The null hypothesis: why does it matter if clergy are not distinctly prone to sexual abuse?

Consider the following two claims, which I call “the null hypothesis”:

• The rate of sexual abuse of minors by priests during a given decade is within one standard deviation of the mean of an assorted rates for clergy of other religions and secular professionals with access to children during the same decade.
•  The handling of accusations of such behavior by bishops is not exceptional compared to that of these other group, again always controlling for the block of time.

Some studies have claimed that available data is consistent with the null hypothesis.  This is perhaps a weaker claim than it might appear, since no other group has been investigated with anything like the thoroughness to which the Catholic priesthood has been subjected.  Also, one must try to correct for the enormous selection biases of the Church keeping personnel records for far longer than any other organization, and that various legal and ecclesiastic bodies have been hunting exclusively for priest offenders, often into the far past, with no comparable solicitude to find victims of other professionals.  I readily admit that the null hypothesis has not been proved, but it is consistent with the data, and it is telling that few of the Church’s critics explicitly contest it.  What I would like to address here is the idea that the truth of the null hypothesis is unimportant, or rather that it is important only to those like me who are frivolously concerned with the relative moral status of my group, but that it is not particularly important for understanding or suppressing clergy sexual abuse.  I claim in fact that it is all important, that every prominent side in the current debate implicitly assumes the falsity of the null hypothesis, and therefore that all their proposals will be futile.

Causality

What is the cause of priests sexually abusing minors, or of bishops incorrectly responding to it?  Ask various factions of Catholics, and they will point to clericalism, celibacy, permissive post-conciliar moral theology, or a disproportionately high number of homosexuals.  Implicit in all of these explanations is the assumption that the phenomena are distinctive to priests and bishops, and therefore the cause must also be something distinctive to them.  If this were true, then the simultaneous truth of the null hypothesis would be an unexpected coincidence.  Rather, in the absence of other information, it is more natural to assume that when the effect is the same, the cause is likewise the same.  If priests abuse at the same rate as other professionals, and if bishops deal with it the same way as other professionals’ employers, then it is natural to assume that they do so for the same reasons.  In this case, the explanation cannot be clericalism, celibacy, theology, or homosexuality.  All the explanations on offer are wrong, and hence all the suggested fixes will not work.  That is slightly interesting, is it not?  If we eliminate celibacy, priests will presumably abuse at the same rate as Protestant ministers, and we have not established that this would be an improvement.  If we eliminate clericalism, priests will presumably abuse at the same rate as teachers, councilors, and juvenile detention officers, and we have not established that this would be an improvement.  If we eliminate gay priests, priests will presumably abuse at the same rate as heterosexual men, and we have not established that this would be an improvement.

Cover-ups

I frankly don’t agree that cover-ups are always wrong, but since I’m in the minority, I will grant for the sake of argument that they are.  Suppose the second plank of the null hypothesis is true, as stories of the shenanigans of school administrators and other religious bodies suggest.    I admit, by the way, that the second plank is more difficult to quantify and even harder to test, and so is perhaps even more uncertain.  Suppose it is true, though.  Is it important?  Shouldn’t our bishops do the right thing, and we should not care what other groups do?  On the contrary, the question of how to handle the handling of sexual abuse allegations also completely changes under the null hypothesis.

Why do bishops respond inadequately to accusations of clerical sexual abuse?  Because they’re clericalists who hate children?  Because they’re evil?  Because they are pathologically devoted to their institution?  Such explanations are plausible if the phenomenon in question is uniquely episcopal, because bishops might be unusual in any number of ways.  But if the phenomenon is wider, then such explanations are clearly inadequate.  We can’t just say that every institution dealing with minors is staffed by evil men.  If unwanted behavior is widespread, we should be looking at the perverted incentive structure that makes it so.  Consider, civil society is a good thing, so it is a good thing that those staffing its institutions wish to preserve those institutions.  We may lecture bishops that they should have no concern with protecting the Church (as everyone but me does), but can we really extend this disregard to every social structure?  Again, maybe bishops only thought that they needed secrecy to protect the Church because they’re paranoid clericalists, but if a wide variety of administrators come to the same conclusion, they are probably right, and unwanted behavior is being incentivized.  The solution, then, would be to look at the legal, financial, and media incentives and make sure that what we regard as good behavior is not punished.  If transparency is what you prize, then organizations must be praised for it and somehow protected from having the information they reveal used against them.  Because everyone implicitly assumes the falsity of the null hypothesis, they are pursuing the opposite strategy, making sure the bishops are punished for their efforts, with the lesson to the wider world being “reform is suicide”.

Priests as tracers

If the null hypothesis is true, then the data in the John Jay report and elsewhere is more widely applicable.  We can take our rich data on priestly sexual abuse and extrapolate it to the wider society.  In particular, we see that the rate of clerical sexual abuse has varied widely since World War II, being much more common in the 1970s–80s.  Most likely, this is true for the wider public as well, with the reasons having more to do with wider social trends than anything distinctively Catholic.

