Thursday, November 09, 2017

It seems a few times a week I see a reference on social media or a news story about priests and child sexual abuse. Especially now that there is a lot of attention directed at high profile Hollywood entertainers.  It's part of the toxic, anti-Christian atmosphere we live in (some of it, to be honest, promoted by anti-Catholic Christians), even though it is far more common for a child to be abused by a school teacher than a priest. The Roman Catholic church is a big target, but the prejudice affects all Christians.

"Based on key studies done in recent years, abuse by priests amounted to about 11,000 cases over a period of 50 years, or about 220 abuse cases per year. However, based on a major 2004 study by former Hofstra University Professor Charol Shakeshaft done for the US Dept. of Education (Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature ), there were 290,000 cases of child abuse in our public schools over a 10 year period, or about 29,000 cases of child abuse per year committed by public school employees, mostly teachers. In other words, for every one case of child abuse by a priest, there were 130 cases of child abuse by a public school employee. What’s surprising is that in spite of the fact abuse by public school employees occurs more than 100 times as often as priestly abuse, this is rarely, if ever, discussed in our media or newspapers. Why is this ?" https://afany.org/2016/05/01/child-abuse-huge-problem/

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2004/03/10/26abuse.h23.html

http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/660375.pdf

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