A serious sex abuse problem in Los Angeles schools: What is going on?
Reports of rampant child sex abuse committed at an elementary school in Los Angeles continue to explode. On the heels of other recent shocking reports involving child sex abuse in L.A. schools, NBC4 in Los Angeles has reported:
"On the same day that attorneys for students at Miramonte Elementary School announced that four additional lawsuits have been filed against LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] over alleged sexual abuse at the school, the district said it faces 189 claims resulting from the scandal …
"The claims are on behalf of 126 students, with the remainder from their family members, [LAUSD general counsel David] Holmquist said."
189 claims?? 126 students? From just one school?
Is there any doubt that if there were 189 claims at a single Catholic parish that there would be screaming front-page headlines in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Huffington Post? One can easily imagine the folks at the Times becoming hysterical and calling for the federalization of the Catholic Church.
Once again: Double … standard.
Hmmm, MUST be priests moonlighting at that school….'tis the only RATIONAL explanation.
WOW. That is a huge number.
Once again, we have to ask ourselves: Given so much abuse in so many venues, why the almost 30-year focus on the Church and the Church alone? I recall reading in the past few days that some legislator somewhere is angling for yet another ‘sex abuse’ Bill … that doesn’t include public schools (and the members of the teachers’ union – and I make this point with all due respect to hard-working public-school teachers).
Again, it is not credible – in my opinion – that the explanation for this sustained campaign is that the government and the public are deeply and urgently moved by the (dubious) theological point that the Church is “unique”. Nor, clearly, is it accurate to assert that there is more ‘abuse’ in the Church than anywhere else, as TMR points out in this article: if any parish had 189 reported allegations or instances of ‘abuse’, one might credibly imagine some push for “federalization” of the Church or putting it under some sort of police-governed “receivership” whereby all of its activities would be overseen by police (or DA) personnel.
Needless to say, if we apply the same SNAP or Bishop-Accountability type ‘extrapolation’ technique to the numbers of possible abuse that has for so long been applied to the Church, then you can multiply the number of schools in the LAUSD by 189 and see what number you come up with. If that seems rather a gratuitously unfair and scientifically dubious gambit, then you can imagine how the Church might also have felt for all these decades.
And if you're up for it, you can then take that number and multiply it by any number of years, say 5 or 10 or 30 or 50.
So then, using techniques of the ‘science’ of extrapolation we have seen for decades deployed in the Catholic Abuse Matter, I would submit the following calculations:
189 incidents at one school; and there are (by Wiki’s count today) 658 schools in the LAUSD: 189 x 658 = 124, 632 possible instances of abuse (and mostly ‘rape’ – however defined – if you prefer).
The LAUSD was formally erected in 1961, so let’s multiply 124,632 by those 51 years, which comes out to 6,356,232 possible cases of sexual abuse (and mostly ‘rape’ – however defined – if you prefer).
But of course ‘everybody knows’ and it is ‘scientifically proven’ that there are at least 9 un-reported cases for every reported case, so now take that 6,356,232 and multiply it by 9, and we get 57,206,088. That is to say: already ‘established’ ‘science’ as deployed for decades in the Catholic Sex Abuse Matter will yield – on just the basic calculations – 57 million, 206 thousand, and 88 possible cases of abuse (and mostly ‘rape’ – however defined – if you prefer). (And also ‘probable’ if you prefer.)
Just doing the math here.
Upon reflection it comes to me that I may have made a math mistake here: must we not then add that 57,206,088 to the original 6,356,232? Which would yield 63,563,230 possible (or probable) instances of abuse (and mostly ‘rape’ – however defined – if you prefer).
Pub, you forgot to include any and all "credible" allegations, which can and do include off the cuff comments about pubic hairs. Once you do that, the math will go to "infinity and beyond", and >snap< (pun intended): instant crisis, just add water. Oh….wait….there is no real money for litigious trial lawyers to go after, thus, no real sensational headlines…….never mind.
