> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Smyth [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Friday, December 06, 2002 3:33 AM
> To: CF-Community
> Subject: RE: Warning: This may offend if religious
>
>
> all the priests i have met have been nothing but gentlemen
>
> but to state that what child abuse within the clergy is
> mostly media invention is absolutely ridiculous
>
> unless you can prove me wrong with facts........
The point is that we're not seeing a snapshot in time - we're seeing, in
a very short period, the abuse of decades. Made worse by the fact that
some priests were chronic offenders allowed to move from area to area
and repeat their crimes.
The point being that the media has exploded this to the point where the
general public believe that the church is rife with molestors and every
other priest is looking for a grope.
That's a media invention as (at least as far as I've seen) there's no
evidence that a priest is any more likely to be a child molestor than
anybody else.
The abuse itself is not a media invention, but many of the ideas that
have arisen are mostly media invention (namely that priests are more
likely to be molestors). We're also seeing a lot of bogus claims
("recovered memories" and such, see the writings of Elizabeth Loftus for
more information) and false accusations due to the ideas invented by the
media.
The crimes, like so many other crimes, have been sensationalized by the
media to point that an honest appraisal of the facts is impossible. As
I said this was also true of "The Summer of the Shark" last summer in
which shark attacks did not, in fact, increase dramtically.
Jim Davis
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