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I had quite the throwback culture war experience this past weekend. While at a family gathering, my dad was cornered by an in-law and quizzed about my “agnosticism”.
He was asked if he had led me to this lack of faith, and was then informed that it’s the patriarch’s responsibility to “get his family into heaven” – a neat little double-duty insult of both himself and me.
I tend to be a very laid-back guy in meatspace, but found myself livid. I’ve been in this family for close to a decade, and the sheer cowardice and arrogance of this exchange was breathtaking. To circle around to one of my direct family members instead of having the cajones to challenge me directly was ridiculous (and in hindsight, what I should have really expected from these people).
We’ve been existing in what I thought was a reasonable detente. As a victorious participant in the Atheism culture war, I’ve been kinda-sorta prepared to have these skirmishes with my wife’s catholic family for a long time. The unspoken agreement was that I go to church for holidays, let you splash water on my children, and don’t bring up anyone’s hypocrisy/the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia/the inherent idiocy in believing in god.
In exchange, I get to stay balls deep in my excellent wife and should be left alone.
I’ll be the first to admit the excesses of Atheism’s victory laps and see how “live and let live” can slide down the slope into a children’s drag show. But this indirect exchange reminded me that when the culture war pendulum swings back, I should be prepared for the petty tyrants and fools on the religious right to reassert themselves. We’re already starting to see the tendrils of this, even if some of their forces have been replaced with rainbow-skinsuit churches across the US.
For Christian motteziens - No disrespect intended. I'm aware of the hypocrisy of my arrogance in this post, and it's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek
Hardly unique among organizations. Do you constantly feel yourself having to suppress your rage at the corruption and pedophilia in public schools?
I've actually wondered how public schools dodged the bullet of horrific pedo scandal that rightfully hit the Catholic church and the Boy Scouts. Based on my vague memories of reading stats, public schools are responsible for much more child molestation.
It's probably way less common on a per-capita basis. For whatever reason, males commit ~90% of child sexual abuse. The younger the students, the more overwhelmingly female the teachers. And unlike schools, The Catholic Church and Boy Scouts have structures where the highest ranking authority figure can create significant alone time with children. The Sandusky scandal was similar.
From what I can tell it's substantially more common. That said I don't find the uproar against the priests inappropriate--we should hold them to a higher standard.
I couldn't find the link for this claim:
It seems outrageous. 1:15 teachers sexually abuse kids? And only 20% are males? The a-priori likelihood is low because of the offender rate and composition of the institutions. Unless schools hire females with a 10x offending rate, AND churches (broadly) hire males with 10-100x lower offending rate (based on this averaged with this, accounting for this. Its a-priori statistically very unlikely for male dominated or 50/50 places, to have higher offending rates than 60/40+ males spaces. But its possible.
All that said, the offender rate comports well with a good article from a solid source. But definitions make everything wonky, conflating language with acts sometimes. So I don't really know with any confidence. Bayes makes me think sex abuse is always much lower the more female dominated a place is.
Now that you mention it that does seem very high. Based on my wife's accounts of male elementary school teachers though, I wouldn't be too surprised to hear that the men alone are far more likely to offend than the average man. They sound socially maladjusted. I don't think predators generally plan ahead and deliberately become schoolteachers in order to have easier access to vulnerable children, but I do think there are a lot of very weird people who think they get along much better with kids, pass the event horizon, and develop romantic/sexual feelings for children after treating them as peers for long enough.
Based on the source you provided it sounds like the outright majority of sexual abuse happens at school.
It does sound that way. And it might be that most sex abuse outside of family (most common iirc) happens in schools. However, my confidence on that proposition is proposition is quite low because of some bayesian reasoning. For example, the established prior is that men commit 80-90% child sex abuse. This is a high confidence, long standing datapoint. Because it's so heavily weighted towards males, any male dominated group should have dramatically more abuse. Like, my heart says the sources we have, but my math side says just default to maleness as a proxy.
Around the time of the Sandusky scandal I recall reading that some abusers spend years inserting themselves into professions which might have the ability to provide access, acting gregarious and helpful. Its all very frightening. The sources we have indicate waaaay to much abuse.
Sure, but schools are far, far larger than any other institution with even 10% as much access to children. I can't think of any profession easier to get into, more respected, and with easier access to children than teacher. Therapists probably have more access, but it's much harder to become a therapist, probably harder to dodge sexual abuse claims, and there are about 20 teachers for every therapist.
Generally all of the professions with access to children are dominated by women. So I totally get your reasoning that male-dominated professions should have more abuse, but in this case there's a strong, direct counterforce, which is that male-dominated professions also have less access to kids, almost in proportion to the extent to which they're male-dominated.
In the end I can think of some reasonable factors explaining away the gender split vs. frequency of abuse issue, and the stats pretty clearly indicate that schools are where the abuse happens, so that's what I'm inclined to believe. Totally get it if you disagree though.
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