Yearning for a Productive Response to Child Sexual Abuse

Given the news recently, I feel compelled as a Catholic and a parent to address the topic of child sexual abuse.  I feel like we as a society do not have a coherent, intelligent response to this issue.  In the past few years, we have been greeted with tales of abuse in USA gymnastics, USA swimming, around Penn State football, the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, and the public schools.  Yet each one of these incidents has prompted a very different reaction.

In the case of USA gymnastics and swimming, we responded with indifference, most likely because most of us aren’t parents are aspiring Olympic hopefuls.  In the case of the Boy Scouts, we are apparently responding by trying to pressure them into adding homosexual boys and scout leaders into the mix.  How adding sexually confused youth and adults will help matters, I don’t know.  One positive step was the release of their files and the insight that there is no single, obvious marker for abusers.  They can be straight, gay, married, unmarried, old, young, etc.  

Penn State was publicly flogged, Jerry Sandusky tarred, feathered, and quickly ushered off to jail.  We didn’t really spend too much time trying to understand him, his history or his motivations.  We instead preferred to hold a large institution which has 40,000+ students, faculty, and staff on campus at any one time responsible for events that clearly only a handful of people had any knowledge of.  

In the case of the Catholic Church, we are heading into a third decade of public flogging.  We have not endeavored to understand the root causes and also ignored the great progress the Church has made over the past 20 years.  While it was the first large organization to face this scandal, it certainly was not the last. 

To be clear, the latest revelations, from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles are deeply troubling.  What they reveal is a clear pattern of a hierarchy at best attempting to deal awkwardly with the problem (therapy for abusers) and at worst criminally conspiring to cover it up.  It is disgusting because it is Bishops and Priests, men of God, who are serving not God, not their flock, but the false god of public relations first.  There is no excuse for it and the fact that Vatican rules are now clear on what is to be done is of little consolation.  

But let’s look at the problem overall because as I stated up front, every one of these cases has prompted a different, and I believe unsatisfying reaction.  Sure, we all felt good making Penn State jokes and cursing Joe Paterno for a few weeks, but why is that?  It was clearly not a measured reaction to the scandal even for a society that has deemed you cannot reaction enough to child sexual abuse.  

I believe it was about our collective guilt as a nation.  The reality is we have aborted 55 million children since Roe v. Wade.  We have thrown millions of other children to the wolves as we have embraced divorce, single parent households, and the adoption of children by gays and lesbians.  Those that make it out of these family structures, are then greeted by a public school system and a culture that will feed them a non-stop series of lies.  You can have sex without consequences, STDs are the only consequence of sex, casual sex is fine, the list is endless.  The bottom line is our current society, our nation, devours children.  If we believe that children are the future, our future looks rather bleak.

So in response to all of this, when we get the chance to express our outrage over how our children are being treated in a socially acceptable way we pounce on it.  Too few of us feel comfortable speaking out about abortion, about divorce, the hyper-sexualization of our culture, or any of the things destroying millions of children each day.  But we can curse Jerry Sandusky and feel like we have done something.

And that is just my point, if the 20 year flogging of the Catholic Church teaches us nothing else, it should teach us that publicly flogging an organization does very little.  The Catholic Church is not a factory for child molesters any more than the public schools are.  But if we believe that people are not born to grow up molesting children, then we need to understand how we are making such predators.  It was easy to demonize Jerry Sandusky as a monster, but he wasn’t born a monster.  Much like the rest of us, he was someone’s child at one point, innocent and pure.  The question is what happened?

Only by identifying the triggers for producing child molesters can we understand the consequences of our behavior as a society and get to the root of this tragedy.  There are a couple possible theories.  Many abusers were themselves sexually abused.  So we need to understand, wherever this abuse occurs, we must stop it to break the cycle and properly treat the victims.

But while there are no obvious demographic markers, I believe there are behavioral markers.  One such marker would be child pornography.  Most child sexual abusers tend to possess child pornography.  In fact, the link is accepted as being so strong that a Bishop in Missouri was recently charged with not reporting an abuser for knowing only that the Priest in question had child pornography on his computer.

Here is the thing, if we were just looking for the 13 year-olds who instead of picking up a Playboy picked up something much more sinister, then stopping this problem would be easy.  But the reality is everybody enters pornography on garden variety heterosexual pornography.  Only for some, does the quest for a higher high lead them seeking darker and darker material, until they have gone too far.  

One of the key findings of the John Jay report, the study commissioned by the Catholic Church on their scandal called by some professionals the most comprehensive study of child sexual abuse ever, was that most Priests involved in the abuse were ordained before 1960.  In other words, they made a decision to live a celibate life in a pre-Playboy, pre-pornographic world.  They were then confronted with the sexual revolution, some caved.  This is not about excusing their behavior, but understanding it with the goal of prevention.

But this is going to be a tough conversation.  Are we moving towards curbing access to pornography in our culture?  Quite the opposite.   Over the past 25 years, we have moved from the adult bookstore in the shady part of town to pornography piped into every hotel room, every household with cable TV, and available free on the internet at the public library (most libraries do not filter out porn because they consider that censorship).  We are inundating people with this poison, which means we could be producing a new wave of child sexual abusers, larger than any before.

The crux of this debate will be, are we willing to restrict adult access to pornography so that we can put children first?  Not saying eliminate it (it’s been around since the dawn of man), but recognize that not everyone can handle it and put some kind of barriers up to consumption.  Because if we are not, then we as a society are saying, that just as we have decided with abortion and divorce, we will once again orientate our society around what we adults want, not what our children need.  The only silver lining there is that world history has shown that societies not geared towards bearing fruit quickly die out, that may be ultimately in our children’s best interest if we keep going down this dark path.