More abuse catholic style.

[Gibbon]

Low self esteem sounds like it applies to many (most) kids? Perhaps one reason why they are so vulnerable and need protection.

Help! I need a new brush, mine ain't big enough for that generalisation!

[d000hg]

Help! I need a new brush, mine ain't big enough for that generalisation!

Generalisations are not automatically false. Surely it's hardly controversial, as you get older you realise that everyone else at school was just as insecure as you.

[Whorty]

He gets loads of abuse these days.

Most of it self .... and there is still a bishop involved

[OwlHoot]

That works out at an average of roughly 12 French kids being abused per day over the last 70 years.

But in France there are (a quick Google search reveals) 32,000 churches, 6000 chapels, and 87 cathedrals (not including countless more catholic schools and colleges, and adding them would reduce the already small result below significantly)

So if we assume this abuse was happening at random churches each day, this means that kids were being abused in only 0.03% of churches but were perfectly safe in 99.97% of churches. That's a pretty good record if you ask me!

One could argue that percentage is a sort of daily "Russian roulette" and that even though the probability of being abused on any given day is low, the probability over longer times is higher. But assuming the abuse happened at random churches is totally unrealistic in the first place, because there were probably a small minority of bad clerics abusing many kids in the same church. So the actual risk of abuse in most churches would have been far lower, probably orders of magnitude lower, than even 0.03%

[d000hg]

I think we can probably imagine there is more that wasn't included, but I think we also drastically underestimate (or perhaps deliberately choose not to think about) the amount of child abuse that happens every day generally... the majority of it at home.
Not to dissimilar to marital abuse and domestic abuse generally, most of it is invisible and never reported.

I could be wrong. Hopefully I am.

[vetran]

I think we can probably imagine there is more that wasn't included, but I think we also drastically underestimate (or perhaps deliberately choose not to think about) the amount of child abuse that happens every day generally... the majority of it at home.
Not to dissimilar to marital abuse and domestic abuse generally, most of it is invisible and never reported.

I could be wrong. Hopefully I am.

Sadly you are probably right. Having lived through testimony in court of a sick fecker working his way through his family that still keeps me awake, it happens in my opinion far too often. How often we can tackle the secrets hidden in the family will be limited unless we change our tactics.

But the organised abuse of kids is too difficult to cover up and we should tackle it as often as possible.