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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Parents care about the probability of their kid being victimized. They don’t care whether 1 priest abuses 10 kids in a congregation of 300 or 10 teachers abuse 10 kids in a school of 300. The relevant metric is number complaints normalized by the relevant potential victim population. There’s more complaints in one year against schools than in 50 years against the Catholic Church. Yes, that’s partly because way more people attend school (everyone) than attend Catholic church regularly. But the difference isn’t a factor of 50. In the relevant period—complaints peaked in the 1980s—probably 1 in 8 Americans attended Catholic Church weekly. (Probably even more than that because families with children are much more likely to attend church.)

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Okay, so say you have a kid and you're putting them into bible study and you have a choice between two sessions, one with 20 kids and an instructor that has a 5% chance of being abusive, and another with 10 kids and an instructor with 9.5% chance of being abusive. You would suggest the latter is better because the odds are better for your kid?

The expectation is higher in the first case, but then chances that it's your particular kid would be 1/group size. So I guess it would be more accurate to have 5 kids in the first group to make it 1% vs .95%. That's still not any better is it?

At the end of the day, it boils down to this.

Do you rather have your kid to have big N% chance of being abused, or small n%. At a micro level, you might get more control, but at the macro level, the results in aggregate are what matter.

> The relevant metric is number complaints normalized by the relevant potential victim population.

It's obvious there's problems with either rate you'd choose for either task.

We have varying degrees of exposure / vulnerability within the populations. Neither one really directly leads to a "risk per unit of exposure of child" or "risk of a given person being an offender".

But it seems like you have some pretty motivated reasoning going on: it sure looks like religious organizations have not done well, and are relatively likely to be much worse per unit of youth exposure.

That’s exactly the point though—where is the evidence that churches are doing “much worse per unit of youth exposure?” OP asserts that religious organizations are doing especially bad, but makes no effort to compare sexual abuse rates there against the base rate. OP is the one engaged in motivated reasoning.

An important fact that gets overlooked is that religious organizations are one of the few aspects of civil society that put children in contact with adults. Really the only secular organizations that do so at a large scale are daycares, schools, and sports. It makes no sense to assert, as OP did, that churches are especially full of pedophiles, without offering a comparison against the other environments where children are exposed to adults.

Actually, they've provided evidence (somewhat flawed) that you've tried to wave away with other evidence/preferring another rate (that seems more flawed to me).

Religious organizations have a) smaller number of personnel, b) fewer youth contacts in total, c) lower hours of contact per average youth than your comparison organizations. We can debate about the importance of each of these in the denominator, but they're all signifiers.

Worse, you're trying to compare numbers for schools that include student-on-student sexual violence (the vast majority of cases) to complaints against staff and clergy for churches.

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