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Well, good on you, I guess. The Lowe report (and Lord Pearson’s initial bluster) come out looking miserably untrustworthy.
I can’t say I expected much from a substack titled “heretical insights,” but I was pleasantly surprised.
As an aside: I don’t think the specific numbers matter. The Catholic scandals took off because they involved positions of trust. The numbers were smaller but closer to home. A failure of utilitarianism, to be sure.
See, I think it's more to do with 1. hypocrisy ("these people claim to be arbiters of morality but look at how they actually behave") and 2. popular anti-Christian sentiment.
People who love to complain about the clerical abuse scandal never seem interested in talking about, e.g., the higher prevalence of such abuse in public schools, despite it being another example of abuse of positions of trust. That's just not what's interesting.
With the Church, the main thing horrifying people was not the crimes (though there was likely a higher rate of sex offenses than for the general population), but the cover-up.
If the RCC had dealt with sex offenders by sending them to some monastery on some desolate island with no kids around for 200 nautical miles, then that would have pissed off people a lot less.
Instead, the main goal was generally to keep the reputation of the church intact. If people complained, perps were given new parishes where they could continue to victimize minors.
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The Catholic scandals took off in places that did not have popular anti-Christian sentiment. It was actually the proximal cause of anti-Christian sentiment in Ireland, starting when Ireland was still religious(I would argue that Irish collapse in religiosity was overdetermined, but it was still the proximal cause).
The visceral horror of it was that it was happening to kids from good families, who were doing nothing wrong. The public doesn't care very much about homeless prostitutes, never has, never will. Trying to draw attention to their plight(and it is a plight, this is not a fun life), just makes people want to get rid of them. On the other hand the abuse victims came from families that did everything right and were betrayed.
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And also because clerical abuse was so homosexual. Of course for Catholicism this goes way back; some monasteries wouldn't accept young, bare-chinned men as their twinkiness was too irresistible for some of the older monks. Laypeople unfortunately were never taught just how gay their spiritual forebears were.
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I'd also add that there's an element of identity. There's a big difference in street pimps taking advantage of lost poor juvenile delinquents, often with absent or bad parents, vs "Good Kids" whose parents are pious enough to get them to church and make them altar boys. The horror of the latter is significantly larger publicly, even if people won't acknowledge it.
Similar to how school shootings are significantly more horrifying than gang related shootings, even if the gang related shootings kill more kids.
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Why untrustworthy? I thought the entire reason the figure was controversial, was that they were open about arriving at the number through a naive extrapolation.
Unless I’m misreading this, the substack author had to reconstruct a method, since Pearson never explained his numbers publicly.
He was quoted in the report, which again didn’t lay out its calculation.
What do you mean?
This is the verbatim quote of the report quoting Pearson. How do you make it clearer that they took the Rotheram, Telford, and Oxford numbers and extrapolated them nationwide?
EDIT: I can concede they shouldn't use such a strong / high-certainty language in the executive summary:
But I'm not seeing where the detective work to reconstruct the method, and therefore the untrustworthiness, is supposed to come in.
Okay, we’ve been looking at the same quote. I agree that there was no ambiguity about him doing an extrapolation. I think the article was clear that Pearson took the most extreme assumption whenever possible. Not including any of those assumptions means that his original statement was pretty untrustworthy.
Nitpick: I don't think extrapolating from 3 known points is the most extreme assumption possible - that should be reserved for assuming that some / most other places had an even higher rate of abuse than Rotheram.
Well, as long as we're talking about the report, I'd say it criticizeable, but not untrustworthy. They didn't hide the method 5 links deep from an obscure note in the references. The quote is in the second hit when you CTRL+F for "250".
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And the literal police facilitating rape isn’t a failure of trust?
Oh, it totally is. But one that’s less personal.
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