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	John Jay 2011 Study on Sexual Abuse: a Critical Analysis Catholic League May 24, 2011 http://www.catholicleague.org/images/upload/image_201105230830.pdf [pdf] Overview In the aftermath of the media blitz in 2002 exposing sexual abuse by Catholic priests, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) created a National Review Board and an Office of Child and Youth Protection to deal with this problem. The Review Board subsequently commissioned researchers from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to study what happened. In 2004, the first study, The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons, 1950-2002, was published. Now it has released its latest study on the causes and context of abuse. The initial study pinpointed the timeline when the abuse crisis was at its peak, roughly from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, and provided rich data on a host of important variables. What it did not do was account for why this happened. This is the subject of the Causes and Context report. Unlike the initial study, this one is fraught with controversy. One reason for this lay with the nature of the inquiry: studies on the causes of social problems generally leave more room for interpretative quarrels with the data than is true of reports of a more descriptive nature. Another reason, more serious, is the reluctance of social scientists to state conclusions that are highly controversial and that run against the grain of the conventional wisdom in the academy. All of this will be addressed, but first a look at what this second study sought to uncover. Chapter 1 presents the context in which the sexual abuse of minors by priests took hold. It is followed by an historical analysis of the problem. Chapter 3 gets to the thorny issue of accounting for causes. The fourth chapter deals with the way the Catholic Church responded to this matter, and the next one analyzes the rise and decline of sexual abuse. The sixth and last chapter records the conclusions and recommendations of the authors. A wealth of material is presented, including a good overview of the relevant social science literature on the subject.
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