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.)