While We Panic about Sharks, the Bees Keep Stinging Away

I n the early days of the unwinding of the Catholic clerical-sexual-abuse scandal, the newspapers and the airwaves were filled with discussions of celibacy, of all things. The Catholic practice of clerical celibacy shocks and scandalizes our current sexual sensibilities, leaving nonplussed critics — some of whom should have known better — assuming that this exotic sexual practice must somehow be linked to sexual abuse among the clergy.

Of course, that never was the case, as sensible people have understood all along.

And, unhappily, subsequent scandals have attested to this. We have seen sexual abuse by celibate Catholic priests and by married Protestant pastors, by Jewish cantors and Olympic gymnastic coaches and elite tennis instructors, etc. The recent report on sexual abuse in Southern Baptist congregations documents a scandal far removed from priestly celibacy. And sexual abuse by public-school teachers is relatively common; while estimates vary, it is probably much more common than abuse by clergy, if only because the share of children in public schools is so much larger than the share of children involved in church activities.

You are many, many thousands of times more likely to be killed by a beesting than by a shark attack, but we have Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, not Bee Week, because sharks are terrifying. The list of animals that are much more likely to kill you than a shark is long and mostly unimpressive: bees, wasps, hornets, and other stinging insects of that kind; mosquitos, which typically kill ten times more people around the world every year than war does; cows and deer, which cause deadly automobile accidents. And don’t forget the lovable, dangerously territorial moose.

Talking about threats that are interesting, exotic, and rare is a way of distracting ourselves from the quotidian and plebeian dangers that we would rather not think about. And so it is with the sexual abuse of children. It is very unlikely that you or I or anybody else is going to convince the Catholic Church to change its teachings on priestly celibacy, and unlikely that any change in that practice would much affect the incidence of child sexual abuse or other sexual misbehavior on the part of clergy. But many of us would rather talk about that distant matter than the ones closer at hand — the ones that are not only close to home but literally at home.

As a practical matter, the factor that most puts a child at risk for sexual abuse is being in a home without both parents present. Divorce and so-called blended families put children at an extraordinarily elevated risk for sexual abuse: Children in such families are many times — as many as 20 times — more likely to experience sexual abuse than children with intact families. For all those “stranger danger” lectures, sexual abuse of children by a stranger is relatively rare, accounting for less than 10 percent of all cases. Abuse by an unrelated male residing in the child’s home — a stepfather, live-in boyfriend, older unrelated male child, etc. — is much more common. As the Centre for Independent Studies reports:

The 2010 US Fourth National Incidence Study of Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4) found that compared to peers in two biological parent married families, children who lived with a single parent with no cohabiting partner were five times more likely to be sexually abused; children who lived in a step-family (with married biological and non-biological parents) were eight to nine times more likely to be sexually abused; and children who lived with a single parent with a partner in the home were 20 times more likely to be sexually abused.

Step- and single-parent families accounted for only one-third (33%) of all children in the United States but accounted for more than two-thirds (66.8%) of all children who were sexually abused. The over-representation of ‘broken’ families implies that if all children in the United States lived with both married biological parents, the rate of child sexual abuse could be halved at least.

You don’t have any say over Catholic clerical discipline. You do have a say over whether you bring an unrelated male into your child’s home. We talk about the former as a way to avoid talking about the latter, and as a way of transferring culpability from ourselves and our families to distant institutions over which we have no control.

We do the same thing with many other subjects. For example, we spend a great deal of time talking about outliers such as the horrific massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde while studiously ignoring the reforms that could help reduce the ordinary crime that accounts for the vast majority of homicides in our country.

E.g.:

Writing in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof posits that shootings might be reduced by means of high-tech “smart guns” that fire only when in the hand of their legal owner. Never mind, for the moment, that such guns do not quite exist as commercial propositions rather than as thought experiments and a few prototypes and props in James Bond movies — there are millions and millions of guns already circulating in the United States, and it seems unlikely, to say the least, that criminals will give these up for Kristof’s smart guns, even if they should happen to come onto the market.

Kristof also writes that we might reduce crime by more rigorously enforcing laws against “straw purchases,” which are used to get around background checks — but he never asks why it is that we do not rigorously enforce those laws already. Kristof and New York Times–reading progressives want those laws enforced, or so they say; so do the National Rifle Association and many other guns-rights defenders, myself included. But in Democrat-controlled cities in Democrat-controlled states, these laws go unenforced and the offenders unprosecuted. The federal government at times publicly refuses to enforce these laws unless it is as part of a larger organized-crime investigation, as in the case of the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

Why?

Kristof writes a great deal about guns, but very little about shooters. He might consult his own newspaper’s reporting, which has found that four out of five of the murders committed in New York City are committed by offenders with prior arrest records. In many cases, these include prior weapons offenses. The same has held true in studies of crime in other high-crime cities. Statistically, the number of homicides that are committed by means of semiautomatic rifles is negligible: All rifles together account for only about 2.5 percent of homicides. But Kristof and others like him would rather focus on the maybe 1 percent of murders that involve culturally resonant “assault style” rifles than the 83 percent that involve prior offenders.

As it turns out, crime is committed by criminals.

When it comes to child sexual abuse, progressives want to talk about the Vatican, not the domestic choices of American single mothers. Similarly, Kristof and others like him would prefer a gun-violence story in which the offender is the National Rifle Association over a story in which the offender is a body of habitual criminals who are disproportionately young black men. African Americans make up about 12.5 percent of the population but accounted for 52.6 percent of those arrested for murder in 2016, according to FBI data. More aggressive prosecution of weapons offenses, including simple illegal possession, would mean locking up offenders who almost certainly would be disproportionately young, black, and poor; more aggressive prosecution of straw-buyers would mean locking up offenders who almost certainly would be the girlfriends, grandmothers, and nephews of the criminals in the first group. The fact that straw-buyers are mostly sympathetic defendants is the reason we do not prosecute those cases — I have heard this straight from the mouths of retired law-enforcement officials. For local prosecutors, going after straw-buyers is bad politics, and to the feds, it’s a waste of time.

For some perspective, consider this: The ATF doesn’t even bother to go pick up firearms that are sold in transactions erroneously approved by the federal background-check system — we have the names and addresses of the buyers, the make, model, and serial number of the guns, and documentation that the sale was wrongly approved, but we don’t bother to take those guns out of the hands of people who are legally prohibited from buying them. Why? Because law-enforcement bureaucracies exhibit the same characteristics as other bureaucracies.

I don’t particularly care for the National Rifle Association, and I have some criticisms to make of the Catholic Church hierarchy, too. But it is silly and dishonest to pretend that our problems and the sources of those problems are other than what they are. Though shark attacks happen, as a practical matter, we don’t have a shark problem — we have a bee problem: ordinary, undramatic social pathologies related to family breakdown, misgovernance, deficient law enforcement, an ineffective criminal-justice system, shockingly dysfunctional schools, etc. But we don’t pick the policies that are likely to prove lasting solutions — we pick the villain who suits us best politically and proceed from there.

If you need evidence for how badly that works, just look around you.