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Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has a long running series, “Teach women not to rape!” chronicling women using their positions as teachers to exploit their students. He notes:
Sexual predators will always be with us, and will always seek out the positions that enable their predatory behaviors. The organization can not be held responsible for the threat, nor the crime- Until and unless they cover up, ignore, deny, or otherwise enable that abuse. At that point, they become the abuser as much as the perpetrator.
The problem we are seeing is that for so many years, for so many justifications, predatory behavior is being enabled and covered up. To me, that is as bad as the abuse itself. The abuser is sick. Evil, and sick. But the enabler is not sick, just evil. Selfish, unfeeling, and evil.
I don’t blame Catholicism, or Christianity, or G-d for the evil. I blame the enablers in positions of high power who are more concerned with saving face than saving victims. They are the ones who are destroying the faith, far more than the abusers themselves.
A thoughtful piece. I’d add that Jewish institutions, both Orthodox and liberal, are also experiencing crises of confidence as sexual exploitation by leaders is being exposed every day.
The one consideration I think you overlook is the absence of checks and balances in religious institutions. Businesses are ultimately checked by the market. US government is checked by competing branches. What makes religious structures unique is that we no longer have, as in the Bible, priests vs. prophets (or rabbis). Religious authorities claim hierarchical authority.
This would seem to be an even stronger criticism of the Catholic Church. As I understand it, such checks and balances are incompatible with Catholics’ understanding that the Church hierarchy itself is divinely ordained.
Yes, we are dealing with people and their flaws. But people operate within organizational structures, both formal and informal, and those structures incentivize certain behavior. Change the environment and you can channel people’s better instincts, or their worse ones. Abuse of power isn’t just an individual failing.
Yes, these were things I was trying to get at. Good points all.
This can show up in any institution, regardless of whether the victims and abusers are even really part of it. Who expected to see a child sex scandal show up in the Penn State football program? The common thread seems to be putting the good of the institution ahead of the good of individuals, whether they are congregants, students or simply bystanders.
It’s much like the failures of socialism, but on a smaller scale. Once you’re okay with trampling individuals, individuals get trampled.
Bravo, Skip! Thanks for the thoughtful and balanced nature of this piece…
Where ever there are children, pedophiles will gravitate to positions nearby. From what I have read, Catholic priests have the same rate of pedophilia as the general population. Be on the lookout for your children. Don’t trust easily.
@manny, we need to stop using the term “pedophilia”; we’re not dealing with infants/toddlers here. Child sexual abuse covers more of the spectrum – and is more descriptive of the pre-teens/teens/young adults – most often under discussion.
There are periodic scandals of individual public school teachers, and the unions are powerful, but I doubt there’s going to be one specific, titanic scandal over it, because there’s no central national leadership, and (at least in my own experience) public school teachers don’t get as close to the kids, literally and figuratively. The role is different. The public schools never set themselves up as moral guides; parochial schools did.
Most religious groups are still run mostly by men. Most public school staffs are female-dominated. The issues are different.
Wonderful post.
Not just public grade schools. An investigaion of big universities would also be in order.
There will always be individuals that can resist anything but temptation. No sin is committed in a vacuum. Having worked a vice car, and prostitution sweeps the vast majority of the arrests were of married men. Remember this; The position is ridiculous, and the pleasure is transitory.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us sinners.
Son of Spengler
A thoughtful piece. I’d add that Jewish institutions, both Orthodox and liberal, are also experiencing crises of confidence as sexual exploitation by leaders is being exposed every day.
The one consideration I think you overlook is the absence of checks and balances in religious institutions. Businesses are ultimately checked by the market. US government is checked by competing branches. What makes religious structures unique is that we no longer have, as in the Bible, priests vs. prophets (or rabbis). Religious authorities claim hierarchical authority.
This would seem to be an even stronger criticism of the Catholic Church. As I understand it, such checks and balances are incompatible with Catholics’ understanding that the Church hierarchy itself is divinely ordained.
Yes, we are dealing with people and their flaws. But people operate within organizational structures, both formal and informal, and those structures incentivize certain behavior. Change the environment and you can channel people’s better instincts, or their worse ones. Abuse of power isn’t just an individual failing.
That should be an advantage in some congregational Protestant congregations that have should have checks and balances between a voting congregation, boards, and clergy, but often responsibility is abdicated, so the advantage is lost.
A break will not be allowed to happen in the public school system. Too many Left / government forces will not allow it to happen. The public schools are their trust.
The break had / has to happen with the religious institutions. Too many Left / government forces want it to happen so these institutions are diminished/ destroyed. It is sad that the institutions nurtured the seeds of their destruction with the hypocrisy they protected. They did it too themselves
I wonder.
I understand that it’s dicey to ever assert that any feature of modern society in particular might contribute to the increased occurrence of sexual abuse and certainly the monsters who commit these acts are entirely responsible for their own decisions.
