[doug from upland]

Between pervert priests and this immigration nonsense, my church is making me very angry. They still, however, get it right on pro-life.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Doug, even if just one priest sexually molested one underage boy, that would be infinitely too much, as I'm sure you'd agree.

Don't get off on the "priest-molester" jag, though. Something like 75% of the abuse occurred between 1965 and 1980, and at that time, the Bishops (like everybody else, unfortunately) were strongly influenced by the therapeutic approach. In practice, that meant you sent the priest off to a counseling-and-coping place run by psychologists, you brought him back into parish work once the shrinks said he was under control, you paid the victims so they could get therapy too, and (supposedly) nobody further traumatized or scandalized by a court appearance.

That was the theory; it didn't work; it ballooned out into a huge cover-up and pay-off arangement with multiple victims, and finally the muckraking press caught up with it and exploited the story as a uniquely Catholic problem.

A uniquely Catholic problem it is not. According to WorldNetDaily (David Kupelian)a major 2004 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education found that nearly 10 percent of U.S. public school students have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention by school employees. Titled "Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature," the report says the mistreatment of students ranges from sexual comments to rape. In fact, says the study's author Charol Shakeshaft, professor of educational administration at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., the scope of the school-sex problem appears to far exceed the clergy-abuse scandal that has recently rocked the Roman Catholic Church.

Comparing the incidence of sexual misconduct in schools with the Catholic Church scandal, Shakeshaft notes that a recent study by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops concluded 10,667 young people were sexually mistreated by priests between 1950 and 2002.

In contrast, she extrapolates from a national survey conducted for the American Association of 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a public school employee between 1991 and 2000. The figures suggest "the physical sexual abuse of students in public schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests," said Shakeshaft, according to Education Week.