Victims of pedophile priests and imams help create more vict

[mcc1789]

Mar 14, 2016 21:00:50 GMT ignorantianescia said:

Well, as I said, what I heard fits better with a time frame during which it was uncommon for men to personally decide to become priests. But domics contests that, so maybe your point still applies.

Nor is it clear to me why paedophiles would self-select into the priesthood. For easy access to children, other professions would make more sense.

Well, they don't only enter the priesthood. Other professions (such as education) also have had sexual abuse scandals. It's just one avenue. Why would becoming priests make less sense? Priests have historically (and presently in many cases, although the scandals helped change this) very respected individuals whom accusations against which would be more likely disbelieved.

[domics]

Mar 14, 2016 21:00:50 GMT ignorantianescia said:

That is the vast majority of reported abuses. It depends on how optimistic one is about the time before then, when children weren't as important and high-status as they are now. I personally wouldn't expect a lot of evidence from the earlier era and admittedly I am rather pessimistic when it comes towards power without accountability. Honestly, sexual crimes are often vastly underreported for a variety of reasons including stigma (to this day), so I don't think it is reasonable to expect the absence of evidence to indicate evidence of absence.

Also, the expert whom I have heard on the matter identified the educational environment in which celibacy was taught to young boys to become priests as a problem. In his verdict, those young boys were taught to treat any feelings of sexual lust in an obsessive repressive way, rather than natural feelings that had to be redirected to non-sexual, productive ends (for celibacy to work at least). I'll readily allow that a repressive education combined with a culture of sexual liberty (and that included at first also a lot of paedophilia apologia) could double up the problem, though. In any case, a lot of the reported cases occurred between the 60s and the 90s - that really is consistent with either scenario.

1) In the 2006 John Jay Report the problem is discussed: "Sexual abuse is underreported, and more people will come forward to report allegations of abuse. However, reporting patterns have stabilized over the last decade, and reports every year now fit the distribution you see here. This means that the decrease in sexual abuse cases is a true representation of the overall phenomenon. Even if more cases are reported, they will be based primarily on abuse that occurred years before, and the shape of the abuse crisis will remain as it is shown in Figures 1.1 and 1.4.Figure 1.7 shows all cases reported prior to 2002, and Figure 1.8 shows all cases reported in 2002. The distribution of cases in 2002 is almost identical to the distribution of cases prior to that, and the approximately 1,000 allegations reported in 2004 show the same distribution as those reported in 2002. This stability in the cases reported by year
supports a conclusion that the overall shape of the problem, or pattern of cases over time, is stable. It is the shape of the crisisof sexual abuse over the period 1950 – 2002. Although more cases will be reported, they will fit this pattern. "www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/child-and-youth-protection/upload/Nature-and-Scope-supplemental-data-2006.pdf

2) If true priests who have attended a minor seminary would be more likely to be sex offenders. That is not the case. Only 4% of the accused priests are from minor seminaries.

[himself]

The John Jay report also noted that:
a) The number of first contacts rose sharply after 1965 and declined sharply after 1985. That is, priests and monks were as affected by the let-it-all-hang-out, if-it-feels-good-do-it sexual revolution as anyone else. After 1985, for the most part, the genitally-obsessed were no longer entering the priesthood and those already in had left.
b) 80% of contacts involving Catholic clergy were man-boy. This is the opposite of secular contacts (mother's boyfriend, school teacher, etc.) which are primarily man-girl. (The latter is why there is no wider correlation of child sexual abuse with homosexuality in the general population.)
c) The boys were primarily teenagers, which means pedophilia was not the major problem, but ephebophilia.

[The homosexual slang term for hunting after teenaged boys is (or at least was) "chicken-hawking." There is a sub-genre of homosexual literature that celebrates this life, though most homosexuals approve of it no more than most of the rest of us approve of men who troll for teenaged girls. And in this context, it is well to remember that not too long ago, boys and girls of 18, 19, and 20 were still legally children!]

We should also note that in that era, psychologists believed that such contacts did little lasting harm to the boy, and that it was worse to make a big public spectacle than to deal with it quietly and compassionately. And of course, it could all be handled by "counseling" by psychologists. There was even a movement to celebrate the sexuality of children. In a case of Worst Timing Ever, a professor at U. Minn. published a book saying how we should allow children to express their sexuality just as the church scandal was breaking. There is a discussion of this here: www.firstthings.com/article/2009/12/how-pedophilia-lost-its-cool
Thinking has changed since then, but is it really just to hold people back then to what we believe today?

Andrew Greeley, the sociologist-priest used to warn about the "Lavender Mafia" that had come into control of a number of seminaries and chanceries. (Bishop Weakland of Milwaukee "came out" after his retirement.) The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a story about the high rate of AIDS among priests. A friend of mine who is homosexual had entered seminary at the time, but dropped out because, as he put it, all the "old queers" kept hitting on him. So while ephebophilia per se is not especially a homosexual weakness -- cf. "Lolita" -- the scandal in the Church was, because for whatever reason there was a greater concentration of homosexuals in the priesthood.

[mcc1789]

Well, I know pederasty was treated quite casually until fairly recently in many cases. That's if it was even acknowledged. As to whether it's just holding people back then to the same standards, I'd say yes. If not, how do we say past actions were bad and change things?