Brody's Scribbles... Roman Catholic Blame Based Marketing Comes Unstuck

By Tim Trent (Bracknell, UK) Nov 18 | Back in September I ran an opinion piece on The Marketing of Blame. I headlined it thus:
I was heartily disgusted to read the Guardian article entitled 'Sex abuse rife in other religions, says Vatican'. The attempt to divert attention from the industrial scale abuse of boys and girls by Roman Catholic priests and nuns is odious, and the language they are quoted as using to try to do so is appalling.

When you read the Guardian article you will see that the hypocritical bunch tried to lay the blame firmly at the door of homosexuals in the priesthood. But not so, says a report by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a $2,000,000 report, according to the Associated Press article that was commissioned by, yes, The Roman Catholic Church. 

The bishops had commissioned the $2 million study as part of widespread reforms they enacted at the height of the abuse crisis. The scandal erupted in 2002 with the case of one predator priest in the Archdiocese of Boston, then spread to every U.S. diocese and beyond.

Nearly 14,000 molestation claims have been filed against Catholic clergy since 1950, according to tallies the bishops have released in recent years. Abuse-related costs have reached at least $2.3 billion in the same period.

At the meeting Tuesday, Bishop Edward Braxton, of the Diocese of Belleville, Ill., asked the researchers whether their study indicated that homosexuality should be considered when evaluating a candidate for the priesthood. In 2005, the Vatican issued a policy statement that men with "deep-seated" attraction to other men should be barred from the priesthood.

Smith said: "If that exclusion were based on the fact that that person would be more probable than any other candidate to abuse, we do not find that at this time."

The latest findings affirmed previous reports that the rate of clergy abuse has declined steeply since the mid 1980s. Researchers found that the abuse rate peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the claims being made now involve allegations from decades ago.

I like that line: "Most of the claims being made now involve allegations from decades ago." That looks, when you read it first, as though the problem today has become trivial. But think about it with greater clarity.
Of course most of the claims are from decades ago. If we live for three score years and ten, and we look back, say, 60 of those 70 years, we have 60 years worth of abused kids to come forward. Even if only 100 kids a year were abused that means 60 lots of 100 kids - 6,000 - in the past versus this year's 100 kids. So that's just journalese, spin doctoring.

But let's stick this myth that gay men are said by the Roman Catholics to be the biggest population of abusers firmly in its coffin and bury it for ever, now. The report, albeit an interim report - and interim reports are not contradicted by later findings - says clearly

"What we are suggesting is that the idea of sexual identity be separated from the problem of sexual abuse," said Margaret Smith of John Jay College, in a speech to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "At this point, we do not find a connection between homosexual identity and the increased likelihood of subsequent abuse from the data that we have right now."

Or, to put that in plain words, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Heterosexual people are as likely or as unlikely to abuse our kids as any other group in society. And you know what? I'm going with unlikely.

I was not abused as a kid (though I was groped by a sad maths teacher, but that was just pointless, silly and an irrelevance), nor was my son, nor was my wife, nor my mother, nor her family, nor my father nor his family. I have no schoolfrineds that were abused, though I know of one music teacher who propositioned an allegedly attractive but rather plain treble in the school choir. Abuse in the normal world doesn't happen. The Scout Movement is not a haven for abusers, nor the teaching profession, nor youth club workers, sports instructors nor any similar organisations. I'm not saying that men and women - do not forget that a penis is not required when you abuse a child - with those tendencies do not enter roles where abuse might be possible, but abuse them they do not. Mainly.

Where abuse starts and continues is with positions of power and control.

If you control a child, either with the physical constraints present in a place like Haut de la Garenne where abuse has yet to be proven but is strongly suspected, or in a religion where absolute obedience to the clergy is a requirement, like the Roman Catholic Church, then you have the environment for abuse can allow it to flourish, unhindered by the normal conventions and laws of society. And where the head of the organisation, God's Vicar on Earth, protects the abusive members of his priesthood, and even moves them to new parishes with more kids, more yet to be abused kids, then that abuse is seen to be sanctioned at the highest level.

But the wheels have come off the Catholic Mantra of "It's those gays, guv, honest!" This report has seen to that. It's not gay folk at all. Or rather we gay folk abuse in the same ratio that straight folk abuse. A very small number of human beings abuse children. We are, contrary to Roman Catholic belief, human beings.

