Behind the latest Catholic sex abuse scandal: The church’s problem is male dominance | Salon.com
▻https://www.salon.com/2018/08/16/behind-the-latest-catholic-sex-abuse-scandal-the-churchs-problem-is-male-domi
So there’s no real conflict in the Catholic Church covering up sexual abuse while trying to prevent women from accessing legal and safe abortion services. In both situations, it’s about using sexuality as a tool to enforce patriarchal hierarchies. In both cases, it’s about a group of conservative men conspiring to organize the world so they hold power and everyone else is subject to their whims.
Shame is a major factor here too. The same sexual shame that religious conservatives try to instill with restrictions on reproductive rights is also used to silence victims of sexual abuse. It’s difficult for victims to speak up, precisely because so much shame is built up around sexuality. Victims, male and female, are often subject to people digging through their sexual pasts, using their consensual activities as “evidence” that they’re dirty and therefore undeserving of protection against abuse.
It’s possible that one reason more survivors of abuse are willing to speak out these days is that the pro-choice movement has done so much work in destigmatizing consensual sex. The fear that victims used to experience — of being outed as someone who has consensual sex and quite likely enjoys it — no longer has the power it used to have, creating more space to speak out.
Ultimately, the lesson here is there is no way for religious groups to preserve their traditions of male dominance and sexual shaming while also eradicating sexual abuse. The sheer number of priests who have molested children confirms what experts have long said about sexual predators, which is that they deliberately seek out spaces where they believe they can leverage shame and power to abuse people. As uncomfortable as this is for many to accept, the Roman Catholic Church created a perfect hunting ground because of its ingrained sexism, its hierarchical structure and its culture of sexual shaming. The only way to root out the abuse is to root out those patriarchal values.