No Good Deed: NY Times Slaps Cardinal Dolan For Actually Getting Rid of Abusive Priests

Let’s deal with reality here.

Submitted by VB on Tue, 06/05/2012 - 1:22am.

Let’s deal with reality here. Child abuse is a problem in this country and it involves many organization such as schools, churches, synagogues. The abusers were a tiny minority of Catholic priests. Some 4 percent of Catholic priests in active ministry in the United States were accused of abuse between the 1950s and 2002. About three hundred priests were convicted. There is not a shred of evidence indicating that priests abuse young people at rates higher than do people in the rest of society.

On the contrary: Most sexual abuse takes place within families. The John Jay
study concludes that, in 2001, whereas five young people in 100,000 may have
been abused by a priest, the average rate of abuse throughout the United States
was 134 for every 100,000 young people.
(CATHOLIC Priests, Abuse, and the Meltdown of a Culture The lessons of an important new study. By George Weigel Posted: Thursday, May)

From the 1950s through the 1970s, the Catholic Church, following the then prevailing societal practice, sent suspected abusers to psychologists rather than calling the police.

In this respect, the Church was far from alone. When the Church was sending
accused priests to psychological treatment, "the criminal justice system was
doing the very same thing with convicted offenders – sending them to
treatment instead of prison."

As recently as 1994, it was the universal practice in New York
among school administrators not to call police to report abusers.
The 1994 study also reported that only 1 percent of those abusive educators lost
their license. In addition, most alarmingly, "25 percent received no consequence
or were reprimanded informally and off-the-record. Nearly 39 percent chose to
leave the district, most with positive recommendations or even retirement
packages intact."
(http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/misconductreview/report.pdf)

According to CARA, here are the numbers of accusations involving a current
minorthat were even deemed "credible" each year from 2005 to 2011:
(http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/child-and-youth-protection/upload...)
Year / # of accusations
2011 7
2010 8
2009 6
2008 10
2007 4
2006 14
2005 9
Meanwhile, according to government numbers, in 2010 alone, there were
some63,527 reported cases of child sexual abuse in the United States – an
alarming societal problem that has received scant media attention.
(http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cm10/cm10.pdf#page=62

The best estimate is that 15% of students will be sexually abused by a
member of the school staff during their school career.
• Though, when the American Association of University Women
Foundation surveyed more than 1,600 students in eighth through 11th
grade, 25 percent of the girls and 10 percent of the boys who said they
had been harassed or abused said the harasser was a school employee.
• The number of K-12 public and private school students in 1996 who
have been or will be sexually abused by a member of the school staff is
nearly 7 million of 51,331,000.
• Between 1% and 5% of teachers sexually abuse or harass students.
http://www.cpiu.us/statistics-2/

A 2004 U.S. Department of Education report reported that "the most accurate data
available" reveals that "nearly 9.6 percent of [public school] students are targets
of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career."
This result prompted Hofstra University's Dr. Charol Shakeshaft, the author of the
study, to opine in 2006, "[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem? The physical
sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by
priests."

A Meanwhile, that same 2004 report cited an important study from the mid-1990s:
"In an early [1994] study of 225 cases of educator sexual abuse in New
York, all of the accused had admitted to sexual abuse of a student but none
of the abusers was reported to authorities."
(http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/misconductreview/report.pdf)

The figures suggest “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100
times the abuse by priests,” said Shakeshaft, according to Education Week.
Indeed, more than 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a
school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade, says the report.

The UN considers creating “sexual rights” for children as young as
10, a court in Brazil shows what this would mean. Planned Parenthood and homosexual advocacy groups lobby to lower age of consent laws, and then feign indignation when they are lumped with pedophiles.
http://www.turtlebayandbeyond.org/2012/homosexuality/sex-rights-for-chil...
http://issuu.com/ippfresources/docs/universalperiodicreview_toolkit_2012

The Catholic Church is not dangerous for children. Paradoxically the Church has been criticized harshly because it has been far more open than other organisations and because people have higher expectations for it. “No other institution has undertaken a public study of sexual abuse and, as a result, there are no comparable data to those collected and reported by the Catholic Church,” say the researchers. “Other organizations should follow suit.”

Many Protestant denominations are too small or too decentralised to report abuse. Members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses have been expelled for speaking out about abuse. Orthodox Jews refuse to deal with sexual abuse in the criminal justice system and investigate instead in rabbinical courts. Vigilance will always be needed to prevent sexual abuse of children, but to say that Catholic priests are dangerous is as preposterous as it is malicious.

Despite all the lies, ad hominem, straw men attack and other logical fallacies sprout by the media or the comments on this forum, the fact is that the Catholic is far safer for children than any organizations and sadly even safer for children then some parents. Given the odd, as a father of two sons, I would trust the Catholic Church more than I trust the schools and many of the people on this forum.

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