BishopAccountability.org
 
  Gays, Priest Sex Abuse: Is There Any Connection?

By Carey Goldberg
Boston Globe [United States]
October 17, 2005

If the Catholic Church wants to prevent sexual abuse by priests, several abuse experts said, there are better ways to do it than by trying to bar gay men from the clergy.

The church recently began checking American seminaries for "evidence of homosexuality," and the pope is widely expected to ban actively gay men from taking holy orders.

But it will be tricky to cull gays from the priesthood, the abuse experts said this month. And it would be more effective -- and more humane -- to target likely abusers rather than all gays.

"There's no adequate way to screen out homosexuality," said Martin P. Kafka, a psychiatrist at Harvard's McLean Hospital. "We don't have any lab tests."

Kafka was among a half-dozen abuse experts invited to the Vatican in 2003 to report on the latest research. He and two others who attended said they recommended the church improve its monitoring of priests, as well as its teaching about intimacy and sexuality -- which the church had already begun to do.

They also told the Vatican that it could better screen out problem priests by checking for personality traits known to be linked to sexual abuse, using methods already familiar to the field.

Instead of asking about homosexuality, Karl Hanson, another expert who spoke at the Vatican, said he would focus on questions like, "Have you ever been in love? What was it like for you? Have you had long-term friendships? Who are your closest friends? Are you most comfortable with people older or younger than you?"

Pedophiles cannot be expected to admit to their prior crimes, so "what you have to do is look for proxy measures of things which increase risk," said Hanson, a psychologist for the Canadian government and researcher on sex offenders. "And when you do that, you're never going to be 100 percent accurate, you're always going to be playing the odds."

Factors that increase risk of pedophilia, he said, include things like: a history of being sexually abused during childhood; a lack of adult friends and lovers; signs of antisocial behavior or trouble with impulse control; indications that a man is conflicted and uncomfortable about his own sexuality; and a general lack of happiness and satisfaction with life. If an applicant has many such warning signs, specialists say, it should raise suspicion.

The experts who went to the Vatican said they proposed other, non-screening measures, many of which the church has already undertaken on its own. In the Boston archdiocese, for example, more than 70,000 adults and 30,000 children have been trained in preventing, recognizing and reporting sexual abuse since late 2002, said Deacon Tony Rizzuto, director of the archdiocese's Office of Child Advocacy.

"We think we're doing the best we can to prevent anything like this from ever happening again," he said.

The church has also increased supervision of priests. And seminary training includes more on sexuality and relationships.

In the church's current effort to more strictly screen candidates for the priesthood, the Vatican is expected not to completely bar gays from the priesthood, but to prohibit those who have been active in gay causes or who are thought to have a particularly strong gay orientation, according to press reports from Rome.

Among the experts invited to the Vatican, Hanson said, most said that homosexuality was "largely an irrelevant variable."

But the issue is tricky. In society at large, the experts said, no link has been found between homosexuality and pedophilia. Most sexual abuse victims are girls molested by men, and even the sexual abuse of young boys is perpetrated mainly by men who consider themselves straight, Kafka said.

But as the church's data show, in the clergy abuse, both the victims and the abusers differed from the usual profile: The victims were likelier to be older boys and the perpetrators likelier to say they were gay.

And gay men may be over-represented among the abusers, although no hard numbers are available. Estimates suggest that upwards of 30 percent of the clergy is gay. Kafka said two studies of abusive priests suggest that between 46 and 66 percent of the molesters were gay or bisexual.

Of course, Hanson noted, the numbers of gay men among the abusers may be exaggerated, because "if you're caught doing something with a boy, you say, 'Well, look, I'm gay,' and it's better than being a pedophile."

Researchers also point out that priests had far more unfettered access to boys than to girls. When lay pedophiles who consider themselves heterosexual have been asked why they molested boys, they pointed to greater access as the reason, said Dr. William Marshall, one of the experts invited to the Vatican and a professor emeritus at Queen's University in Ontario.

"They say, 'If I ask a parent if I can take a boy to a football match, they say yes, but if I asked, "Can I take your daughter to a movie?" they'd ask, "What's wrong with this guy?" ' " Marshall said.

Still, when adults molest children past puberty, they tend to follow their sexual orientation. When the victims are older, straight men tend to molest girls and gay men molest boys. According to one survey, two-thirds of the victims were 12 or older when the abuse began.

So, Kafka concluded, "inasmuch as the church has a problem with the abuse of post-pubertal males, homosexuality is a risk factor." And thus, "it makes rational sense then to ask, 'What do we do about homosexuality?'

No easy answer. Specialists in sex offenses use various methods for trying to detect pedophilia: They include assessing a man's arousal while he looks at pictures of children, whether by measuring his penile response or more indirect reactions. But experts could not imagine the church resorting to such methods to test for homosexuality.

So "the only way they're going to know is through self-report or setting up a network of informers, and I don't know how practical that's going to be," Kafka said.

Marshall was more outspoken. At the Vatican, he said, he told gathered officials, "It's primarily a monitoring problem, and it's not going to be solved by kicking homosexuals out of the church."

Furthermore, he said, he argued, "If you have a policy of excluding homosexuals, all the applicants to the seminaries who are homosexual will just lie." His audience, he recalled, "looked at me in shock and said, 'Lie?' "

David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, pointed out another flaw in plans to screen out gay men. Among the priests who abused boys, "probably large portions of them were either in denial or unaware of [their homosexuality] or conflicted or eager to see themselves in another light."

"So," he said, "it's not clear that trying to screen for homosexuality among a population of that sort really gets those people out."

And in current-day America, he added, gay people are much likelier to acknowledge and accept their sexual orientation, so they may present far lower risks than the repressed types of the old days. (That fits with the profile of abuse in the church; it has fallen precipitously since the 1980s.)

Another big problem with broader screening, Finkelhor said, is that it carries a high price: Many of those screened out would never have become molesters.

"In screening for anything, they're going to be culling hundreds or thousands of people for every bad apple that they eliminate," he said. "And just taking out gays is an extraordinarily meat-cleaver approach."

 
 

Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.