Faith Leaders Take Advantage of Women, Survey Says

Assuming both parties sincerely believe in their religion, I would say that the clergy/churchgoer relationship has a much greater disparity of power. Your boss might be able to fire you, but he’s not qualified to hear God’s private opinions, after all. I can see how it would be very easy for a corrupt cleric to persuade the target of an unwilling sexual advance that God either approves of it or would be angry if the target refused.

Compounding this is the social consequence of being involved in some kerfuffle with the cleric. For many religious people, the church congregation becomes like an extended family. It makes me wonder how many people have accepted an unwanted sexual advance, or declined to report a failed one, just to avoid making waves and becoming outcasts in their communities.

How many women in a congregation? In a small church of say 200 people, half women, that’s 3 women. In a megachurch of 20,000 members it’s 303 women on average. If you assume that there is an uneven distribution then which churches are the pervy ones? Small churches or the mega churches? Which is statistically safer?

Either way it seems that women have another valid reason to avoid going to church. The question is “WWJD?” Take advantage or not?

Is a clergy/congregation relationship any different from a boss/employee one?

In most cases there are no immediate devastating *financial* consequences to leaving a church (and therefore that religious leader’s influence), unlike leaving a job. There are exceptions and mitigating factors on both sides, of course. A religious leader holds different things over one’s head than a boss does.

We’ve got a thread going in the forums right now about religious leaders and crime. The good thing this article brings up is the stricter screenings and increased training many churches are instituting.

It’s frightening how little – in terms of background checks and references and training – many religious leaders are subjected to. Especially (counter-intuitively) Sunday School teachers, who are often just volunteers from the congregation, yet are completely trusted to be alone with small children.

Hemant wrote:

I’m shocked. Who knew sex scandals in the church involved women?! (*cue rim shot*)

Yes, women and girls get abused by clergy. It is an unfortunate misconception on the part of both religious authorities and the general public that these acts of abuse are only perpetrated against boys. Two examples:

– The Catholic Church’s reaction to the scandal was to screen potential priests for homosexual tendencies;
– A parody video posted on Pharyngula recently had a Catholic official saying that the purpose of the church was “boy fucking”.

It isn’t about homosexuality, it’s about sexual abuse, whether the victim is male or female, child or adult. And it’s about abuse of authority.

Andrew Morgan wrote:

3%? Really? Isn’t that far, far, far lower than the number of women preyed upon on college campuses, and probably lower than society as a whole? I don’t really see what the story is here.

Women preyed upon on college campuses could be compared to women preyed upon by members of the congregation. This particular case is about sexual advances from clergy, which I think would be compared to sexual advances from college professors, not simply all unwanted sexual advances against female college students. What Jeff asked regarding sexual advances by other authority figures is the most pertinent question, I think.

I’m shocked. Who knew sex scandals in the church involved women?! (*cue rim shot*)

A statistic for your ignorance: 80% of the victims in the catholic clergy abuse scandals were female.

“One in every 33 women who attend worship services regularly has been the target of sexual advances by a religious leader”

You know, I wonder what the stats are for women in general? Is it really a religious thing, or just being a woman in general?

I’ve been physically sexually harassed three times in my life. And yes, one was in a church (a UU church – and no, that has nothing to do with me being an atheist) but the other two were not. I never thought the fact that it was in a church had anything to do with it. Some people are just assholes.

I want to know if the stats for this in general are really much higher for those who go to religious services? Or are people just upset because they think religious people should be perfect and it seems more awful when they aren’t?

Ah, this line from the article

“Nor do they know whether sexual wrongdoing by clergy is more, or less, frequent than in other well-respected professions.”.

That’s what I want to know (and really, I don’t understand why they don’t know – I’m sure someone has looked into this). Not to downplay the problem but given what I’ve heard over the years, and the experience of people I personally know, I would be surprised if you couldn’t say that 1 in 33 women – PERIOD – had been sexually harassed by someone (let alone outright rape or attempted rape, which is something like 1 in 6). We like to pretend it doesn’t happen as often as it does or that it’s only “those Catholic priests” or whatever.

Sad that some of these jerks are religious leaders but not surprising. Some humans just aren’t worth the oxygen they breathe.

While I think that clergy who target women in their congregation are sexual predators, unless they actually rape a woman, the women have to bear some of the responsibility for giving in. Yes, they could face serious consequences such as getting kicked out of their church, but by giving in, they’re not only being complicit in the illicit relationship, but they’re perpetuating the problem by keeping it hidden, thereby allowing the clergyman to continue his sexual predation. Not just on them, but likely on other women in the congregation as well.

I suspect that part of the problem is inherent in Christianity itself as well as traditional church hierarchies, where not only will the woman lose her “connection with God”, but her social standing, her friends and more. On top of that, religion teaches people not to question authority or rock the boat, so the women are intimidated into giving in by their own beliefs.

It’s sort a strange combination of being a victim yet being responsible for their own choices.

