Any institution that has allowed children to be harmed by predators deserves to be taken to task for it. No institution should get a pass. And no profession should get a pass. Not preachers, not priests — not even teachers.
Especially not teachers. And yet …
Consider the statistics: In accordance with a requirement of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, in 2002 the Department of Education carried out a study of sexual abuse in the school system.
Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft looked into the problem, and the first thing that came to her mind when Education Week reported on the study were the daily headlines about the Catholic Church.
“[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem?” she said. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”
So, in order to better protect children, did media outlets start hounding the worse menace of the school systems, with headlines about a “Nationwide Teacher Molestation Cover-up” and by asking “Are Ed Schools Producing Pedophiles?”
No, they didn’t. That treatment was reserved for the Catholic Church, while the greater problem in the schools was ignored altogether.
As the National Catholic Register’s reporter Wayne Laugesen points out, the federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state’s entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000.
Yet, during the first half of 2002, the 61 largest newspapers in California ran nearly 2,000 stories about sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, mostly concerning past allegations. During the same period, those newspapers ran four stories about the federal government’s discovery of the much larger — and ongoing — abuse scandal in public schools....
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THE CATHOLIC KNIGHT: A few opinion columnists are starting to see the light on this one, and their big media keepers are finally letting them speak freely on the subject. Catholic pundits have been warning about this anti-Catholic media bias for years, but their warnings have fallen on deaf ears, until now. The sex-abuse cover-up scandal in the public schools has just gotten too big. It's become the "elephant in the living room" that nobody wants to talk about, but it can no longer be ignored.
As I pointed out in a previous story, the problem in the Catholic Church was not pedophilia, but rather homosexual abuse of teenagers. This fact was also neglected by the mainstream media. Likewise, when we take into consideration the non-pedophilia cases of sex-abuse in the public schools the number of cases rises exponentially. As I've said on many occasions. The Catholic sex-abuse scandal of 2003 was not reflective of a Church problem, but rather a cultural problem. Western culture is decadent and corrupted by sexual deviancy. Sexual predators naturally gravitate toward positions that put them in close contact with their prey, and give them some level of authority over them. Naturally, the position of a priest would be desirable to a sexual predator, but the position of public school teacher would be far more accessible.
