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Karen J. Terry 2 Understanding the Response to Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests A Criminal Justice Perspective Introduction Sexual victimization of children is a serious and pervasive issue in society, and it is particularly prevalent in institutions where adults form mentoring and nurturing relationships with children and adolescents. Such institutions include churches, schools, sporting organizations, and child-care settings. Much of the media focus on child sexual abuse within institutions in the last decade has focused on the Roman Catholic Church. Though the crux of this media attention came in 2002 with reports about a serial predator, John Geoghan, the first high-profile priest-abuser came to the attention of the Catholic Church and the nation in the mid-1980s. In 1983, it emerged that Gilbert Gauthe had allegedly sexually abused over a hundred children in his parish in Lafayette, Louisiana. He was convicted in 1985 and served nearly ten years in prison. As a result of the Gauthe case, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) began discussing the problem of abuse for the first time at its national meetings. In 1993 James Porter was reported to have abused over a hundred young boys and girls in parishes across Massachusetts. He was subsequently dubbed by the media as Boston’s first “predator priest” and was sentenced to eighteen to twenty years in prison. It was John Geoghan, however, whose actions led to widespread and sustained media attention on the issue of sexual abuse by priests. Geoghan was a priest in the Boston Archdiocese who was accused of abusing more than a hundred children over three decades. He was processed through both the ca18 Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests | 19 nonical system (the laws adopted by the ecclesiastical authority) and criminal justice system. The Church eventually laicized him, defrocking him and removing him from ministry, and the criminal justice system convicted him of indecent child assault and incarcerated him. He was murdered in prison by a fellow inmate, illuminating the level of indignation against such offenders . The Boston Globe published a special series on abusive priests for nearly a year as Geoghan’s abuses were coming to light (Boston Globe Spotlight Team 2004). The media attention to this topic led to a substantial increase in reporting of abuse cases; approximately one-third of all cases reported by the end of 2002 had been reported in that year alone. This explosion of reporting led to the understanding of what is referred to today as the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. In June 2002, at the height of this flood of reporting, the USCCB created a charter that aimed to understand and address this problem (see US Conference of Catholic Bishops 2002). Among other things, the charter called for empirical studies of the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests. The Office of Child and Youth Protection and the National Review Board, two entities formed as a result of the charter, commissioned researchers at John Jay College to conduct two studies: The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950–2002 (John Jay College 2004, hereafter referred to as the Nature and Scope study), and The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950–2010 (Terry et al. 2011, hereafter referred to as the Causes and Context study). The research team released a report of their descriptive Nature and Scope findings in February 2004 and a supplementary report in 2006 (John Jay College 2006). The Nature and Scope study provided information about the extent of the abuse crisis, the distribution of offenses throughout the country and over time, the priests against whom allegations were made, the minors they abused, the Church’s response to the allegations, and the financial impact of the crisis (John Jay College 2004, 2006). The Causes and Context study, released in May 2011, analyzed the conditions that permitted abusive behavior in the Catholic Church to persist, integrating research from sociocultural, psychological, situational, and organizational perspectives (Terry et al. 2011). This chapter provides an overview of the key findings from these two studies , including the diocesan and criminal justice responses to abuse. Few priests with allegations of abuse were arrested, charged, convicted, and incarcerated for their crimes, and this chapter outlines the priests who were processed through the criminal justice system and how they differ from those who were not. [3.136.97.64] Project MUSE...

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