BishopAccountability.org
	On the Distorted Coverage of the Dutch Abuse Report By David Quinn's Irish Catholic December 17, 2011 http://www.irishcatholic.ie/site/content/distorted-coverage-dutch-abuse-report If you want to know why so many members of the public so grossly exaggerate the number of priests who are guilty of child abuse, look no further than the coverage of a new report on abuse in the Catholic Church in Holland released yesterday. The media are correct in stating that approximately 20,000 Dutch children, possibly more, possibly considerably less, have suffered some form of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests, religious or lay workers since 1945. But on its own, and taken out of context, the reporting is highly misleading because it gives the impression, yet again, that the Catholic Church is especially prone to this terrible scandal. A story in today's Daily Telegraph is a case in point. It informs us that, "Children involved in church organisations were twice as likely as non-Catholics" to be abused. But that isn't what the report says at all. What it says is that children in institutions were twice as likely to abused as other children, but that there was no difference in the rates of abuse between Catholic and non-Catholic institutions. This could hardly be more different from what The Daily Telegraph has reported. Here is the exact quote from the Dutch report: "The Commission of Inquiry investigated how great the risk of unwanted sexual contact with children was in institutions (boarding schools, private schools, seminaries, children's homes). It emerged that the risk was twice as high as the national average, but with no significant difference between Roman Catholic and non-Roman Catholic institutions." The Dutch commission, established by the Catholic Church, surveyed over 34,000 people aged 40 or more to determine levels of child abuse in Dutch society. It found that one in ten had suffered abuse at the hands of a non-family member. (What must the figure be once family members are included?) Of those surveyed, between 0.3pc and 0.9pc were abused by a Catholic priest, religious or lay worker. Ironically, the Dutch report warns against media misrepresentation of child abuse by the Catholic Church. It should have saved itself the bother. The report has been used to further exaggerate the scale of the problem in the Church. The Dutch bishops should not have commissioned this report unless other organisations were doing the same. By commissioning it and releasing it in this way, it has allowed the Catholic Church to be singled out again and damned for having a worse problem than comparable organisations, when this is not the case. Is it any wonder that people are so inclined to believe that so many Catholic priests have abused children?
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