The John Jay College of Criminal Justice report on the priest abuse scandal.

Here are the news reports from the NY Times and Washington Post, each with a slightly differnet slant on the study. Worth hitting the links and reading in full.

The NYT -

A five-year study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to provide a definitive answer to what caused the church’s sexual abuse crisis has concluded that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were to blame.

Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s.

Known occurrences of sexual abuse of minors by priests rose sharply during those decades, the report found, and the problem grew worse when the church’s hierarchy responded by showing more care for the perpetrators than the victims.

******

... the John Jay report says that when it comes to analyzing the incidence and causes of sexual abuse, “No organization has undertaken a study of itself in the manner of the Catholic Church.”

Because there are no comparable studies conducted by other institutions, religious or secular, the report says, “It is impossible to accurately compare the rate of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church to rates of abuse in other organizations.”

And WaPo -

The largest study ever done on youth sexual abuse by Catholic clergy concludes that the scandal that became public in 2002 was a temporary problem caused by poorly trained seminarians, bishops who focused too little on victims and a permissive culture in the 1960s and 1970s that saw an increase in divorce, marijuana experimentation and robbery.

It has been closely watched by experts, historians and advocates for victims and accused priests. This is because John Jay was given unprecedented access by the church — which paid for about half the study — to priests’ personnel files and psychosexual testing, as well as seminary records. The subject of clergy sex abuse ignites multiple culture war flames, with various sides blaming homosexuality, celibacy, church secrecy and societal turmoil.

Supporters and critics of the church were already speaking out about the study, whose general contours researchers have publicly described over the years.

“Who else has studied child sex abuse at this level? No other organization has anything similar. If we’re really serious about keeping kids safe, other organizations have to follow suit: the public schools, the Boy Scouts, sporting organizations,” said Tom Plante, a psychologist who works with Catholic clergy and consulted the bishops for this study.

“This report misses the boat. What deserves the most scrutiny are not child sex crimes but continued clergy cover-ups of child sex crimes,” the advocacy group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said Tuesday in a statement.