Child Sex Abuse in Churches

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There’s been a lot of child sexual abuse going on in churches lately. There probably always has been, but it’s been getting more media as of late. Yay for the press!

Internal documents from 6 Catholic dioceses involving 300 priests and over 1,000 victims has recently been reported on the news out of Harrisburg.

Also:

https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.g ... nesses.pdf

In Australia, there were 1006 pedophiles with over 1800 victims that were known to elders in the Jehovah’s Witness congregations and none of them were reported to the police.

I thought about putting this stuff in the News forum, but it seemed applicable to PPR.

It’s all about priorities.

The RCC will just shift the pedo priests to other parishes, turning a blind eye to the psychological damage the kids have suffered, yet God will strike us dead if we eat meat on Fridays.

Does this job attract pedos, or it turns men to pedos?

Maybe both. Since child abuse isn’t dealt with properly, it’s the perfect career for a pedophile. It’s also a career that attracts people who crave power.

Further, they have a warped view of sex.

Pedophilia is one of humanity's ugliest and most tragic crimes. It's such a good thing that much of what was hidden in this regard is coming to light such as the issues with some Catholic priests. Sadly though, child sex abuse is also prevalent in education both public and private, child sports, child organizations, etc. Any child-centric activities draw such monsters/predators. Just terrible.

I think it’s especially sad when it’s been swept under the rug, like it has been in these cases, because that just creates more victims.

Unfortunately, any time there's a bunch of youths, and a bunch of counselors who are in charge of those youths, there's inevitably some sort of sexual abuse going on.

That goes for religious groups----perhaps especially for religious groups.

When I went to summer camp, there was always rumors swirling about some adult who did stuff to kids.

I don’t think the problem is necessarily that it’s happening (don’t get me wrong: if it happens once, it’s awful!), but the biggest problem is that it is being systematically covered up by these organizations. That just creates more victims.

Wait, are you telling me that priests sexually abuse children?

The Catholic Church should be criminally charged under the RICO statues in the U.S. That will never happen, of course, but it's a nice dream.

Imagine if Walmart refused to hire you to be a sales associate unless you (a)were male, and (b) took a lifetime vow of celibacy. Walmart would be hard put to fill its ranks, and the folks it would get to fill its ranks would be a rather distinctive selection of people.

Then imagine if it wasn't Walmart but your county's school system that demanded those requirements for hiring staff for primary and secondary schools.

I wasn’t just picking on Catholics in my original post. I also mentioned Jehovah’s Witnesses. Men who are overseers in their Kingdom Halls are allowed to marry.

I think that people who are in positions of power sometimes like to abuse that power, especially if the organizations they’re in have insufficient policies in place as far as reporting goes.

I understand all of that.

But what I am saying is that the RCC has that additional problem in the job requirement of priests (or at least that's my hypothesis).

And on top of that it looks like its not just "insufficient policies of reporting". It has always looked suspiciously like part of the problem is that the RCC purposely avoids coming clean and purging their ranks precisely because they may already have a shortage of priests. So they just move the bad ones around the chessboard because if they got rid of the bad ones they would loose the whole chess game.

I could be wrong about my celibcacy hypothesis. Maybe other sects have pedophile clergy, like the JWs . And maybe noncelibate ministers and rabbis etc have as many predatory pedos per capita of their numbers as do Catholic priests. Who knows? But it does seem like celibacy must be a factor in the problem.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 15 Aug 2018, 6:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I wonder how much more of these disclosures the catholic church [as an institution] can take before it implodes. alternately, I wonder if there is a hidden extra-liturgical power structure that will keep a lid on the disclosures somehow?

Lord Acton proven right again, re absolute power corrupting absolutely.

The saddest part is the enabling, protecting, defending of the predators - not by their organization, that's standard, look at Penn State and Sandusky, or the Olympic Committee. But by the "flock". Even parents of some of the abused didn't want to believe their own children.

Oh - not sure if this has been noted above, but similar scandals are emerging from ultraconservative Protestant areas nowadays (Bill Gothard, for instance, and yes that is a horrible aptonym), and there was at least one involving an orthodox Jewish community (Hardei, Brooklyn). It's not a specific religion that drives this; it's the worship of power.

I wonder if there is something about the authoritarian mindset which is somehow not so tore up about all this.