UNITED STATES
national
By MARY GAIL FRAWLEY-O’DEA
Both the John Jay College of Criminal Justice report on the clergy sexual abuse crisis and the 2005 Report on the Implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People stated that Roman Catholic priests abused mostly males. The John Jay study, for example, found that 64 percent of the accused priests abused only males; 22.6 percent abused only females; 3.6 percent abused both girls and boys, and in 10 percent of the cases, the gender was unknown. Statistics were similar in the 2005 study.
Not only were most reported victims male, they also were pubescent; 60 percent were first abused between the ages of 10-14. These are not, however, biologically or psychosexually fully developed males and cannot be construed as homosexual partners for any adult.
Still, the gender and age of so many victims created space for Vatican officials such as Cardinal Jorge Arturo Medina Estévez and Fr. Andrew Baker, conservative journalist Deal Hudson and others to link the sexual abuse of young people to homosexual priests. Now it appears that the Vatican, holding back on a full ban on gays in the priesthood, wants to hold homosexual priests responsible for the sexual abuse crisis.
The attack on gays by some Catholic spokesmen has drawn criticism from experts on sex offenders. Robert Geffner, psychologist and editor of the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, stated that research indicates that homosexuals are no more likely than heterosexuals to violate minors sexually. David Finkelhor, director of Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, views sexual attraction to minors as a separate sexual attraction, an opinion also espoused by John Bancroft, physician and director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Sexual offender researchers Nicholas Groth and Frank Oliveri studied more than 3,000 sex offenders and did not find even one homosexual man who shifted from an attraction to adult men to a desire for minors. Conversely, they found that men who were nonexclusively fixated on children, or who regressed from an attraction to adults to an interest in children, all described themselves as heterosexual and, in addition, usually were homophobic. Similarly, Minneapolis psychologist Peter Dimock concluded that most minor boys are abused by heterosexual men, some of whom are indifferent to the gender of their victims, choosing either girls or boys based on the minor’s availability and vulnerability. Perhaps more sexual predators abuse boys than once was thought but are reluctant to say so and be perceived as homosexuals.