Jeg strever litt med å huske når jeg ble informert (om det var tidlig på 90-tallet, eller da jeg var feltprest 1986-88) om den generelle frekvensen av seksuelt misbruk av barn og ungdom, både i vårt eget land, og nokså generelt for alle samfunn – for jenter regnet man med at opp mot 10% ville bli misbrukt på en eller annen måte, for gutten var prosentandelen noen lavere. En slik virkelighetsbeskrivelse må føre til en høy grad av realisme, også innefor Kirken (at disse problemene vel aldri helt kan unngås), samtidig som de sier oss at det skjer mange slike misbruk rundt om i hjemmene, på skolene, i idrettslagene osv. – men de fleste av disse sakene blir det aldri skrevet noe om.
Den kjente katolske forfatteren, George Weigel, tar utgangspunkt i lignende tall når han i First Things nylig skriver om hvor urettferdig Den katolske Kirken blir behandlet mht slike saker (her må vi også huske hvor enormt strenge man har vært i Kirken i USA de siste åtte årene):
The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother—thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests—a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).
Yet in a pattern exemplifying the dog’s behavior in Proverbs 26:11, the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today. That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line.
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Takk for tipset om en svært interessant artikkel. Utdraget du bringer bør nok likevel korrigeres med denne kommentaren hentet fra «First Things»:
«Concerning numbers «2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests – That would suggest that priests are more than 100 times more likely to commit sexual abuse than the general population». Even if George Weigel wants to defend the truth about the Church, He gives completely wrong numbers of priests involved therein. The source is probably here: „ According to a survey by the New York Times, 1.8 percent of all priests ordained from 1950 to 2001 have been accused of child sexual abuse”.
But there is a great difference between saying: “about 2% of priests were child abusers” and saying “2% of child abusers were priest” (if 50% of priests are older than 60, it does not follow, that 50% of people older than 60 are priests, does it?).
This error was already widely repeated in European media, unfortunately, because Weigel is very popular in Europe. And, yes, if true, it WOULD really prove that priests are 100 times more likely to commit sexual abuse than the general population. Thank God, it is NOT true….»