Doubly overlooked - IMO deliberately - is any comparitive study of "Protestant" numbers versus Catholic numbers. As I had concluded on an earlier thread:
The John Jay study is more than conclusive - it's exhaustive of the entire US population of Catholic priests. Every study I've seen of "Protestant" abuse included volunteers and laypersons; excluding them (to create a "pastor vs priest" apple-to-apple comparison) gives you a roughly 1% abuse rate for "Protestant" pastors, or (in other words) at least a four times greater likelihood of abuse by a Catholic priest than by any given Protestant pastor....Let me throw in one caveat to that statistic. I found that when I isolated "Protestant" abuse cases by denomination/affiliation/theological leanings, the more free will/Arminian/synergistic the theology is, and the more independent the association is (as opposed to denominational affiliation), the higher the abuse statistic goes. It's the average of all "Protestant" pastors that is, in my calculations, around 1%. Some independent churches have statistics that are far, far higher than the Catholic average of 4%.
Then “every study” begs the question of how reliable the data is. Protestant churches, governed as they are, tend to dispose of records and certainly have no reason to track pastors who have left their sight. Out of sight, out of mind. Then you have the matter of churches that “fold”. Protestanht denominationalism offers a small business model, with lots of start-ups. ; the hierarchial ones, a corporate ones. For instance the “Bible Baptist” church my grandmother attended. Or the church just next door to my home. I knew the pastor’’s son. They disappeared after a few years. In each case, the pastor disappeared with the assets; in the second case, the church folded after his WIFE disappeared with the assets. More to the point, a church atttended by
a high school friend divided because the pastor was caught cheating on his wife. He cut a deal, and walked away with half the congregation. within a year, he had left town and both churches closed. No way under heaven to prove any of this ever happened.
Guess you missed this one.
It is commonly believed that clergy sexual abuse is an exclusively Catholic problem that does not happen in other churches. In a 1983 doctoral thesis by Richard Blackmon, 12% of the 300 Protestant clergy surveyed admitted to sexual intercourse with a parishioner and 38% admitted to other sexualized contact with a parishioner.1 In separate denominational surveys, 48% of United Church of Christ female ministers and 77% of United Methodist female ministers reported having been sexually harassed in church.2 Although the actual extent of the problem is unknown, the significance of clergy sexual abuse is acknowledged by the denominational leaders of all Christian churches.3
And where's your outrage at the US Department of Education for allowing sexual predators to teach in our public schools. According to a fairly recent report, sex abuse among educators is 100 times greater than in the Catholic Church. Perhaps I missed your threads on those news stories.