that you yanked off of the subway that will determine if he is a “pedophile” or “not a pedophile”?
Here is an article summarizing several attempts to find the prevalence of abusers among Catholic priests: PDF http://www.sjvcenter.org/documents/prevalance_and_incidence.pdf
The highest estimation is 2.7% pedophiles and 8.4% ephebophiles. The median estimate is around half of those estimates.
Here is a link to the biggest study of what happened. http://www.jjay.cuny.edu/churchstudy/main.asp It estimates that about 4% of priests have been accused and 80% of the accusation are about ephebophilia.
While it’s definitely true that the Catholic Church has been involved in a major institutional cover-up of systemic criminal child abuse, that doesn’t say anything about whether the incidence of child abuse is higher overall among Catholic clergy than among the general male population.
And indeed, the available evidence seems to suggest that it isn’t. As a 2010 report notes, insurers do not consider Catholic churches a higher risk for sexual-abuse liability coverage than other religious institutions:
The Catholic clergy abuse cases are definitely more visible in the media than similar cases in other institutions, but there seems to be no substantive evidence suggesting that they are significantly more prevalent.
You can’t reliably get a percentage by using the number of priests who were ever accused of abuse in archdiocese and combining it with the number of priests in the archdiocese at this moment. I mean, over a third of the accused are not in the archdiocese anymore (for one reason or another). We’d need to divide the number of accused with the total number of priests who were ever in the archdiocese during the time period which the allegations cover.