Do we see evidence of such social trends?  In fact, they are quite common, and often easier to see outside the Church.  I have linked before to Mary Eberstadt’s article on how pedophilia was then considered “cool” in literary circles.  Scanning sex books written during this era, I encounter, without a hint of censure, that scientists find they can give a female infant orgasms by stimulating her clitoris.  And if an infant, why not a two, four, or ten year old?  It was the age when all enlightened people believed in childhood sexuality.  A while back, there was a bit of a scandal when a German politician on the Left was confronted with his statements from the seventies calling for a reduction or elimination of the sexual age of consent.  I remember the politician was baffled at being singled out, pleading that that’s what everyone was calling for at the time.

Christians often say that the hostile culture has embraced the Sexual Revolution, but that’s not quite right.  Elite culture is no longer praising sexual expression and exploration, but has switched to Civil Rights 2.0:  promoting homosexuals as victims of oppression for an (at best euphemistically-described) immutable characteristic, punitively hostile to heterosexual male sexual expression as oppressive to career women.  Historically, the appetite of homosexuals for boys is unquestionable.  During the Sexual Revolution, the cause of all perversions were united under the banner of freedom and rationality.  Today, homosexuals claim to abhor the sexual exploitation of children as much as anyone, and perhaps we have no reason to doubt them.  The history of clerical sexual abuse proves that behavior can change drastically on decade timescales.  Possibly one reason for the anomalously homosexual nature of the statistics on abuse by priests is that this data goes so much farther back in time.  That’s just speculation, but it illustrates the importance of disaggregating data in time, lest we risk identifying false correlations.  Also speculative but interesting is the idea that the downfall of the pedophile cause may have been when homosexuals, following the AIDS epidemic, reconceptualized their movement as a fight against something akin to racism rather than part of a general fight for unlimited sexual expression.

If priests are unexceptional, and we can thus use our rich data on them as tracers for the wider society, then presumably most religions and professions have enormous sex-abuse/”cover-up” scandals from the 1970-80s in their closet.  However, we also see from the priest data that abuse rates were declining even before the massive publicity and reform efforts which might (but then again, might not have) have caused priest data to decouple from wider trends.  It is probably incorrect to look for distinctively Catholic causes (John Paul II’s reform of the seminaries, etc) for this.  General social trends explain it quite well; we have no reason to abandon the null hypothesis.

So, what should other institutions do?  I see at mostly-Catholic First Things, there are a couple of recent articles urging Baptists and Evangelicals to confront their own histories of sexual misconduct.  Protestants observing the self-destruction of the Catholic Church will probably take a different lesson.  What I recommend is the course that society has actually decided on, which could be described as “a massive cover-up”.  Attitudes toward pedophiles, ephebophiles, and their treatment have changed.  The problem is solved, insofar as it can be.  There is no reason to poke around into the past and destroy all the institutions, all the social trust and social capital of the present.  Remember I also recommended destroying all records of civilians reporting their neighbors during the communist years in Eastern Europe.  Destroying social trust in these newly-free nations would only push them in the direction of statism and communism, ironically pushing these countries back to that which one condemns.  Cover-ups are often good.  The present needn’t sacrifice itself for the past.

The Catholic Church is probably doomed, but I think other institutions might survive.  First of all, no other institution has the same destructive ideology of prioritizing reform over survival.  Second, the public still maintains a sense of the common good in the context of other institutions.  We think it perfectly fine that a parish or diocese should be financially ruined because fifty years ago Father so-and-so touched mister-so-and-so, and bishop so-and-so ignored it.  We would not allow a school district to be financially ruined because fifty years ago Mister-so-and-so touched so-and-so, and the superintendent ignored it.  We would even say that it is because we care about the children that we will not allow this to happen, no matter what happened in the past.  The exception, of course, would be those who want to eliminate the public school system anyway, but such people are arguing in bad faith, just as are those who say “sue the Church out of existence” because they want to eliminate the Church anyway but can’t argue that case on the merits.  It is perfectly rational to protect society’s massive investment in public education, and sociologists will surely recognize that it be a massive loss to allow all other religions to suffer the fate of Catholicism.  A social desert serves no one.

Intrinsic plausibility

More study, suitably disaggregated in time, of other institutions are needed to test the null hypothesis.  Lacking that, I think it has a good claim to be the default assumption.  Many other groups have had more power and as much sense of their own distinctiveness as the priesthood.  Other institutions have all the same incentives as the Catholic Church.  Nor should we expect Catholic doctrine to give priests any advantage, because Protestant and secular cultures have exactly the same attitude toward sex with minors.  Even if the null hypothesis is false, say that the Catholic clergy is a 2SD outlier, the speculations here are still highly plausible, because we would expect different groups, subject to the same social forces, to trend together.