Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Where is the outrage?

The Catholic Church has been taken to task, and rightly so, for instances of the sexual abuse of children that had committed by a few priests. The notoriety of those instances have created in the mind of the public a myth that the issue of child sexual abuse is a Catholic thing. Professionals who have studied the issue clearly understand that is not the case, yet the myth exists.
For this reason I was surprised to see the New York Times run a story on the rate of child sexual abuse in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community and the failure of religious and civil authorities to pursue those cases.
I suffer from no delusion that these cases will receive much exposure in the mainstream media -- indeed, if reporters were actually to do their homework they would expose the rate of abuse in the public school systems of the nation. I simply wish to point out the societal hypocrisy when it comes to the issue of child sexual abuse and how failure to address the problem in cases where Catholics are not involved merely leaves our children in jeopardy.

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