----- Original Message ----- From: "William T Goodall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, September 13, 2004 2:51 PM Subject: The gospel according to Jimmy Breslin
> The true number, he thinks, is 25,000 pedophile priests and something > like 100,000 abused children in the years since 1950. Lets look at the number of 100k abused children. A boy has about a 1 in 6 chance of experiencing sexual abuse; a girl about 1 in 4 to 1 in 5. Assuming that we are just talking about abuse of boys, with Catholics about 25% of the population of the US, and boys during that time period now being males from 6-50, we have about 90 million or so males, about 22.5 million catholic males, and about 3.75 million who were sexually abused. This means that his number, taken at face value, indicates that about 2.6% of sexual abuse of Catholic boys is by priests. While even 0.1% is too much, condemning a whole group of people for this, while ignoring the responsibility for the other 97.4% sounds like an ax to grind to me. And, I might add, I'm doing the numbers in a manner that reflects his numbers in the best light. If he includes abuse of girls, or other types of abuse in his 100k, the fraction gets smaller. Its closer to 1.2% if girls are included in the denominator. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