I believe you're on to something, Ken W. Once the basic numbers-game is in place, then the variations and add-ons are conceptually almost limitless. Defining the spectrum of what constitutes abuse can be expanded like an accordion; the assertion that any such 'abuse' – no matter how low on the spectrum – creates life-devastating consequences (which is especially useful in civil tort trials to establish a base for 'damages' to be awarded); and so on.
Are you counting the number of angels dancing on pin heads? (another pun intended)
Apparently the word 'counting' has tripped a wire you-know-where. But the question is one that should be put to the Game: how many devils have they created that are theoretically dancing around?
But to more serious matters.
Following up on that thought I put up at 1024 AM: once the ‘numbers’ were there to such a shocking (though - as we have seen – ungrounded) extent, then all the later and somewhat dubious if not sleazy additional tweaking could surf the shock and outrage created by the initially stunning ‘numbers’.
Redefine evidence to include unexamined stories; presume unexamined allegations are all true by their very nature as victim-stories; accept the most incredible ‘explanations’ for how such ‘stories’ could have worked out in actual events (‘repressed memory’ is a major example here); profoundly weaken legal rights of the accused and even reverse the presumption-of-innocence vital to American and Western justice … all that and more achieved and achievable because of the ‘emergency’ created by those ‘numbers’.
And this brings up an interesting bi-valence in the LAUSD matter: on the one hand, abuse (properly defined) is something that should be reduced as much as workably possible and, additionally, any organization that works toward that end will benefit from the improvements to its integrity. On the other hand, this LAUSD matter offers an excellent chance to see how the SNAP-py Game-plan operates: by seeing it deployed in a setting other than the Church setting (where people over 30 years seem to have gotten the idea that abuse naturally and ‘uniquely’ resides), we can see the full treacherous and sly whackness of the Game-plan. (And perhaps as Citizens wonder how the heck such whackness gained and sustained such traction among us for 30 years.)
Of course, many ‘special interest’ elements working behind the scenes to further the Catholic Abuse ‘Crisis’ aren’t going to be anywhere near so eager to support the same type of whackness against a major public employee union; and the unions – far more savvy in recognizing the government’s dark-side when it’s aimed right at them – probably aren’t going to sit still for it.
Thus when DP (rightly) notes in various articles that there isn’t anywhere near the media outcry about public-venue abuse as there is and has been for so long about the Church, we are seeing in that phenomenon he mentions precisely the type of before-the-fact prevention of such campaigns by savvy public organizations that the SNAP-ish dogma likes to attribute (clearly inaccurately) to the Church: that is to say, that the Church can prevent media coverage and court cases and so forth.
And really – given the legally lethal whackness of the Abuse Game – who can blame the public organizations and their unions for wishing to prevent themselves becoming the target of such a campaign? If the public service organizations and their unions work hard to prevent themselves becoming such a target of such a campaign, it cannot simply be concluded that obviously the only reason they are doing so is because they ‘defend’ or ‘support’ abuse or pedophilia or what-have-you. It may simply be that they realize clear as a bell that once you are downrange of this Game’s Stampede, you are not going to be able to legally and rationally defend yourself; once a Stampede starts, rationality is no longer in play. And when rationality goes, Western justice goes.
None of this is intended to accept ‘abuse’ (properly defined) anywhere against anybody at any time. Rather, it is intended to give some idea of the complex consequences that have been generated by the Game’s ginning up of Stampedes to begin with: once you’ve started one, then you are not only facing a) the problem of abuse (properly defined) but you are also facing b) the consequences and problems created by the Stampede you have started to attack/eliminate/deal-with that abuse.
Thus, having set fire to the ship to get at the rats you have convinced yourself are aboard in epic and epidemic numbers, you soon have to deal not only with a) the rats (in such numbers as they may be aboard, and no ship is entirely rat-free) but also with b) the damage caused by the fire you yourself have started.
That makes for a lot of ‘splainin’ to do (thank you, Ricky Ricardo).
