An estimate of the number of victims of sexual abuse in the Church

In sixty-four countries, I estimate between 420,000 and a little more than a million victims of sexual abuse of almost 17,000 predator clergymen.

The figures follow the criteria for international comparisons set by the Sauvé Report on sexual abuse in the French Church of a three percent rate of predators among Catholic clergymen.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

Based on the criteria set by the Sauvé Report, today I am presenting an estimate of the total number of victims in the sixty-four countries that I have considered in this series.

The Sauvé Report, commissioned by the national conference of Catholic Bishops in France, set a minimum of three percent of the total male clergy, both ordained and non-ordained male religious as a base for international comparisons on sexual abuse, as it appears on p. 162 of the English version of the report.

The Sauvé Report states that “a rate of around three percent of priests and members of religious orders who committed sexual violence against children, constitutes a minimum rate and a relevant point of comparison with other countries.”

I cannot replicate the entire procedure followed by the Sauvé Report for each of the sixty-four countries in the sample. They were able to calculate the overall number of victims of sexual abuse at large and clergy sexual abuse in the second half of the 20th century using a poll with an exceptionally large sample, which allowed them to calculate the number of victims of sexual abuse over an extended period.

My estimates are “static” in the sense that I only consider the current number of priests in the sixty-four countries in the sample, and I do not try to calculate sexual abuse over different periods of time as the French report does.

Also, I should emphasize that the sixty-four countries in the sample do not represent the total Catholic population worldwide. There are countries and territories that I have been unable to consider, as China, due to the absence of reliable information on the Church there.

I also have excluded small European countries such as Luxembourg or Andorra, and I have excluded all the countries with a Muslim majority. I include India since the information is readily available and the Catholic minority in that country represents over seventeen million persons.

Parameters

Following the parameters set by the Sauvé Report for each country I offer an upper limit or maximum and a lower limit or minimum estimate. The Sauvé Report includes three estimates of the number of victims for each sexual predator. Those estimates assume 25 through 63 victims per predator, with a “middle-of-the-ground” figure of thirty-five victims per predator.

In this piece I only offer an upper and lower of the estimate limit using the 25 and 63 victims per predator data as the base for the estimates for each country. In other reports, as the one issued by the Australian Parliament, the Royal Commission, there are dioceses with up to fifteen percent of the clergy involved in sexual abuse. If that was the case for other dioceses, then the limits of the range would need to be multiplied by a factor of five.

As I have done in previous installments of this series, I organize the countries in regions. In the English-speaking version of this piece, I start with North America (Canada and the United States), while in the Spanish-speaking version I begin with Latin America.

I provide these figures in the expectation that the Church will acknowledge the extent of the damage its policies on this crisis bring to the victims of said policies.

Main problem is that if one reads what Pope Francis, and before him Pope Benedict XVI, the hierarchy of the Church seems to be aware of the damage they bring upon the victims when they dismiss them or, as in the case of Peru and other countries, some bishops or their local supporters go as far as to chastise and harass the victims of sexual abuse, their lawyers, and journalists.

That dissonant attitude is neurotic to say the least. It makes it hard to believe in what key actors of the Church say regarding abuse and the “spirituality of reparation,” as Pope Francis framed his approach during his meeting with the members of the Commission for the Protection of Minors in early May of this year.

Now the estimates per region, country and for the range already indicated previously of 25 through 63 victims per predator, with three percent of the male clergy, ordained and non-ordained, considered as predator as the base for the overall calculation in each country. The number is the product of adding the Total priests and the Male religious columns at this page.

Therefore, the estimates I am offering here, are only of the number of victims of the priests reported as providing services at this time in the Catholic Church, and not an historical report of all the victims of clergy sexual abuse.

North America

This region includes Canada and the United States, and somewhere between 60, 000 and over 151, 000 victims.

Latin America

This region includes all the Spanish-speaking countries in the Western hemisphere, Brazil, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. I estimate the number of victims as somewhere between 79, 000 and 200, 000.

Europe

I estimate the number of European victims as somewhere from 204, 000 to 516, 000.

Notice that Europe offers higher estimates of victims than Latin America.

It is important to stress that, in this model, the number of victims depends on the number of clergymen providing services and not on the population in each country or region.

Asia Pacific

In the Asia Pacific region, I estimate somewhere between 47, 000 and 120, 000 victims of clergy sexual abuse. Again, the number of victims is a by-product of the number of clergymen in each region, and not a function of the overall population in the country or region.

Africa

Finally, I only include sixteen countries from Africa. As I have explained before, not all the countries provide enough information.

For the countries included in the sample, I estimate somewhere between 29, 000 and almost 75, 000 victims of clergy sexual abuse.

For the sixty-four countries in the sample there are 561, 554 clergymen. Of them, 364, 520 are ordained priests, and the rest, 197, 034 are non-ordained religious males. These figures do not include neither bishops nor permanent deacons.

I estimate the total number of predator Catholic clergymen as 16, 847 for the countries in the sample.

Likewise, the total number of victims in the lower limit of the estimate is 421, 166 and one million sixty-one thousand 337 victims in the upper limit of the estimate.

English Edition

The bottomless abyss of the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church