Sunday, February 09, 2014

Which Group Is The Larger Sex Offender Against Children, Teachers or Catholic Priests?

According to this story posted at CBS News--hardly an anti-teacher, right-wing site--teachers make the priests look like pikers:
Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft looked into the problem, and the first thing that came to her mind when Education Week reported on the study were the daily headlines about the Catholic Church.

"[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem?" she said. "The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests"...

As the National Catholic Register's reporter Wayne Laugesen points out, the federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state's entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000....
Without data, all you have is an opinion.  If someone can find fault with the data, I'll listen to them, but otherwise this report is damning.  (Priests?  Damning?  Get it?  Sometimes I slay myself!)

2 comments:

PeggyU said...

Fascinating article, particularly the conclusion.

allen (in Michigan) said...

Makes all kinds of sense.

Access to children. The absence of any effort to winnow out adults with pedophilic tendencies. A hierarchical administrative structure that puts the safety of children at odds with the teacher's superiors - the crimes of the teachers or priests reflects on their superiors so their superiors have powerful incentives to cover up the crimes.