A blog of a blog of a blog said...

[catsittingstill]

Scheherezade has been having intermittent fading of her ability to pick up the WiFi. When she's good, she's good in the computer room; when she's not so good, I have to carrry her into the dining room and set her on the table, about ten feet from the WiFi modem. Carrying her around is a bit of a pain in the neck, and I needed her in the dining room for a different project anyway, so she has been sitting on the dining room table for a few days, and I've been checking my usual blogs more frequently because every time I wander by, I see her sitting there.

So that means I've been branching out a little farther than I usually do, and I ran across this: What about the girls?

Sullivan seems to be basically reposting something a reader sent him. The synopsis is roughly that in the priestly abuse cases that have been dogging the Catholic Church recently, most of the victims so far seem to have been male. The part that got my attention is this:

Maybe that's a reporting issue - what the statisticians would call self-selection among the cohort. I don't have any basis for really knowing. But it does seem unusual to me that female victims of clergy rape would be less inclined to report the abuse than the boys would.

I don't see anything unusual about that at all. 

In a culture where women are still socialized to believe that rape is their fault--or is only not their fault if they adhered perfectly to the double standard of sexual behavior, which is nearly impossible--of course girls are more likely to 1) believe it was their fault and they don't deserve justice, or 2) understand that they have been wronged but believe exposing the crime will only make the rest of their social circle despise them.  

Add into that the fact that a lot of people think gay sex is evil and straight sex is normal and of course victims of gay rape might be more likely to report it. 

So I recommend against assuming that the sex ratio of victims coming forward is the same as the sex ratio of the youngsters who were abused.

Comments

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

From Sullivan's article:

Maybe it's because the girls were generally not placed in positions where they were likely to come into frequent contact with priests in isolated settings, and vice-versa.

Well, duh -- altar boys are generally, well, male.

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

This. Catholic schools and other environments still tend to be more segregated by gender, leading to limited opportunities. They also tend to chaperone the girls more than the boys.

Abuse of Catholic girls does exist, one example being the infamous Magdalene Laundries of Ireland. That abuse was mostly physical and emotional, not sexual, and those girls who were sexually abused generally suffered that abuse before their arrival at the Laundries (sometimes impregnated and then blamed and sent there as punishment for it. Ick, Ick, Ick.)

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Scheherezade has been having intermittent fading of her ability to pick up the WiFi. When she's good, she can tell her tales without the connection, but some nights--well, a thousand and one nights is nearly three years. Try composing a new story, cliffhanger and all every night for thirty months, knowing that if you falter, that if your story fails to engage, your head will be uncermoniously lopped off, and none of your friends and family back in the future will have a clue to what happened.

Oh, yes, she was a scholar, she had learned the ancient form of Arabic, had reproduced the dress, and had studied the sites so well that the chronomotron did not deposit her in a wall, ten feet underground, or so high in the air that she would suffer a fatal fall (that being said, later time travellers without the same confidence in their archaology simply donned a parachute and chose to be dropped a thousand feet above the ground in the dark of night).

But it was her bearing that made her so out of place--the lack of a hunch in her back, a walk of confidence that no simple farmer's wife would dare, and that dead giveaway of outsiderhood--she gazed straight into the eyes of any man or woman she met. Indeed, her disguise was too good--she would not be forgiven her odd ways as an obvious foreigner. And so she had been condemned to death.

But she did have one assett. Her personal implant could feed her terrabytes of date she kept stored on what a less ancient incarnation of civilization would call a combination web server (well, whole internet by early 21st century standards), wifi router, and most importantly, chronomotron beacon, burried in the clay of a simple pottery lamp.

And so, the condemned prisoner, she needed that device desperately; for all that her strange ways enraged her captors, her strange tales had enchanted them. Her would be executioner, a low, brutish man was enraptured by the scripts of mindless situation comedies of a century ago, which she artfully translated and embellished. Soo he brought his fellow brutes to hear the tales, then a more refined class of ancient soldier, officer, and ultimately, royalty. For each, she searched for finer and more exotic tales, as her walk from her cell to the palace took her past the unseen room where her lamp was stored.

If only she could lay her hands on that lamp, its signal sent to the future would bring rescue. What sort of tale could she tell that would bring her captors to surrender that lamp? This was the question that engaged Scheherezade for 999 nights. But now the answer came to her...

Uh, sorry, I guess that's not where you were going with your post. Nevermind.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Wow, that is really cool :-)

No, it's not where I was going with my post, but maybe it should have been.

cases with boys trigger larger financial penalties

[patternbuilder.livejournal.com]

There was a study done with cases in the States a few years ago that showed the media was focusing on abused boys, since the legal cases for those had much higher financial penalties for the abuser, than when the victim was a girl.

The blame the girl victim mentality was definitely in play for those cases.
Ratios were close to 50/50 IIRC.

I did see a graph of types of priests entering the priesthood that purported to show that as society liberalized in the 60's, the men entering the priesthood became more and more pedophiles / sexually repressed. It seemed the author was trying to show that straight men were no longer joining the church in any numbers.

Seemed a bit fishy to me.

However, I did hear a friend of a friend type report (she was in Seminary) suggesting that showtunes were very popular with 30 - 50% of priests in the catholic seminary. No idea of the truth on that one.

I do find the priest shortage to be another way that the Catholic Church is a slow motion train wreck. Their prohibition against marriage for priests really limits the numbers, as does their insistence on male priests only.

My step sister married a Catholic from France, and they had to wait 6 months for the parish priest to come around on circuit to get her through the training needed to convert. England is also reporting that church attendence is so low, that in places Anglican preachers and Catholic priests are sharing church duties in order to better cover their territories. Who would have thought it?

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

<croak>The Catholic priesthood is, so far as I can tell, disproportionately gay. The Church has been pressuring gay men who are unsuited to celibacy into the priesthood for a very long time.</croak>