While the way many of our bishops, pastors, and priests handled the sexual abuse scandals was in no way excusable...at least we can say that the problems were not merely endemic to a particularly religious institution, and certainly not related to issues of celibacy. A Fox news piece covers the "plague" of sexual misconduct among school teachers.
The passages that I found the most horrifying, but also the most resonant with the problems the Church has faced was the following:
Most of the abuse never gets reported. Those cases reported often end with no action. Cases investigated sometimes can't be proven, and many abusers have several victims.
And no one — not the schools, not the courts, not the state or federal governments — has found a surefire way to keep molesting teachers out of classrooms...
Too often, problem teachers are allowed to leave quietly. That can mean future abuse for another student and another school district.
"They might deal with it internally, suspending the person or having the person move on. So their license is never investigated," says Charol Shakeshaft, a leading expert in teacher sex abuse who heads the educational leadership department at Virginia Commonwealth University.
It's a dynamic so common it has its own nicknames — "passing the trash" or the "mobile molester."
Also unnerving was the following statistic: "One report mandated by Congress
estimated that as many as 4.5 million students, out of roughly 50
million in American schools, are subject to sexual misconduct by an
employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade." Makes home-schooling seem all that more attractive, no?
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