Thanks to Religious News Service and Dating God for this near instant report on the long awaited and just released John Jay College of Criminal Justice report on the clergy sex abuse crisis.
(Update: here is a link to 3 SNAP victims' highly critical responses to the John Jay Report: Snap Network)
As if once wasn't enough, yet again this second John Jay report forcibly debunks the myth of a gay connection to the sexual abuse crisis - but it does so with a whammy of a final punch line.
There are days when the light shines through the clouds, however briefly. This is one of those days (and it's gorgeous on the Vltava River here in Prague.) Perhaps I should have said, 'however dimly.' Whatever the flaws of the study, leaving Bishops free to conclude "we don't have to change a thing," it is the final nail in the coffin for the assertion that gay men are the locus of the problem.
(Update: here is a link to 3 SNAP victims' highly critical responses to the John Jay Report: Snap Network)
As if once wasn't enough, yet again this second John Jay report forcibly debunks the myth of a gay connection to the sexual abuse crisis - but it does so with a whammy of a final punch line.
the researchers found no statistical evidence that gay priests were more likely than straight priests to abuse minors—a finding that undermines a favorite talking point of many conservative Catholics. The disproportionate number of adolescent male victims was about opportunity, not preference or pathology, the report states.
What’s more, researchers note that the rise in the number of gay priests from the late 1970s onward actually corresponded with “a decreased incidence of abuse—not an increased incidence of abuse.”Read the full report at the above link for Religious News Service and for commentary at the link for Dating God and the New York Times.
From the NYT article: 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.
(Snap member, David Clossey reponds:
(Snap member, David Clossey reponds:
-The crisis isn’t all that bad, the report suggests, because many of the kids who are or were violated had experienced puberty. Never mind the fact that child sex crimes, no matter at what age, are always illegal, immoral and hurtful. So the hair-splitting between pedophiles and ephebophiles (a distinction that seems to matter to few besides bishops) is, for the most part, at best irrelevant and at worst distracting.
“Thus, it is inaccurate to refer to abusers as ‘pedophile priests,’ ” the report says.
There are days when the light shines through the clouds, however briefly. This is one of those days (and it's gorgeous on the Vltava River here in Prague.) Perhaps I should have said, 'however dimly.' Whatever the flaws of the study, leaving Bishops free to conclude "we don't have to change a thing," it is the final nail in the coffin for the assertion that gay men are the locus of the problem.
