Please show me one shred of objective evidence that shows "most" people caught child molesting never went through the criminal justice system. I would very much like to see this and how that number is quantified. Who counted them and how did they do so?
Why don’t you go do your own research, since you are making these off-the-wall charges.
The problem is that many of these people DID go through the criminal justice system - which gave them a slap on the wrist.
I knew an older Spanish priest once who told me that if anybody had done anything like this prior to the 1960s, he would have spent most of the rest of his life in a monastic jail, and if he had gotten out before he died, he would never have considered doing anything like this again. The problem was that the Church handed over its justice system to the civil authorities.
The US may have been more lax than Spain, but the problem was that after Vatican II, the Church adopted the secular justice program of whatever State it was in. Once that changed and the Church stopped disciplining its own (which was met with cries of joy by the New York Times), the entire structure collapsed.
“Please show me one shred of objective evidence that shows ‘most’ people caught child molesting...”
One difficulty here is with the word “caught.” I'm not sure that “caught” is an on/off switch type of word in this matter. There are degrees of “caught,” or rather, knowledge by third parties, and I suspect that by playing on the shading of meaning, on the ambiguous nature of things, etc., many abusers avoided being prosecuted.
If, by “caught,” you mean “someone has made a formal complaint to law enforcement authorities, and law enforcement authorities found the accusation credible,” then I suspect that my original statement is defeated almost tautologically.
But, if by “caught,” you mean that some party other than the offender and the victim are aware of the accusation of crime, then I think that my assertion is completely true, but is still impossible to prove in the way that you request.
In the past, there were folks strongly suspected of abuse, but because circumstances were ambiguous, or victims reluctant to come forward, or where organizations intentionally covered up, or organizations handled the matters privately, or private settlements were arranged, or accusers weren't believed because there was no physical evidence, abusers weren't prosecuted. Yet, in some way, shape or form, they were caught. And many of the perpetrators were forced to move on. By their nature, these cases would be difficult to quantify. Yet, as naive as I was in my youth, even I knew of a few cases like this.
The now-revealed documents of many Catholic dioceses show that there were several thousand abusers over the course of 50 years whose cases fell into one or more categories. Even among those where there was clear evidence of abuse, most of these cases were not prosecuted, even though many of the abusers received treatment.
Do you think that these same sorts of cases didn't play out through other American institutions? I've seen research that suggests that 12% of public school children are sexually abused by public school personnel. Do you think that nearly all these cases are completely unreported and that some signifcant number of them were not traditionally dealt with as mentioned above? I certainly don't see hundreds of thousands of public school teachers in prison.
I've seen studies that suggest that 8% of adult males engage in sexual abuse of underage minors. That's literally nearly 10 million people. Are you saying that nearly all of these cases are completely and totally unreported and nearly none dealt with as laid out above?
How many hundreds of public school teachers did you prosecute? Oh, you didn't prosecute hundreds of public school teachers? Then you likely missed the bulk of abusers in the public schools.
I know that St. Luke's in suburban Maryland openly treated hundreds of Catholic priests for child sex abuse from the early 1980s into the mid-2000s, and that in the early years, these men were not usually prosecuted. They were treated and often re-assigned to limited ministry (I remember that Cardinal Hickey, then-Archbishop of Washington, assigned one of these priests to be the chaplain at a maximum security prison in southern Virginia, but that's as far as that man got to being sent to jail), as laicization was not yet the norm for abusers in the mid-1980s.
This institute openly practiced therapy for child sex abusers, and actually worked with authorities to treat those who actually had been prosecuted. Thus, the authorities knew that St. Luke's was a place that treated abuser priests because they actually worked with St. Luke's on cases where there was criminal prosecution. Folks released on probation or parole often had to have on-going treatment at St. Luke's, and the civil authorities actually assigned much of the supervision and monitoring of these folks to St. Luke's. Nonetheless, when Ive reviewed the sex abuse records of the Archdiocese of Washington, prior to recent years, archdiocesan priests sent to such facilities often were not prosecuted.
Law enforcement in Maryland knew that there were abuser priests there because THEY'D SENT SOME OF THEM THERE THEMSELVES. Are you telling me that the Prince George's County, Maryland State's Attorney was unaware that there were other abuser priests there who were going unprosecuted?
Also, not being in the field, I guess you'd be surprised how many folks used to confess to these acts before the laws changed. That's why my professors were against mandatory reporting - because they saw a fair number of these folks, and by treating their confessions in confidence, they believed that they could do something to dissuade some of the perpetrators from further crimes, and if the laws were changed, the number of folks who would confess to these acts to their shrinks would decline.
Here's another piece of evidence. By definition, every girl under the age of consent who has become pregnant by someone more than a few years older than herself is technically a victim of child sex molestation. This population comprises literally in six figures.
Here's a clip from a wiki article on teen pregnancy:
“A review of California's 1990 vital statistics found that men older than high school age fathered 77 percent of all births to high school-aged girls (ages 16-18), and 51 percent of births to junior high school-aged girls (15 and younger). Men over age 25 fathered twice as many children of teenage mothers than boys under age 18, and men over age 20 fathered five times as many children of junior high school-aged girls as did junior high school-aged boys.”
A little back-of-the-envelope extrapolation suggests that just among the population of underaged females who become pregnant, there are many tens of thousands of adult men who have fathered these children. And yet, are not in jail for this crime. The hospital birth to a 15 year-old girl of her baby is significant evidence of child sex abuse. Are the district attorneys lining up to make these tens of thousands of cases?
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