Orlando, Fla., Aug 27, 2007 / 13:00 pm
For some five years, since the Boston Globe broke the story of the clergy sex-abuse scandal, there has been no shortage of brutally unfavorable -- and oftentimes patently unfair -- media coverage of the Catholic Church.
Some, of course, feel that the church is getting a rightly deserved comeuppance for its past failures to address effectively child sexual abuse in its midst. But such schadenfreude does very little to recognize the steps that have been taken in the Catholic Church to prevent future occurrences. It also does not help people to recognize that the sexual abuse of teenagers and children is a societywide problem and not just a Catholic Church or priest problem.
While one case of abuse is one too many, and priests are -- and should be -- held to a higher standard, the numbers of predators found in the ranks of Catholic clergy were rather small when compared to the total numbers of priests serving faithfully over the same time period. The numbers were no larger than the percentage of abusers in the general population, and the number of those abused by clergy -- a terrible tragedy in itself -- is only a small subset of the total number of children sexually abused by adults.
Indeed, in 2004, a U.S. Department of Education study estimated that some 290,000 students experienced some form of sexual abuse by public-school employees in just one decade (1991-2000). According to this same study, nearly 10 percent of U.S. public-school students have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention by school employees.
Similarly, the Associated Press recently reported that the three insurance companies that cover the majority of Protestant denominations in the United States receive each year some 260 reports of minors being abused by clergy, staff or other church members. The numbers of sexual-abuse cases among Protestant denominations has been to date largely unknown -- largely due to the lack of hierarchy and reporting structures. Nevertheless, their numbers appear to outpace accusations against Catholic clergy.