> Why focus only on the religious organizations?

Likely because OP hates religion. Their post was a reddit tier hot take on an issue that transcends religious bounds as you've pointed out. It's a common trope about child-abusing priests but people forget the vast majority of these cases occur in schools. Anything to take a shot at the church and paint it as a pedophile training camp, I guess. OPs sources are absolutely garbage.

For the downvoters here's some evidence: a 55% increase in sexual assault from 2016 to 2018 in schools [0]. They estimate it is likely undercounted.

We'd do a lot getting groomers out of school as quickly and as forcefully as we can.

EDIT: Seems I upset the groomers on HN with this post lolz. It's funny OP's trash sources are getting upvotes and I'm getting downvoted to hell. Perhaps HN needs to cull it's own groomer population.

EDIT 2: Stay mad groomers.

[0] https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/sexua...

Perhaps posts that lead and end by hurling childhood insults, paired with vague statements presenting as obvious facts, is always going to be considered noise.

A weak nitpick, no substantial responses to the inconvenient facts provided, instead make it go away is the typical hn style, just like joe biden, just pretend it doesnt exist, censor, deny, and lie lie lie.

The school stat is not limited to complaints about school personnel, it includes child on child violence.

The abusers in the church were part of the power structure. That same power structure systematically covered up and protected the abusers. Same thing for the scouts.

That happens at schools too: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oversight-failures-allow-sexual....

This happened at my kid’s (not religious at all) school: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2019/01/29/key-sch...

It’s obviously easier to uncover this when dealing with large national or supra-national organizations like the Catholic Church or Boy Scouts than tens of thousands of individual school districts.

The number of adults in the school system is vastly larger than the number of Catholic priests.

There are 37,302 diocesan and religious-order priests in the United States vs 3,500,000 full and 500,000 part time teachers in the US + even more support staff.

You can look into the past demographics, but it looks like there is dramatically more victims per priest per year than per teacher per year.

Of course—congregations are much bigger than classrooms. But the figures above are cited in terms of complaints (corresponding to number of victims) not number of perpetrators. Thus the better comparison is how many people attend school versus the number who attend Catholic Church. Catholics are 1/4 of the population, and over the relevant timeframe (back to 1950), probably half or more attended church regularly.

Wait no, this doesn't make sense. You should be comparing the rates of bad actors against the number of potential actors (ie church staffs vs school staffs). Comparing the volume of potential victims is meaningless. To draw an extreme example, what would you say about a religious sect where 100% of its leaders were rapists but there was only 10 people in each congregation? That's okay because public schools have tons more students?

Parents care about the probability of their kid being victimized. They don’t care whether 1 priest abuses 10 kids in a congregation of 300 or 10 teachers abuse 10 kids in a school of 300. The relevant metric is number complaints normalized by the relevant potential victim population. There’s more complaints in one year against schools than in 50 years against the Catholic Church. Yes, that’s partly because way more people attend school (everyone) than attend Catholic church regularly. But the difference isn’t a factor of 50. In the relevant period—complaints peaked in the 1980s—probably 1 in 8 Americans attended Catholic Church weekly. (Probably even more than that because families with children are much more likely to attend church.)

> The relevant metric is number complaints normalized by the relevant potential victim population.

It's obvious there's problems with either rate you'd choose for either task.

We have varying degrees of exposure / vulnerability within the populations. Neither one really directly leads to a "risk per unit of exposure of child" or "risk of a given person being an offender".

But it seems like you have some pretty motivated reasoning going on: it sure looks like religious organizations have not done well, and are relatively likely to be much worse per unit of youth exposure.

That’s exactly the point though—where is the evidence that churches are doing “much worse per unit of youth exposure?” OP is the one engaging in motivated reasoning—the top post doesn’t even attempt to make a comparison against the base rate of sexual abuse of children, which is unfortunately extremely high.

Actually, they've provided evidence (somewhat flawed) that you've tried to wave away with other evidence/preferring another rate (that seems more flawed to me).

Religious organizations have a) smaller number of personnel, b) fewer youth contacts in total, c) lower hours of contact per average youth than your comparison organizations. We can debate about the importance of each of these in the denominator, but they're all signifiers.

Worse, you're trying to compare numbers for schools that include student-on-student sexual violence (the vast majority of cases) to complaints against staff and clergy for churches.

Okay, so say you have a kid and you're putting them into bible study and you have a choice between two sessions, one with 20 kids and an instructor that has a 5% chance of being abusive, and another with 10 kids and an instructor with 9.5% chance of being abusive. You would suggest the latter is better because the odds are better for your kid?