And this Game deploys many of the same dynamics that many Americans alive today saw in the old Bomber-Gap and Missile-Gap Stampedes of the 1950s: the Soviets were supposed to have scads of nuke-carrying ICBMs and bombers (including one seaplane version with 10 engines that would theoretically skim across the Pacific at about 30 feet, invisible to radar, and suddenly pop up to bombing altitude off the PCH in Malibu … in the middle of those Stampedes, nobody here stopped to ask how all that seawater sucked into the engines would affect the bomber’s performance). For that matter, we saw the same sort of thing with Iraq’s WMD (remember those?) only a decade ago … a decade that has seen this country initiate and become bogged down in the longest and most self-devastating ‘war’ it has ever gotten itself into – with profound ill-consequences that are still playing-out today.
For those who are already planning their reading for the New Year, I could strongly and happily recommend Christopher Dawson’s excellent 1949 book Religion and the Rise of the West. By religion Dawson means Latin Christianity and Catholicism, and he covers the years of the Dark Ages and the Medieval era (from the first missionary efforts to Northern Europe in the 5th century to the 13th century flowering of the Medieval).
In doing so I am not recommending any sort of gooey and sentimental pining-for those eras, nor am I suggesting that we would all be better off ‘going back’. Rather, I am suggesting that Catholics become more familiar with the challenges, achievements, and motivations of the Church in what few today realize were so profoundly violent and conflicted times.
This is especially true if you have read the larger and more comprehensive historical overview given by Diarmaid MacCulloch in his Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, published a few years ago, which I recommended – and still do – a few articles back. That author – as you may have noticed as you got into the book – is a bit over-impressed with the post-Vatican 2 developments informed by ‘liberalism’ – so-called – and approaches the Roman Catholic history from a rather less-vertebrate ‘Anglican’ viewpoint (i.e., let’s all just make some adjustments and be happy together instead of being stodgy and insisting on stuff).
While nothing in these books directly relates to the Catholic Abuse Matter (although MacCulloch does mention it in a few paragraphs towards the end of his book), I think the reading will give Catholics a better grasp of their own Church history, vitally and necessarily expanding the somewhat skewed material most folks will have seen or heard flying by them in recent decades. It is the lack of such grounded awareness of their rather impressive history as a Church that has contributed to a certain if subdued demoralization among Catholics nowadays. We have nothing to be demoralized about and the Church has been wrestling with her own self-reformation for quite some time, and not at all unsuccessfully.
Wow you do work extra hard making mountains out of mole hills. And all this effort because you (and it isn't even you) have to compensate victims. Congrats. Jesus scores again.. If we tell u our stories are very heavily wieghed. by YOUR side, before compensation is (if it is) ever given. You ignore it.
We are not trustworthy. But the people who transfered child molesters to unsuspecting parishiners are worthy of your trust and your support and even your mendacity.Nope unimportant to you. No thanks says you " we will stick to our paranoid fatasies."
If we ask you the odds of someone unscrupulous scaming the Church (chickens coming home to roost, Karma in my opinion.) and every one tells you including the John Jay report, that it's no more than 2 to 3%. You ignore it because you think we and the media want to destroy your faith. Something no one even cares about doing. We have no interest in your imaginings. We just want harmed people helped. And to top it all off you have no proof of any of your claims. Which is exactly the same thing that you accuse victims of doing. I can only think of the title of an old George S. Kaufman play: Idiot's Delight.
Thank you, everyone, for your contributions! I am going to close this comment thread.
Peace!
My 3 year old son was raped at his LAUSD preschool, we went to the school, to the police, to the district attorney in May 2011. We wrote to the board of directors, superintendent, city council, mayor, governor, president, etc. We begged, pleaded, threatened and fought for justice. Most victims are too traumatized to speak out, but those who do speak out face agonizing scrutiny. Our lives hearts are broken, our souls are tourmented and our lives are ruined. We are among the hundreds of victims. But our voices mean nothing to the world.