You're all paedophiles too!

This comment piece from Andrew Brown in the Guardian is a few days old now, but I'm still in awe of its sheer badness - possibly one of the flimsiest attempts at damage-limitation I've ever seen:

The most detailed statistics on child abuse for the Catholic clergy that I can find come from the John Jay Institute's report drawn up for the American Catholic bishops' conference. From this it emerges that the frequency of child abuse among Catholic priests is not remarkable but its pattern is. Although there are no figures for the number of abusers in the wider population, there are figure for the number of victims. These vary wildly: the most pessimistic survey finds that 27% of American women and 16% of men had "a history of childhood sexual abuse"; while the the most optimistic had 12.8% of women and 4.3% of men. Obviously a great deal depends here on the definition of abuse; also on the definition of "childhood". In some of these surveys it runs up to 18, which is a couple of years above the age of consent in Britain.

The Catholic figures show that between about 4% of priests and deacons serving in the US between 1950 and 2002 had been accused of sexual abuse of someone under 18. In this country, the figure was a 10th of that: 0.4% But whereas the victims in the general population are overwhelmingly female, the pattern among American Catholic priests was quite different. Four out of five of their victims were male. Most were adolescents: two out of five were 14 or over; 15% were under 10.

This is vile, but whether it is more vile than the record of any other profession is not obvious.

In this piece, Brown has set himself the tricky task of defending the indefensible and proceeds to fail in epic style. Most people will work out for themselves what's wrong with Brown's sorry excuse for an argument, but some of the comments on this article dissect his errors succinctly and with some style. The biggie, of course, is that Brown isn't comparing like with like. We don't necessarily have the figures for every "other profession", just an overall figure for the whole American population. And who are the biggest perpetrators of abuse?

Offenders are most often acquaintances (approximately 50%) followed by family members (approximately 25% to 33%) and strangers (7% to 25%) (Douglas & Finklehor, 2005).

With a few exceptions, we don't know about the profiles of particular professions in this respect, but we do know that the majority of abusers are known to the abused child - friends of the family or somebody who had befriended the child (a category which could include people like your friendly parish priest), followed by members of the child's own family. This comment from AllyF hits that particular nail right on the head, (with the proviso that he should have mentioned acquaintances, followed by family members, rather than just family members):

Hard to know where to begin with this utterly shameful, ignorant, offensive screed.

Just on the statistics, the estimates of prevalence of child abuse include abuse by immediate and extended family members, which account for the overwhelming majority of child sex abuse cases.

If you were to remove family members from the equation and only look at children who were sexually abused by non-family trusted professionals, I suspect you'd find that the prevalence of abuse by catholic priests is wildly disproportionate to the amount of contact they have with children.

Indeedy - if you're going to deploy the "you too" version of tu quoque, it kind of helps to get your stats right.

Other comments falling into the "better than the original article" category, include:

The Catholic figures show that between about 4% of priests and deacons serving in the US between 1950 and 2002 had been accused of sexual abuse of someone under 18.

As the vatican have been making huge efforts to protect paedophile priests it's a bit naive to accept their estimates. I personally know two people who have been abused physically and sexually by priests.

This is vile, but whether it is more vile than the record of any other profession is not obvious.

Oddly enough though we haven't anywhere near the number of people coming forward to complain about sexual abuse from other professions like medicine to back that up. Bearing in mind the position of absolute trust that a priest has amongst Catholics, it's safe to say that most cases of abuse are probably never reported.

(Danot)

Many Catholic priests and religious have abused children in their care. But is the church's record worse than the world's?

Oh dear.

What a dreadfully wrong question to be asking. You probably should be asking whether the Catholic church's record is worse for the society in which it operates, and the answer would be 'yes'. The you should ask whether it is worse for that Catholic church because they operate from a position of trust, and the answer would be 'yes'.

One of your daftest articles, Andrew. Which means it's ahead of some pretty stiff competition.

(Lord Summersisle)

The other point that makes the Catholic abuse is that it is nowadays very widely reported. It may be the best reported crime in the world: that, too tends to skew perceptions.

This is manipulation of the word "reported". There's a difference between coverage in the press, and reporting of individual incidents of abuse. You may be right that the phenomenon is more widely reported but it does not follow that individual cases are more often notified. As with all crimes of this type, it is very hard for victims to report them.

(nongovernmental)

The second important aspect to note is the unmediated access to children priests have and the trust they command from both parents, the wider community, and the boys themselves. Simply, if a member of holy orders (until very recently in our history at least) was accused of child rape/abuse, the church would often cover the thing up and deal with it internally. Often, priests who were accused of such crimes were not withdrawn from duty but simply relocated to another parish, often where they could reoffend.

It also must be taken into account that children are often told from a young age that members of the church are not only people they can trust, but also people who demand respect from them. If a child is abused by an authority figure - especially one whom others regard highly - how is this infant able to know that what is taking place is wrong? Is it really likely that they will be able to articulate their experiences in the same way they could if a less-respected member of society abused them?

(dementedbear)

Oh, for goodness' sake.Hey, our church is okay, because we only child molest at the same rate as the general population. Forget the aspirations to the moral high ground, gloss over the cover-ups and hush-money,ignore the abuse of power and trust, and the institutional blind-eye, and omit to mention the sheer affrontery [sic] of Denis Brennan asking parishioners to pay the Church's guilt money, and generally miss the whole bloody point.

(alisdair cameron)

Many Catholic priests and religious have abused children in their care. But is the church's record worse than the world's?

Read the above statement again except this time replace child abuse with Bank Robbery, Fraud, Mugging or virtually any other crime.

Many Catholic priests and religious have Robbed Banks. But is the church's record worse than the world's?

See how daft it sounds?

(Valten78)

I know proportion, like perspective, is a difficult concept for some people to grasp. It looks as if Andrew Brown's in need of a Father Ted figure to do some explaining....