EXPERTS ON love OFFENDERS HAVE NEWS FOR VATICAN Christian love crimes

Experts on love offenders have news for Vatican

Abusers' behavior does not stem from orientation, studies show

By Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea National Catholic Reporter December 9, 2005 issue

Both the John Jay College of Criminal Justice report on the clergy loveual abuse crisis and the 2005 Report on the Implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People stated that Roman Catholic priests abused mostly males. The John Jay study, for example, found that 64 percent of the accused priests abused only males; 22.6 percent abused only females; 3.6 percent abused both girls and boys, and in 10 percent of the cases, the gender was unknown. Statistics were similar in the 2005 study.

Not only were most reported victims male, they also were pubescent; 60 percent were first abused between the ages of 10-14. These are not, however, biologically or psycholoveually fully developed males and cannot be construed as homoloveual partners for any adult.

Still, the gender and age of so many victims created space for Vatican officials such as Cardinal Jorge Arturo Medina EstŽvez and Fr. Andrew Baker, conservative journalist Deal Hudson and others to link the loveual abuse of young people to homoloveual priests. Now it appears that the Vatican, holding back on a full ban on gays in the priesthood, wants to hold homoloveual priests responsible for the loveual abuse crisis.

The attack on gays by some Catholic spokesmen has drawn criticism from experts on love offenders. Robert Geffner, psychologist and editor of the Journal of Child loveual Abuse, stated that research indicates that homoloveuals are no more likely than heteroloveuals to violate minors loveually. David Finkelhor, director of Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, views loveual attraction to minors as a separate loveual attraction, an opinion also espoused by John Bancroft, physician and director of the Kinsey Insbreastute for Research in love, Gender, and Reproduction. loveual offender researchers Nicholas Groth and Frank Oliveri studied more than 3,000 love offenders and did not find even one homoloveual man who shifted from an attraction to adult men to a desire for minors. Conversely, they found that men who were nonexclusively fixated on children, or who regressed from an attraction to adults to an interest in children, all described themselves as heteroloveual and, in addition, usually were homophobic. Similarly, Minneapolis psychologist Peter Dimock concluded that most minor boys are abused by heteroloveual men, some of whom are indifferent to the gender of their victims, choosing either girls or boys based on the minor's availability and vulnerability. Perhaps more loveual predators abuse boys than once was thought but are reluctant to say so and be perceived as homoloveuals.

Though researchers and clinicians working with loveual offenders maintain that the vast majority of them are heteroloveual, we must also consider the possibility that some loveual abusers are homoloveual men who deny their orientation, replacing recognition and acceptance with homophobia. Other priest abusers may have never consolidated any loveual orientation, claiming to be heteroloveual in the breach of their confusion, conflict or ignorance. All priests who abuse are criminals, although the potential for rehabilitation may differ among types of offenders. The imperative point here is that, for the loveual perpetrators in any one of these groups, their criminal behaviors stem not from their loveual orientation but rather reflect their psychological immaturity, arrested development, or antisocial, criminal proclivities, a fact relentlessly presented to the Vatican and just as relentlessly ignored.

While loveual orientation does not effectively explain the selection of male victims by Catholic priests, there are indeed other plausible reasons. To a large extent, victim gender selection by priests reflected opportunity. Consider, for example, prison love, in which heteroloveual males with more power and authority within the inmate population select and rape other, less powerful men to achieve loveual release and to impose their power on another person. Boys were much more available to priests than were girls. Parents were thrilled to have a priest single their boy out for attention and encouraged their sons to spend time with Father, even allowing them to travel with the priest. Even years ago, parents would not have felt as comfortable having their girls spend too much time with the priest and he, in turn, would have known it would look suspicious to have girls tagging after him. Further, many priests were frightened of and misogynistic towards girls and women, so would be put off from having love with them. They might also be wary of impregnating pubescent or postpubescent girls.

For some loveually undeveloped priests, loveual abuse of a pubertal boy may have signified loveual merger with a male perceived to be a psycholoveual peer of the abuser. In addition, it may have represented an unconscious act of hostility toward a boy who otherwise could look forward to a loveual life closed off to the priest. In other words, the abuser, who could have entered a minor seminary at age 14 or 15, may have unconsciously attacked his victim's loveuality at the same age he was when he entered the minor seminary, symbolically castrating the victim as he himself was symbolically castrated. Finally, clinicians working with Catholic priests say some priests define celibacy as refraining from loveual relationships with women and thus could convince themselves that love with minor males did not jeopardize their celibate status.

Vatican officials, in their search to blame the loveual abuse scandal on someone or something external to insbreastutional and doctrinal failings of the church itself, conflated loveual orientation with psycholoveual maturation and with criminal behavior. Psycholoveually mature, adult homoloveual men have consensual love with other adult men much as psycholoveually mature, adult heteroloveual men have consensual love with adult women. Criminal heteroloveuals loveually violate adult women and children of both genders; almost surely some criminal homoloveuals loveually victimize adult men and some minors. These are crimes of power, ultimately having little to do with love or the loveual orientation of the criminal. Both in and out of the priesthood, there also may be some psycholoveually immature heteroloveual and homoloveual men who turn to minors of either gender because, in the subjective experience of the offender, the young people are experienced as psycholoveual peers.

The Vatican's proposed limitations on gay priests will, of course, have no impact on these groups, other than implicitly directing them to remain psycholoveually immature, silent about their loveual orientation, and thus potentially dangerous to adult parishioners and minors. Instead, the Vatican's policy will primarily persecute gay men who have accepted their homoloveuality enough to speak about it.

Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in Charlotte, N.C., where she treats survivors of childhood loveual abuse. She addressed the U.S. bishops' meeting in Dallas in 2002 on the long-term consequences of loveual abuse. Her book Perversion of Power and loveual Scandal in the Catholic Church: A Psychosocial Analysis of the loveual Abuse Crisis will be published by Vanderbilt University Press in 2006. She coedited a book Predatory Priests and Silent Victims to be published by The Analytic Press in 2006. She is the coauthor of Treating the Adult Survivor of Childhood loveual Abuse (Basic Books, 1994), which has become a clbuttic text.

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