Here is some summary data from a John Jay Institute report done for the Conference of Catholic Bishops:
“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.”
The original report has been moved and the link is bad but it could be found I’m sure. What this summary suggests is that the frequency of abuse by Catholic priests IS in fact much higher than in the general population (which includes other religions). And that there is a much higher rate of abuse of boys than girls. (Wonder why that is?)
There’s an interesting graph on page 28. It shows the instances of abuse rising steeply and peaking in the late 70s then declining just as steeply. I have a theory on why the data looks like that.
Freegards
A local family sent their druggie son to a psychologist in another state. Psychologist helped him “retrieve” repressed memory od priest abusing him. He just received a $4.5 million settlement from the church