Vatican Insider
December 15, 2011
http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/world-news/detail/articolo/stati-uniti-united-states-estados-unidos-pedofilia-pedophilia-10805/
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| Orthodox Jews in New York |
Victims of sexual molestation, including children and teenagers who were subjected to sexual violence, total 117. Over the last three years, eighty-five suspects have ended up in jail. They are all members of the large Jewish Orthodox community in the New York borough of Brooklyn, which attempted in vain to resolve the problem internally before reporting what had happened to the police. District Attorney Charles Hynes is continuing investigations and is not ruling out new developments.
The operation - one of the most important actions taken against paedophilia - was called “Kol Tzedek,” meaning “voice of justice.” It was not easy to convince victims to come forward, to push past the blanket of secrecy that had been pulled over these sad events. Victims of violence are required to speak with their rabbi before speaking with anyone else, according to the authoritative scholarly group Torah Agudath Israel of America, the religious authority that evaluates reporting the crimes to the police.
The third report on paedophilia by John Jay College of New York confirms the falsity of the idea that Catholic priests are an “at risk” category regarding paedophilia. It also shows how the phenomenon is found in all religious communities (Protestants, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Jews), but above all in public schools and sports clubs, as well as the Boy Scouts.
“I wonder,” Turin sociologist Massimo Introvigne, author of the book Pedophile Priests, told Vatican Insider, “what would have happened if 85 Catholic priests or sacristans had been arrested.” The news would have been given quite a different emphasis, while now it is nearly absent in the mainstream media, because it calls into question the anti-Catholic dogma that paedophilia is more widespread among the clergy than elsewhere. It is true, unfortunately, that Catholic schools and parishes also have pedophiles, but the statistics show that in the United States these environments are sixteen times safer than society in general.”
Introvigne, however, also urges people not to criminalize the Jewish Orthodox community: “It is not a matter of displacing the moral lynching from priests to Orthodox Jews, whose community is now in the sights of liberal organizations for their opposition to gay marriage. It is enough to make it known that priests are not more likely to be pedophiles than others, and that the celibate priesthood has nothing to do with it: Orthodox Jews marry, including rabbis. A certain anti-Catholic prejudice all too often blocks the global view of the paedophilia scandal.”
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