Priest Abuse and Clergy Sexual Abuse Information

and what changes can be made in the policy regarding these crimes?

Allegations of sexual abuse of children have been made against public school teachers and a variety of religious groups including but not exclusively Roman Catholic priests, monks, and nuns. Several major lawsuits were filed in 2001 alleging that priests had sexually abused minors. Some priests resigned, others were defrocked or jailed, and financial settlements totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars were made with many victims. The cases became ongoing national news in the U.S. with the accusations made against Paul Shanley and John Geoghan, and publicized by the Boston Globe in 2002. Some commentators, such as journalist Jon Dougherty, have argued that media coverage of the issue has been excessive, given that the same problems plague other institutions, such as the US public school system, with much greater frequency.

That same year, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a "zero-tolerance" policy for accused offenders. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops commissioned a comprehensive study that found that four percent of all priests who had served in the U.S. from 1950 to 2002 faced some sort of sexual accusation. According to this report, common actions included touching adolescent males under their clothes and removal of clothing, but more serious acts were committed in many cases. The Church was widely criticized when it was discovered that some bishops knew about allegations and reassigned the accused instead of removing them, although school administrators engaged in a similar manner when dealing with accused teachers, as have the Scouts and Jehovah's Witnesses. Some bishops and psychiatrists noted that the prevailing psychology of the times suggested that people could be cured of such behavior through counseling. Many of the abusive priests had received counseling before being reassigned.