Somewhat OT: How is it that religions across the board discriminate against girls and women, abuse girls and women (see above), offer less posthumous reward to women, and yet, according to comments made in this forum before, there are so few women involved in atheist groups?

I don’t know what those comments were based on, but assuming they are correct, there seems to be a disconnect here. I can account for some of it with cultural upbringing, making it less likely for women to dare to stand up for themselves, or take a stand, but surely that doesn’t account for this big discrepancy?

Any ideas?

Please check out Joe My God’s website… He lists all the crimes (many of which are sexual in nature) that have been alleged over the week, complete with area and description.

http://joemygod.blogspot.com/search/label/This%20Week%20In%20Holy%20Crimes

Let’s think about some math here for a moment. We know that 3% of women who attend worship services have been the target of advances by the leaders, but I think the more important statistic is what percentage of these leaders have made these advances. All we can really say about that is that it’s going to be much higher than 3%, given the number disparities between clergy and attendees, but that doesn’t tell us much. It could be 100% of clergy harassing 3% of the women they see, or 50% of clergy harassing 6% of women, etc.

Most likely, it’s going to be a smaller amount of the clergy – probably less than 10% – who’ve harassed a lot of women, with the rest of the statistic made up of individual propositions from a large chunk of the clergy, some of which might have been misinterpreted or misremembered at the time of the poll. On top of that, we have to watch out for simply mistaken answers to poll, where perhaps the pollee didn’t understand the question properly (this effect would drive actually small numbers up).

In the end, what can we say? Well, not much. Clergy are human, and human males have a long history of doing whatever they can to get sex, including abusing their power. We just don’t know how common it is here. All we can really say is that obviously the clergy aren’t significantly better than the lay population when it comes to this. Being religious, even being a priest, doesn’t make you a more moral person.

(um, my math sucked up there, but I hope I got my point across – sorry).

Mathyoo, it’s more complicated than that. So many women who *do* come forward with charges end up being dragged through the mud and for nothing. The guy gets away (go to that site I linked to above to find how many *rape* cases end in jail time – and that’s outright rape, not harassment or misusing authority, etc). And look at the people who have stood up to the Catholic church. Most of them have not gotten anything except excommunication and scorn from their families. Blaming the victim is a lot easier than stopping the crime in the first place.

“While I think that clergy who target women in their congregation are sexual predators, unless they actually rape a woman, the women have to bear some of the responsibility for giving in. Yes, they could face serious consequences such as getting kicked out of their church, but by giving in, they’re not only being complicit in the illicit relationship, but they’re perpetuating the problem by keeping it hidden, thereby allowing the clergyman to continue his sexual predation. Not just on them, but likely on other women in the congregation as well….
It’s sort a strange combination of being a victim yet being responsible for their own choices.”

This is called victim-blaming and it is very common among people who hear stories like this, especially if the victim is a woman. While you did give an explanation, it’s a tired argument, and in other circumstances usually involves asking what the woman was wearing, where she was, if she was drinking, etc. instead of asking why people are raping or otherwise sexually abusing others.

Religious sexual abuse is especially “easy” if the woman was raised in the church. I am currently reading “Under the Banner of Heaven” and it was explaining 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart’s case, where the self-proclaimed prophet came into her room and threatened her and held her as his “wife” (and raped her) for some months.
This wouldn’t have been as easy had she not been raised in the church (this one was the LDS church, but the rapist was Fundamentalist LDS with whom the LDS church claims no affiliation). Women are completely subservient in most Bible-as-literal-truth Christian sects, and if someone has been raised to never question their doctrine, and especially an adult man over an adolescent girl then it’s doubly bad. I am just saying the sexual abusers are ALWAYS the ones to blame if they sexually abuse someone.

With believers, there is a special trust and loyalty to their church leaders and to take advantage of that, to me, makes them worse than the run of the mill scumbag sexual abuser. And don’t even get me started on the kids. I saw a documentary on a Catholic Irish priest that made my blood boil. (this last part is not related to the quote, for clarification)

It really confused me that they even included advances made by unmarried members of the clergy. It might not be professional for a pastor to date within his own congregation (I honestly don’t know if that’s the case, my pastor growing up was married already), but without distinguishing between “God wants you to get naked in my office” and “Would you like to have coffee some time?” I thought this report was too vague to be helpful.

This article is pointless without better statistics.

Actually reading the report can be interesting. It does a summary of other research. Including the little item that though 3.1% of women reported having experienced “Clergy Sexual Misconduct” (CSM) as adults, 50% of the reporters of CSM (male and female) were African-American (this can either mean they are more likely to report it or they are more often victims of it or both but it is a startling difference). The report also gives some anonymized case studies on how some victims were ‘groomed’. report

Old news to exmormons: Joe Smith who founded Mormonism told married men’s wives that God commanded them to marry him ‘spiritually.’ Sex and power. That’s what loser religious leaders always go for.