By Bruce Gorton
Times Live
May 25, 2011
http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/expensive/2011/05/25/catholic-peadophilia-case-still-minimising/
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Miranda Celeste has done a close reading of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' report into peadophile priests, and its not good.
The funding for the report was apparently mostly provided by sources that had an interest in minimising the damage, which they did. For example, they only considered it a case of peadophilia if the priest targetted kids younger than ten-years-old.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) sets that cut off at the victim being thirteen-years-old.
Why does this matter? "Most sexual abuse victims of priests (51 percent) were between the ages of eleven and fourteen."
And then there is trying to blame the sixties and seventies – to quote Miranda Celest on this:
This claimed "peak" in sexual abuse cases (which forms the crux of their argument that the sexual abuse crisis was a "historical problem" (2)) and the argument that "period effects" are partially to blame for this "peak" are supported only by extremely limited and inherently untrustworthy data.
In other words we can't trust the data enough to say whether there was a peak or not. Eish.
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