The expectation is higher in the first case, but then chances that it's your particular kid would be 1/group size. So I guess it would be more accurate to have 5 kids in the first group to make it 1% vs .95%. That's still not any better is it?

At the end of the day, it boils down to this.

Do you rather have your kid to have big N% chance of being abused, or small n%. At a micro level, you might get more control, but at the macro level, the results in aggregate are what matter.

The number of possible victims isn’t the limiting factor here, it’s the number of pedophiles and their ability to prey on children. A substitute teacher may teach tens of thousands of children per year, but they don’t have a position of particular trust nor are they protected by the school system.

The core complaint isn’t that the Church has more perpetrators, but rather that by protecting the perpetrators they increased the number of victims per perpetrator.

> nor are they protected by the school system.

Example from the day before yesterday: "5 school employees arrested for alleged failure to report student's sexual assault"

https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/5-school-employees-arrest...

Bonus one from a couple months ago: "Knoch Primary School principal charged with failing to report alleged sexual abuse"

https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/knoch-primary-school...

I don’t see why you think that supports your argument.

Here's another, December of last year, there are a lot of these: "Three school administrators in Bellingham accused of failing to report alleged sexual assault"

https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/bellingham/school-a...

If teachers are willing to cover up for random child molesters in the community what do you think they'd do for one of their own?

> what do you think they’d do for one of their own?

Hang them out to dry, as should be evident by your failure to find examples.

Teachers failing to report student on student violence isn’t actively protecting perpetrators the way the church was reported as doing. Church administrators would move pedophiles to new communities multiple times after accusations showed up. It’s a very different situation.

> Church administrators would move pedophiles to new communities multiple times after accusations showed up.

From a few months ago: Oversight failures allow sexually abusive teachers to quietly move from school to school

"It's called passing the trash," said Morgan Stewart, an attorney representing students who have accused teachers of sexual abuse at Redlands Unified District schools. "They'd give them recommendations, they'd give them approvals. You've got this culture that just allows it to happen again and again."

Failing to report reasonable suspicion of sexual abuse is a crime, yet federal officials and experts told CBS they believe school administrators often do not contact authorities for fear of damaging the reputation of a teacher or the school. And teachers told CBS they observed a culture that discouraged reporting suspicions of misconduct in their schools.

TLDR: This practice is repeated in schools across the United States, risking harm to millions of children, according to experts and federal officials. On average, one offender passes through three different school districts before being stopped, and can abuse as many as 73 children in their lifetime, according to a 2010 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oversight-failures-allow-sexual...

That GAO report shows some serious lapses at private and public schools, such as using the wrong name for a criminal background investigation. It highlighted a few cases of people being given a positive recommendation after being fired for such things as watching porn on school computers.

Nationwide fingerprint checks really should be mandatory here.

Quite a leap from a textbook example of bystander effect to “teachers are protecting pedophile teachers.”

Schools absolutely protect sexual abusers. At my kid’s school, it was an open secret in the 1970s through 1990s that teachers were sexually abusing students: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2019/01/29/key-sch.... This is an affluent, extremely progressive, private school in a deep blue state. It’s just about the opposite of the Catholic Church.

I think this his the nail on the head. Any time you create a role and imbue it with unimpeachable morality or trust, grant it power, and bring it into close private contact with vulnerable persons, you have a recipe for abuse. Crime requires opportunity. Sometimes abusers are created by being placed into those roles. And of course some abusers are already fully formed, and will seek out those roles. I'm sure a lot of them they don't even do it knowingly. They gaslight and groom themselves into abusers as much as they gaslight and groom their victims. They're almost always male, except for a "rounding error". And you'll the pattern in an array of different roles: police, doctor, priest, scout master, BBC TV presenter, rock star, sports coach, therapist, charity boss. The more power and trust, and the greater the contract with the vulnerable, the more it'll happen.

John Jay Report also found that the sexual abuse has largely been a problem of homosexual pederasty, not pedophilia.

I don’t believe the sexes of the offender or victim matter much when it is between an adult and a child. Always wrong and that should not be sidelined or downplayed.

> The evidence suggests that abuse is actually a cross-cutting problem. It arises whenever you put adults in proximity to children. Why focus only on the religious organizations?

Focus should not be exclusively on religious organizations. But focus should be disproportionately on them because of their track record of using moral superiority to explain away and stop abusers.