UNITED STATES
The Anxious Bench
July 20, 2014 By Philip Jenkins
Jason Berry is a journalist who works on Catholic issues and clergy sexual abuse. He has recently published an article on abuse issues, in which he attacks my work. He is quite at liberty to make such a criticism, but he cannot do so on the basis of an outrageous mis-representation of what I actually said.
Berry says this:
In 1996, Philip Jenkins… argued in Pedophiles and Priests that the earlier coverage of clergy abuse was a “putative” crisis, one “constructed” by the media and church critics. In 2002, a Boston Globe investigation of such cases ignited a chain reaction in many newsrooms about a deeply rooted culture of churchmen concealing abusers that the Vatican ignored. The “putative crisis” resembled a construction of its author.
What he suggests, then, is that (a) I had claimed that the reported instances of clergy abuse were invented or made up, and that (b) my argument was demolished by the post-2002 media exposés of the scale and severity of clergy abuse. Both statements are flat wrong. Did Berry actually read my book?
Already in the early 1990s, long before the Boston Globe exposés, stories of clergy sexual abuse were becoming very widespread in the US and Canada, usually in a Catholic context. The issue was thus becoming defined as a major social problem. In my book Pedophiles and Priests, I analyzed how the problem was being constructed, a term I defined at considerable length, but not, evidently, in a way that Berry chooses to understand. Contrary to what he implies, “constructed” is NOT synonymous with “invented.”
The term “construction” is a commonplace of social science, and is in fact the primary means of approaching and analyzing social problems. To speak of a problem being constructed makes no necessary statement about the scale of its objective reality, and it certainly does not mean that the issue at question is bogus or mythical. For a social scientist, all social problems are constructed.
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