Black Collar Crime

The Catholic sex abuse scandal has been covered by Freethought Today since at least the late 1980's. Long before it was taken seriously by mainstream media outlets. Today, there are victim's organizations tracking these cases and we know that the conspiracy to cover it up goes right to the top of the Catholic hierarchy. It's now come to light that some of the pedofiles are nuns.

Given the male-dominated nature of the Roman Catholic church, it will be interesting to see how they handle the growing number of cases of pedophile nuns.

The website of Bishop Accountability will help you identify abusive priests in your area, track them where ever they are assigned and provides access to many legal documents on the matter. SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) tells you 17 ways you can help protect children from abuse.

The abuse problem is not strictly a Catholic problem either. It occurs quite often among Baptist ministers, Evangelical preachers and Mormons as well. Findings from national surveys by Christian Ministry Resources (CMR), a tax and legal-advice publisher serving more than 75,000 congregations and 1,000 denominational agencies nationwide, suggest that over the past decade, the pace of child-abuse allegations against American churches has averaged 70 a week. The 70 allegations-per-week figure actually could be higher, because underreporting is common.

The CMR findings also reveal:

Most church child-sexual-abuse cases involve a single victim.
Law suits or out-of-court settlements were a result in 21 percent of the allegations reported in the 2000 survey.
Volunteers are more likely than clergy or paid staff to be abusers. Perhaps more startling, children at churches are accused of sexual abuse as often as are clergy and staff. In 1999, for example, 42 percent of alleged child abusers were volunteers – about 25 percent were paid staff members (including clergy) and 25 percent were other children.

James Cobble, executive director of CMR, who oversees the survey, says the data show that child sex-abuse happens broadly across all denominations. Churches have been active since the early 1990s in addressing the problem, Cobble reports. More than 100,000 copies of a book he co-authored, "Reducing the risk of Child Sexual Abuse in Your Church" were sold.

Hugh White, vice president of marketing for Brotherhood Mutual Insurance, in Ft. Wayne, Ind., suggests that the amount of abuse reported in the CMR 2001 data is reasonable though "at the higher end" of the scale. Mr. White's company insures 30,000 churches – about 0.2 percent to 0.3 percent of which annually report an "incident" of child sexual abuse. But he says that his churches are more highly educated on child abuse prevention procedures than most, which may account for a lower rate of reported abuse than the CMR surveys.