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]

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. [b]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
report only noncontact sexual misconduct and 6.7 percent experienced only contact misconduct.[/b] (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]

Look again.  The number I used refers to educator misconduct, not all misconduct.

10x is conservative and is taken from other studies of abuse reporting.  The sex abuse scandal represents the best reporting environment that has ever existed for a class of offenders.  It's very likely that a higher percentage of offenses by priests have been reported than for any other group.

The DOE study suggested that school districts DID cover up.  Remember the 1994 study of 225 NYC educators accused - none were reported to police, only one lost his license.   That wasn't the 50s or 60s, either.   We live in a period of high consciousness of abuse, more conscientious reporting and the development of best practices for prevention.  This was not the case even twenty years ago, and it was certainly not the case when I was a child.

Thank you for pointing out that priests have relatively little contact with children; when you add the education required, demanding schedules, and housing that is usually none too private, it's not the most obvious career choice for a pedophile.

I am *not* making, nor would I ever make, the argument that lower incidence is somehow okay, or that any number of offenses is trivial or meaningless.  That's a disgusting accusation not borne out by anything I've said.  I'm an abuse survivor and do not take any of it lightly.  Sexual abuse of children has been and is and will continue to be an issue in families, neighborhoods, schools, rec centers, sports teams, churches of all denominations - any setting where children are in contact with teenagers and adults.

The one and only thing I am taking issue with is the impressive smearing of Catholic priests as unusually oriented to or guilty of sexual offenses against children when the numbers do not seem to bear out this perception.  I take issue with this not because of any great love for the Church, but because it's morally wrong to smear the many who are innocent and it's also godawful stupid to create a bogeyman who makes others seem safe by comparison, especially if those others are, in fact, offending at higher rates than your bogeyman.  [/quote]

No, it doesn't.  I quoted verbatim the study you gave me.  The total abuse rate was 80% caused by other students.

I'm not sure what your point is about the priests and student contact.  Regardless of how plausible you find it as a career for a pedophile, nonetheless, there they are.

I think you misunderstand this as a sparring contest over the relative goodness of the Church vs. other institutions.  I am a lifelong Catholic.  I had the nuns for grade school, the Jesuits for high school, and a fairly large dose of the Opus Dei to boot.  I never had a priest who did anything wrong to me.

This isn't about sticking up for our faith.  This is about being honest about the state of our religious institutions.  Right now my kids do not go to Catholic church because my wife won't have it.  A generation ago, she would have been like my father, who converted in order to raise the kids in my mother's religion.  We are killing ourselves by giving the world every reason to believe that we are not taking it seriously enough.  Every time someone hears the defense "we are just as bad as anyone else", it fails for three reasons:

1.  Sometimes it's just not true.  I took the study you gave me and read it, and the data plainly did not say it.  We may have the same problem as other religious institutions, but we do not appear to have the same rate of adult abuse as schools from the study you gave me.
2.  No one feels comforted by knowing that 2% or 9% or 3% abuse, regardless of how it ranks with other venues for abuse.  For many people, that is just too high a penalty to pay for going to Church.
3.  The clerical abuse scandal is first and foremost an issue of the Church's response to abuse, not the abuse itself.  Schools call the police when a teacher abuses a child.  They do not hide them, move them around, and use their lawyers to defend them.  It is this dark legacy of hiding the problem that is our burden.  The way to erase the dark legacy is not to argue about how it wasn't THAT bad.  The way to erase the legacy is to show the commitment to change.  If in the next decade, priests are turned over to the police for prosecution and this decisive action is demonstrated publicly, the public will respond in kind.[/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