How can we approach this from a CH lens?
"Kristine Ward, the chairwoman of the National Survivor Advocates
Coalition,
said the cultural explanation did not appear to explain why abuse cases
within the Catholic church have shaken places from Australia and Ireland to
South America. “Does the culture of the U.S. in the 1960s explain that?
It’s
hard to believe,”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/us/18bishops.html
Church Report Cites Social Tumult in Priest ScandalsBy LAURIE
GOODSTEIN<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/laurie_goodstein/index.html?inline=nyt-per
Published:
May 17, 2011
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A five-year study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to
provide a definitive answer to what caused the church’s sexual abuse crisis
has concluded that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor
homosexuality were to blame.
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Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were
poorly
prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and
sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s.
Known occurrences of sexual abuse of minors by priests rose sharply during
those decades, the report found, and the problem grew worse when the
church’s hierarchy responded by showing more care for the perpetrators than
the victims.
The “blame Woodstock” explanation has been floated by bishops since the
church was engulfed by scandal in the United States in 2002 and by Pope
Benedict XVI after it erupted in Europe in 2010.
But this study is likely to be regarded as the most authoritative analysis
of the scandal in the Catholic Church in America. The study, initiated in
2006, was conducted by a team of researchers at the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/j/john_jay_college_of_criminal_justice/index.html?inline=nyt-org
in
New York City at a cost of $1.8 million. About half was provided by the
bishops, with additional money contributed by Catholic organizations and
foundations. The National Institute of Justice, the research agency of the
United States Department of Justice, supplied about $280,000.
The report was released Wednesday by the United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_states_conference_of_catholic_bishops/index.html?inline=nyt-org
in
Washington, but the Religion News Service published an account of the
report
on its Web site<
http://www.religionnews.com/index.php?/rnstext/exclusive_no_easy_answers_to_catholic_abuse_scandal/
on
Tuesday. A copy of the report was also obtained by The New York Times. The
bishops have said they hope the report will advance the understanding and
prevention of child sexual abuse in society at large.
The researchers concluded that it was not possible for the church, or for
anyone, to identify abusive priests in advance. Priests who abused minors
have no particular “psychological characteristics,” “developmental
histories” or mood disorders that distinguished them from priests who had
not abused, the researchers found.
Since the scandal broke, conservatives in the church have blamed gay
priests
for perpetrating the abuse, while liberals have argued that the all-male,
celibate culture of the priesthood was the cause. This report will satisfy
neither flank.
The report notes that homosexual men began entering the seminaries “in
noticeable numbers” from the late 1970s through the 1980s. By the time this
cohort entered the priesthood, in the mid-1980s, the reports of sexual
abuse
of minors by priests began to drop and then to level off. If anything, the
report says, the abuse decreased as more gay priests began serving the
church.
Many more boys than girls were victimized, the report says, not because the
perpetrators were gay, but simply because the priests had more access to
boys than to girls, in parishes, schools and extracurricular activities.
In one of the most counterintuitive findings, the report says that fewer
than 5 percent of the abusive priests exhibited behavior consistent with
pedophilia, which it defines as a “psychiatric disorder that is
characterized by recurrent fantasies, urges and behaviors about
prepubescent
children.
“Thus, it is inaccurate to refer to abusers as ‘pedophile priests,’ ” the
report says.
That finding is likely to prove controversial, in part because the report
employs a definition of “prepubescent” children as those age 10 and under.
Using this cutoff, the report found that only 22 percent of the priests’
victims were prepubescent.
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders classifies a prepubescent child as generally age 13 or
younger. If the John Jay researchers had used that cutoff, a vast majority
of the abusers’ victims would have been considered prepubescent.
The report, “The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic
Priests in the United States, 1950-2002,” is the second produced by
researchers at John Jay College. The first, on the “nature and scope” of
the
problem, was released in
2004<
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usccb.org%2Fnrb%2Fjohnjaystudy%2F&rct=j&q=john%20jay%20college%20priest%20study%202004&ei=FQvUTYHADKLL0AGisLmBDA&usg=AFQjCNFwgGtpCNs32CF3qeeVrxls0770UA&sig2=CwkkZB-RHLUGHIpUSBdONA&cad=rja
.
Even before seeing it, victims advocates attacked the report as suspect
because it relies on data provided by the church’s dioceses and religious
orders.
Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of
BishopAccountability.org<http://bishopaccountability.org/>,
a Web site that compiles reports on abuse cases, said, “There aren’t many
dioceses where prosecutors have gotten involved, but in every single
instance there’s a vast gap — a multiplier of two, three or four times —
between the numbers of perpetrators that the prosecutors find and what the
bishops released.”
David Clohessy, national director of the Chicago-based Survivors Network of
those Abused by Priests, said that while the report contained no surprises,
it had nonetheless been a disappointment because it did not include
recommendations for far-reaching reforms, including limiting the power of
bishops. Mr. Clohessy said this was critical because bishops had covered up
many instances of sexual abuse by priests in the past.
“Predictably and conveniently, the bishops have funded a report that says
what they’ve said all along, and what they wanted to hear back,” he said.
“Fundamentally, they’ve found that they needn’t even consider any
substantive changes.”
Robert M. Hoatson, a priest and a founder of Road to Recovery, which offers
counseling and referrals to victims, said the idea that the sexual and
social upheavals of past decades were to blame for the abuse of children
was
an attempt to shift responsibility from church leaders. Mr. Hoatson said he
had been among those who had been abused.“It deflects responsibility from
the bishops and puts it on to a sociological problem,” he said. “This is a
people problem. It wasn’t because of the ’70s, and it wasn’t the ’60s, and
it wasn’t because of the 1450s. This was something individuals did.”
Kristine Ward, the chairwoman of the National Survivor Advocates Coalition,
said the cultural explanation did not appear to explain why abuse cases
within the Catholic church have shaken places from Australia and Ireland to
South America. “Does the culture of the U.S. in the 1960s explain that?
It’s
hard to believe,” she said.
William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, a conservative Catholic
group, however said he believes permissiveness in the church in the 1960s
and 1970s - particularly at seminaries - had been a significant reason for
the rise in sexual abuse. Mr. Donohue said that while he generally
supported
the report’s findings, he believed that the study seemed to have
purposefully avoided linking abuse cases with the increase in the number of
gay men who became priests during the 1960s and 1970s. “The authors go
through all sorts of contortions to deny the obvious - that obviously,
homosexuality was at work,” Mr. Donohue said.
In Philadelphia, where a grand jury in February found that as many as 37
priests suspected of behavior ranging from sexual abuse to inappropriate
actions were still serving in ministry. The archdiocese initially rejected
the grand jury’s findings, but soon suspended 26 priests from ministry.
An essay in the Catholic magazine
Commonweal<http://commonwealmagazine.org/fog-scandal-1> last
week by Ana Maria Catanzaro, who heads the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s
sexual-abuse review board, which is supposed to advise the archdiocese on
how to handle abuse cases, said that the board was shocked to learn about
the dozens of cases uncovered by the grand jury. Her essay raised questions
about whether bishops provide accurate data even to their own, in-house
review boards.
Still, the John Jay report says that when it comes to analyzing the
incidence and causes of sexual abuse, “No organization has undertaken a
study of itself in the manner of the Catholic Church.”
Because there are no comparable studies conducted by other institutions,
religious or secular, the report says, “It is impossible to accurately
compare the rate of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church to rates of
abuse in other organizations.”
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