Constantinopolis wrote:Also, child molesters are found among every group of people and every profession. There are far more teachers who are child molesters than priests who are child molesters, yet I don't hear anyone saying that schools are dangerous and kids are better off without them. Get a grip.
The reason you don't hear that is because the teachers actually get punished. They're banned from working with children ever again. Furthermore, teaching staff is
required by law to report any kind of sexual abuse they suspect to the authorities under penalty of being charged as an accomplice, not the system with many clergy where they're allowed to keep their lips sealed about anything they see or hear and the offending party is frequently delivered to a new batch of potential victims. Schools, by in large, actually
try to protect kids and willingly hand over teachers who molest to the police. That's why nobody's calling them dangerous, because they have rules in place that are meant to eliminate danger as soon as possible, not keep it around.
Let's say you're a landlord whose tenant's heat is broken in the winter. When they complain to you about it not being fixed, you try to defend yourself by saying that your neighbor's building's heater was once broken too, so what's the problem with it happening to you? The problem is that your neighbor fixed the damn heater. You haven't.
This can't be repeated enough:
The problem isn't that it happens, it's that nothing is done about it.Here's something more worth getting a grip on: How about instead of getting so pissed at the people who are rightfully angry about churches' unwillingness to do anything about a serious problem, you instead turn around and get pissed at the church policies that are giving churches bad reputations in the first place? Get mad at the cancer, not the doctors informing you that you have cancer.
Bombadil wrote:Giovenith wrote:How is brushing these things under the carpet in any way an incentive? I hear this excuse all the time, "The church is just trying to protect their reputation." How? How does covering up pedophiles in any way
protect them? It has always had the complete
opposite effect, every time they do the public get pissed at them and begins to question the legitimacy of these institutions. The public is not a bunch of toddlers with no sense of object permanence, moving pedophiles around doesn't trick us into thinking they don't exist, all it does is send the message that churches don't take child molestation seriously.
Ironically, this defense before of, "Blame the individual, not the institution," actually would hold up if the institution punished these people. People understand that we're only human and that bad things happen despite the best intentions, they only become angry when it becomes clear that the entity in question isn't even trying to make up for or prevent said bad things. Furthermore, people
love seeing assholes be punished and condemned: it's why we're bombarded by lie detector talk shows, demand the termination of wrongdoers' jobs, and go on epic witch hunts for people who do something offensive on social media. If the churches actually made a point of throwing these people under the bus, I have extremely little doubt that the overwhelming response would be people cheering them on for it - "Wow, look at this church, they really know how to take responsibility and keep their membership clean and safe for our families!"
Not only is their current approach to the problem reprehensible, it doesn't even make sense in their goal to maintain face.
Well.. 'incentivize' might be the wrong word here. I watched this documentary on a private school in the UK where the headmaster and two other teachers were pedophiles. Quite serious pedophiles. A matron noticed something about one of the teachers and spoke to a boy who told her of the abuse. At that point the teacher was asked to resign as the solution, as opposed to taking it to the police..
The weirder point was that the parents were informed, and they sent the boy back to the school on the idea it was solved. Aside from the horror of being sent back to the place the abuse occurred, the headmaster and another teacher continued to abuse boys.
I don't think people know what to do in the case of pedophilia, they'd rather not think about it and make the problem go away rather than bring it out into the open - perhaps they justify it internally on 'reputation of the school/church' but I suspect it's partly just not wanting to accept it.
..that teacher simply went to another school and carried on. Even when it was all brought out in the open some 20 years later there were issues with 'he said/he said' testimony after 20 years.
This doesn't really answer much about my post, only that other institutions have a similarly ridiculous mentality. They're shooting themselves in the foot with this strategy. It's like trying to cover a pile of dog doo-doo with a napkin instead of scooping it into the trash: you've kept it out of sight for maybe about an hour, but people are going to smell it out and they're going to be
waaaay more pissed at you for not cleaning it up than they would have been for just letting the dog shit in the house in the first place but then quickly getting rid of the mess. You can bounce back from a brief mistake that you've made up for, you cannot bounce back from knowingly allowing the mistake to hinder everyone and refusing to admit any wrongdoing.