Reply to CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC PRIEST BLAIMS THE VICTIM'S

Forum Index » Political Discussion

Reply to "CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC PRIEST BLAIMS THE VICTIM'S "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The rate of offending among priests is shaking out at roughly 2.5%.  The last ten years were the best reporting environment that's ever existed to root out a group of offenders.

The rate in public school is higher.  [/quote]Really, cite please.  I don't recall one in 30 teachers turning out to be pedophiles.  [/quote]

6.7% of students reported unwanted contact, 9.6% other forms of sexual misconduct, inclusive:

http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/misconductreview/report.pdf

The author of the report has repeatedly stated that public school abuse is much more prevalent than abuse by priests.

The report also includes a 1994 study that found that of 225 teachers identified for sexual misconduct in NYPS, NONE were reported to police and only one lost his license.

[/quote]I'm trying to wade through this thing but I'm not finding statements bout prevalence vs catholic church, and your numbers compare percentage of catholic offenders to student victims so they are not comparable statistics.  Can you point me to the relevant section of the study that you think makes the case?[/quote]

Google the author's name for her statements.

Slightly fewer than 11,000 allegations were made in the US covering the period 1950-2002.   If you multiply that by ten to cover the usual reporting rate for sexual abuse cases, that's 110,000 victims since 1950.   That may be high, since the last decade and a half has brought high social support for victims and significant civil awards, which is an ideal environment for reporting.

In contrast, there are 77 million Catholics in the US, almost all of whom would have had significant contact with priests throughout childhood.  To be even more conservative, Catholic school enrollment forty years ago, during the peak years of the allegations, was 5 million.  So let's take ALL of the 10x estimate for allegations during the entire 52-year period and express it as a percentage of the Catholic school enrollment for one year in the 60s.

It's 2.2%.

Do you see what I'm getting at?  The perception of abuse is very high, because so many allegations were made at once, but those allegations covered more than fifty years.  The real issue isn't a high prevalence of offending, but the institutional coverups and opportunities to re-offend.

But - 225/0.  Coverups were obviously not just a church issue.  My private school fired a hebephile rather than deal with the scandal, and he went on to teach elsewhere.  And frankly, if you want access to children, the priesthood is by far the most demanding and difficult way to get it.  You can get hired at the neighborhood rec center with a high school diploma, and they're not that picky.  [/quote]

I don't see the numbers.  First of all, your 9.8% includes unwanted contact from other students.  Specifically, it says:
[quote]Responses from students who indicated they had experienced one of the listed behaviors were analyzed using descriptive statistics and frequencies. This analysis (Shakeshaft, 2003) indicates that 9.6 percent of all students in grades 8 to 11 report contact and/or noncontact educator sexual misconduct that was unwanted. 8.7 percent
17
report only noncontact sexual misconduct and 6.7 percent experienced only contact misconduct. (These total to more than 9.6 percent because some students reported both types of misconduct.) Of students who experienced any kind of sexual misconduct in schools, 21 percent were targets of educators, while the remaining 79 percent were targets of other students.[/quote]

So the 9.6% is already down to 2% when you get to adults.

And what is included includes a great amount of non-contact sexual misconduct.  I don't know if your 10x multiplier is sufficient to go from actual abuse claims to every unwanted comment over a 60 year period of time.

Second, you are comparing contact of priests in a parish with that of educators, who are with the children, away from their parents, every weekday for nine months of the year.  The only time I had alone with priests in 11 years of Catholic school was as an altar boy and during confession.  After that, it was pretty much masses, benediction, and school assemblies / occasional classroom visits.  And that was for someone in Catholic school.

I am inclined to believe data that suggests that other institutions may have a similar problem, but I don't think this data makes the case at all.  More importantly, the idea that we are only as bad as other institutions is a losing argument.  I find no comfort in the idea that the Church is in the XXth percentile on depravity.  The numbers are large enough to stand on their own.  Furthermore, I can't imagine the reaction if school districts systematically covered up abuse in their ranks, hired lawyers, moved teachers around.  A school fires them and sends the police after them.  This is what makes the Catholic church abuse scandal so especially bad.  People would be willing to accept that there are bad apples.  They don't want to hear that the farmer is still selling them at the market.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics