Second problem: the clergy abuse scandal reinforced and compounded many of the most insidious stereotypes about sexual abusers and child molesters. The offenders were routinely referred to as pedophiles, implying a sexual attraction to prepubertal children, a paraphilic disorder, a person with multiple victims, and a compulsion to offend. In fact, the majority of the priest offenders were not pedophiles (Haywood, Kravitz, Grossman, Wasyliw, & Hardy; 1996). Very few readers got a sense of the spectrum of offenders who were involved. People like Father Porter and Father Geoghan who had many victims were prominently featured, but the reality that most of the accused had one or a couple of victims got lost. The notion that there is a wide spectrum of abusers was much more apparent when the public conversation included many instances of incestuous fathers and abusive grandfathers, but in the context of priest abuse, this was harder to convey. Child maltreatment professionals have to work hard to re-establish public awareness about the full spectrum of abusers.
Third problem: the scandal also reinforced people’s exaggerated impressions about the riskiness and incorrigibility of sex offenders. The appalling cases where the offenders were caught, posted to other positions and then continued to offend were the focus of much of the coverage. But there were also a fairly remarkable number of cases, it would seem, in which offenders got caught and managed to straighten themselves out. This is not to recommend the Catholic Church approach to the management of abusers, but simply to point out how the crisis reinforced people’s sense that child molesters have a compulsive need that cannot be stanched. Emphasizing the riskiness of sex offenders is an argument for the need to do something, but when people do not have a sense that there are both risky and not so risky sex offenders, it leads to bad policy, and child maltreatment practice and children’s interests are not necessarily served well.
This combined in the scandal with a lot of negative impressions about offender treatment as a viable option in the management of child molesters. Because in some of the most high-profile cases, offenders got sent to treatment and then returned and continued to abuse, usually in the absence of any good follow-up or supervision, it may have reinforced many people’s belief about the futility of treatment with this population.
It does not help the child maltreatment field or the public and policymakers to see child molesters as simply incorrigibly compulsive fiends who cannot be stopped. It is factually incorrect (Hanson et al., 2002), it makes investigations more difficult, it deters confessions and co-operation from offenders, it confuses victims in some cases, and it undermines the work of colleagues who are trying to do offender treatment and sensible correctional management.
Fourth problem: this scandal reinforced the idea that homosexuals are to blame for child molesting, an idea that I believe had been losing its currency. The American Catholic Church certainly did not go to the extreme that it could have in scapegoating homosexuals for the disaster the church was facing. But enough officials voiced that message, and there is a significant likelihood that the responses taken by the church will continue to reinforce that message. Unfortunately, those people who want to use the crisis for a scapegoating of homosexuals now have more license to do so.