Why are boys more abused than girls?
I think it is more about paedophilia than true sexual orientation.
Paedophilia is the sexual attraction to the biologically juvenile form of the human being. This is not the 'legal child', but is the 'biological child' Paedophilia is often used to mean the sexual attraction to a person under the age of consent, but that age varies worldwide, 13 in some places and 18 in others.
It is a given that some men abuse people who are under the age of consent. It is also a given that some women do the same thing. These are, generally, people who abuse their position of power, and the outcome is a satisfaction of misdirected sexual urges.
If one is talking about a post-pubertal child then the misdirection is social, not paedophilic. If one talks of a per-pubertal child then it is paedophilic.
Paedophilia is common enough to be a 'normal' sexual response, but is a wholly unacceptable one for many reasons, including but not limited to

* Physical damage to the child  

* emotional damage to the child  

* reinforcement in the abuser that such acts are acceptable  

* socially, the desires are misplaced

However, as we can see from Bonobos and their behaviour, paedophilia and indeed rape is a natural part of that creature's sexual behaviour.

Probably the problem is that the human is unique in being able to voice complaint about the behaviour of others, and is able to discriminate sufficiently to moralise and to do something about it.
But sexual abuse is not, usually, about sex per se, even with Bonobos. It is either to do with power and dominance (see the Bonobos again), or it is to do with giving pleasure.
To consider that pleasure giving first, I think none of us will deny that sexual stimulation is pleasurable. There is no age before which it is not pleasurable. If it were socially acceptable to give sexual pleasure to a child, and to do so selflessly, then this would be deemed to be a good behaviour. It is when, as so easily can be seen to happen, this behaviour becomes selfish, that abuse takes over. Indeed, it is abuse in many ways to take a child and to awaken sexual pleasure in it, primarily because that is usually done in order that the child wishes for more of the same. It is, after all, fun!
But it is socially unacceptable.
We have chosen to create laws and ethical codes that render it to be considered to be a bad and punishable act. And that is fine.

With some men and women sex is always a power trip. And that leads us on to consider the way they can twist things such that they will always be in the driving seat. That is easiest with a smaller, weaker, and more easily cowed person as the other party. Those are children. Children are smaller, weaker, and can be browbeaten more easily than adults.
So an attraction to a child can be created because that child has all the characteristics that the power person requires. It may also be an attraction based on many things about childhood that would take far to long to even scratch the surface of here.
Below the age of puberty a boy and a girl are physically remarkably similar. They are hairless, similarly shaped, and with immature and pretty irrelevant genitals. The child is almost androgynous. Only after puberty starts does the child become recognisably male or female. Faces alter, genitals develop, and sexual orientation demonstrates its arrival.
Men and women who abuse children under the age of puberty often, but not always, choose boys and girls with sufficient variety for the choice to be almost random. Over the age of puberty their choice tends towards but is not always congruent with their own sexual orientation. But, and this is key, in almost every case the act of sexually abusing a child is a power trip, and nothing to do with sexuality per se. Sex is involved, but not the driving force.
Now that was a lengthy preamble to answering the question "Are gays the problem?"
No.
The problem is that the clergy is in a unique position with unfettered access to young boys and girls. A priest (in any religion at all) may easily have an excuse to closet himself or herself alone with a child and may coerce that child with seemingly reasonable requests to shed clothing and to perform sexual acts.
A poor priest perceives a positon of privilege and power, and has a very real temptation to abuse the children in his or her care. Robbie Garner in his book "Nobody Came" - Sacre Coeur, a Jersey orphanage and Haut de la Garenne - describes nuns who rubbed his 5, 6, 7 year old little penis with fervour in the orphanage where he was sent. This appears to have been some sort of ritual at bath time.

Couple that temptation with the undeniable fact that children flirt, even though they have no idea what outcome may be generated by flirting, and you see that a weak priest may fall into the trap of saying that the child initiated the acts, thus attempting to absolve the adult of blame and responsibility.

Children enjoy sex. I know I did at 11 or so, but that sex was a solo experience. An abuser might have seduced me had he or she known I could be seduced, but no-one attempted it. That's good. But a priest might have achieved seduction and subsequent abuse by invoking the name of a deity and showing me how this was god's design for me.

So no, the problem is not gays. Nor will removing gay priests solve the problem. Nor, I suspect, will removing celibacy from Roman Catholic priests remove the problem.
What will solve it is an acknowledgment of the problem by the management of the religious organisations and the offering up of the abusers for prosecution.

It is time that The Pope stopped protecting and hiding the paedophiles in his organisation.

Tim Trent is a Data & Privacy expert as well as an independent freelance marketing consultant based in Bracknell, UK. He is one of Europe's leading experts in compliance with data privacy regulations, and is in the forefront of implementing Permission Based Marketing. He publishes regular articles on Data Protection.
A regular contributor to Brody's Notes & Scribbles, more of Tim's opinions can be found at his website, Marketing by Permission. [Linked Here]