By Susan Campbell
Hartford Courant
May 19, 2011
http://blogs.courant.com/susan_campbell/2011/05/not-seeing-much-data-post.html
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...it appears that this outlay of Catholic money by the bishops and the use of four years of study has concluded first the crisis simply was, it has passed, and the "was" (Philadelphia notwithstanding) "was" due to the sexually permissive culture of the 1960s and 1970s.
This begs the questions:
Since this has been the mantra of the hierarchy at least since the Dallas bishops' meeting in 2002 if not before, what does the funding and the cooperation of the bishops for the report's data do to its outcome?
What weight does the study give to the knowledge that has been gained in the scandal that it takes victims into their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s to come forward? That puts anyone abused in the 1980s at just the brink of their "going public" time frame (somewhere in their 30s or 40s). For knowledge of what happened in most of the 1980s, the 1990s and 2001-10, through today we will have to wait 20, 30, 40,50, 60 to 70 plus years.
You can read the report here (click on REPORT). I'm halfway through. It's fairly broad and doesn't cover much new ground. In fact, the report reads like the testimony of an expert witness in the recent St. Francis Hospital child sex abuse trial, which ended in a settlement earlier this month. That testimony, too, presented clergy sex abuse as inevitable, and the church as incapable of preventing it.
(The jury never got to hear that witness' testimony -- the plaintiff's attorney dismissed it as "junk science" -- though courtroom observers did.)
The report reiterates that the crisis bloomed in the '70s, and began dissipating in the mid-'80s.
The report insists that neither male-only clergy nor celibacy has any bearing on the crisis. It points instead to the cultural changes of the '60s and '70s -- which, says the report, "manifested deviant behavior" like drug use and crime -- as part of the problem among pedophile priests.
But the report insists the vast bulk of priests don't fit the definition of "pedophile." Instead, the report says the priests who abuse don't differ so much from non-abusing priests, psychologically speaking. In fact, abusive priests tend to be older, better educated, and less antisocial than non-priest child molesters, says the report.
And the report says that no other institution has undertaken such a vast public study of sexual abuse and, as a result, it's impossible to compare incidents among, say, teachers, or Boy Scouts of America, or Big Brothers/Big Sisters, or Southern Baptists or Episcopalians, though the report includes anecdotal information about those groups.
In all, the report so far is frustrating to the extreme, though I will keep reading.
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