But I do think that for men there are basically two romantic types: Some men want to be married to their best friend, others are looking for a damsel in distress. The former group are the best suited to the modern dating world. Men and women have more similar experiences of life than ever before, providing ample opportunity for shared interests and friendship within marriage. For the second group things are tough. Today’s society produces few fair maidens and more self-reliant working women, many of whom know at least as many dirty jokes as their men.
That vast majority of men in the second category find virtuous and productive ways to over come this difficulty, either looking for traditional femininity where it can be found, making peace with modern women or even dedicating themselves to the quality of purity which they admire by pursing a celibate life in the church.
Unfortunately it may be that for a small fraction of these men, and an all too large fraction of those who choose the clerical option, their attraction to innocence may, through temptation or defects of character, become perverted into something evil, a disordered attraction for the, ever younger, portion of society who still posses that quality.
Those aren’t mutually exclusive categories.
Hey, just like the Baptists!
Yes, that seems right.
But don’t they preach a lot about diversity, inclusion, tolerance, not doing drugs, having sex with condoms, and saving the environment?
Yeah, that seems right. But First Baptist Church has two or three men who might be a problem if they’re predators. The local high school might be 70% staffed by women and have a female Principle, but there will still be upwards of ten men.
Actually, no, or far less than you’d think reading Breitbart or listening to Hannity. The right-and-wrong stuff they teach in public school is vague and much of it is not different from what I learned in public and Catholic schools fifty, sixty years ago. We called diversity “don’t be racially prejudiced”. Same with tolerance. Not doing drugs wasn’t part of the curriculum in 1957-69, but I wouldn’t call that intrusive government moralism.
The only time either of my kids ever ran into this kind of thing was before entering college; UCLA requires enrollees to take a two hour online training session. It’s dull and pedantic, but it’s largely aimed at foreign students, of which UCLA has many, along the lines of “Back home, maybe killing women and homosexuals is A-OK, but it’s not here”. A number of our guests from the Middle East and Asia need to know this.
True, but they do represent opposite poles. Friendship is based on familiarity, sameness and a certain sense of equality. It’s hard to idealize your friends. And while friends can and should sacrifice for each other, if the sacrifices start to run exclusively in one direction, the relationship starts to look more like an unhealthy dependance than genuine friendship. Romantic relationships can rest on a similar basis but can successfully take others forms as well.
Fair enough.
I’d only add that the vagueness may be a bigger problem than the left-wing preachiness.
Nice comment!
Augustine follows Cicero in his definition of friendship–it’s a mental and spiritual thing consisting of agreement on all things. Mrs. Augustine is a much better friend to me (either than she might have been or than just about anyone else could be) because we agree on nearly everything. If she should be the damsel in distress or the independent woman, that wouldn’t change the friendship all that much.
Yes. And every organization, church, school, business, social club etc are full of these humans. Balancing trust in such communities with the understanding that any human in any fellowship can be untrustworthy and abusive is a hard balance. You don’t want to be too trusting and you don’t want to be so jaded that you deprive yourself of fulfilling communion with your fellow humans. Like Goldilocks, I try to balance these to “just right”. And I’ve been wrong before, in both directions.
Agree. Unfortunately there is no one word for teen abuse. Some rationalize it and claim it should be legal. Not me.
Not sure that is true. I don’t have data but perusing the newspapers I come across quite a bit of public school child abuse. And the public schools do a great job of keeping it under the radar when it is found out.
Pederasty.
There may never be such a scandal. Indeed I hope I am deeply wrong about that speculation. But some school systems are better than others, and some are especially notorious for their impenetrability, and I’m not sure I’d be that surprised to find that major issues come to light in one or another. But I was trying to think of something akin to the universality of religious institutions, and this post actually stemmed from a conversation I had offline with someone who knows quite a bit about some pretty serious allegations that have been covered up in one system.
Precisely so, Sir Percy…and the length of time that word has been with us is a reminder that there is nothing new under the sun, yes?
Thanks. I guess it’s not commonly used.
Hopefully, it doesn’t come up as often as it has been.
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/02/evangelical-apocalypse?fbclid=IwAR1ckNv5XtA5dK8Y5c_OJBB9MtGp6jhMbLbqAMvqJYqqyTSv1i3_D-IvuA8
In one church I used to attend, this was exactly what I saw: “The problem isn’t that they offer the mercy of Christ to persons caught in sinful patterns, but the idea that extending such forgiveness means the person should be allowed to remain in a position of authority.” Multiple people were caught in infidelities, and actual sexual abuse of minors, but not only allowed to remain in positions of authority in the church, but bolstered in those position by public declarations before the congregation that calls for removing such people were themselves sinful, and demonstrating a lack of forgiveness.