Recent in-depth US government studies on the maltreatment of children through sexual and other forms of abuse make no direct reference to priests or the Catholic Church as problematic. They do, however, highlight serious flaws in schools nationwide both in terms of the incidence of sexual misconduct and ingrained practices of cover-up and transferring perpetrators to other schools. 

The most recent “Child Maltreatment” report compiled by the Department of Health and Human Services indentified 60,253 different perpetrators of sexual abuse of minors in the U.S. during 2008. Statistics from all 50 states show 56% were parents or other relatives and 8.8% were a parent’s unmarried partner. The category “other professionals”, which includes “clergy, sports coach, camp counselor, etc.”, accounts for 349 perpetrators (0.6%). This group, being relatively tiny, is given no further attention. (For further perspective, an average of 18 Catholic priests a year were accused of paedofilia between 1950 and 2002, according to a study by John Jay College of Criminal Justice commissioned by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. That would put priests’ portion of the US paedofile ranks at less than 0.03%.) 

The Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS–4) Report, which the Department of Health and Human Services submitted to Congress this year, notes that only about a fifth of the child maltreatment cases recognized at schools were reported to civil authorities and investigated. A full 20% of the “school sentinels” who contributed to the study indicated that their schools, as a matter of policy, do not even permit them to report to child protection services. The authors lament that desipite similar findings of analogous studies in 1980, 1986, 1988 and 1993, no real progress has been made in gettings schools to stop protecting perpetrators and start protecting victims. 

This echoes a 2004 Department of Education report on “Educator Sexual Misconduct”, which estimated that 9.6 % of pupils are targets of sexual misconduct by teachers or other school staff sometime during their school career: 

Few students, families, or school districts report incidents to the police or other law enforcement agencies. When criminal justice officials are alerted, it is almost always because parents have made the contact. […]As one consequence, abusers are subject only to informal personnel actions within the relative privacy of school employee records. 

The Department of Education report cites a 1994 investigation which identified 225 teachers in New York who had admitted to sexually abusing a student: 

None of the abusers was reported to authorities and only 1 percent lost their license to teach. […] 15 percent were terminated or, if not tenured, they were not rehired; and 20 percent received a formal reprimand or suspension. Another 25 percent received no consequence or were reprimanded informally and off-the-record. Nearly 39 percent chose to leave the district, most with positive recommendations or even retirement packages intact. Of those who left, superintendents reported that 16 percent were teaching in other schools and that they had no idea what the other 84 percent were doing. 

In reaction, a special commission in New York City recommended 35 specific policy changes to reduce educator sexual misconduct, including requiring schools to report and to do background checks before hiring teachers. But as of 2004, these had not been implemented, the Department of Education report noted. 

I wonder when we will see headlines about the abuse cases that top US government officials have known about for decades but kept quiet, and how many will resign for their inaction on the issue…  

The Department of Education report rightly pointed out that: 

The overwhelming majority of America’s educators are true professionals doing what might be called the “essential” work of democracy. The vast majority of schools in America are safe places. Nevertheless, we must be willing to confront the issues that are explored in this study. 

I wonder when similar comments regarding the clean-up that is well underway in the Catholic Church will be taken at face-value.