They Don't Require Math in Journalism School

In 2018, the highly retrospective nature of most of the allegations still gets lost in the deserved and appropriate public wrath at each new wave of revelations. Those revelations are about sexual abuse that hundreds and perhaps thousands of priests in the United States committed over a long period but overwhelmingly in the 1960s through the 1980s. Gray notes that, in the John Jay report of 2004,

the most common decade of birth for alleged abusers was the 1930s and the most common decade of ordination was the 1960s. This profile has not changed in allegations that emerged in the 14 years that have followed — including the recent [Pennsylvania] grand jury report. No new wave of abuse has emerged in the United States.

“Wave,” of course, doesn’t mean “incidence.” CARA counts 22 cases of abuse that priests in the United States are alleged to have committed in 2015–17. That’s an average of about seven cases per year. Still too many. For perspective, however, compare that with the annual average of 271 cases of abuse that, since 2004 alone, has been alleged to have been committed by priests during the 1970s. Are the figures for the past few years so dramatically lower because accusers tend to come forward only many years after an incident? Will we have to wait until 2050 to have an adequate picture of what the rate of abuse might be now? Probably not, according to Gray...

SEVEN per year. Meanwhile in the Chicago Public School System....

They were top athletes and honor-roll students, children struggling to read and teenagers seeking guidance.
But then they became prey, among the many students raped or sexually abused during the last decade by trusted adults working in the Chicago Public Schools as district officials repeated obvious child-protection mistakes.

 To better quantify the frequency of abuse in Chicago’s schools, reporters obtained and analyzed Chicago police data on such crimes from 2008 through 2017. Police investigated 523 reports that children were sexually assaulted or abused inside city public schools during that 10-year period, or an average of one report each week, the data show.

 In all, the Tribune closely examined 108 cases and identified 72 school employees as alleged perpetrators in the last decade. The rest were student-on-student sexual attacks.


FYI -there are over 13,000 school districts in the United States.