Experts on sex offenders have news for Vatican: abusers' behavior does not stem from orientation, studies show

Vatican officials, in their search to blame the sexual abuse scandal on someone or something external to institutional and doctrinal failings of the church itself, conflated sexual orientation with psychosexual maturation and with criminal behavior. Psychosexually mature, adult homosexual men have consensual sex with other adult men much as psychosexually mature, adult heterosexual men have consensual sex with adult women. Criminal heterosexuals sexually violate adult women and children of both genders; almost surely some criminal homosexuals sexually victimize adult men and some minors. These are crimes of power, ultimately having little to do with sex or the sexual orientation of the criminal. Both in and out of the priesthood, there also may be some psychosexually immature heterosexual and homosexual men who turn to minors of either gender because, in the subjective experience of the offender, the young people are experienced as psychosexual peers.

The Vatican's proposed limitations on gay priests will, of course, have no impact on these groups, other than implicitly directing them to remain psychosexually immature, silent about their sexual orientation, and thus potentially dangerous to adult parishioners and minors. Instead, the Vatican's policy will primarily persecute gay men who have accepted their homosexuality enough to speak about it.

[Mary Gall Frawley-O'Dea, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in Charlotte, N.C., where she treats survivors of childhood sexual abuse. She addressed the U.S. bishops' meeting in Dallas in 2002 on the long-term consequences of sexual abuse. Her book Perversion of Power and Sexual Scandal in the Catholic Church: A Psychosocial Analysis of the Sexual Abuse Crisis will be published by Vanderbilt University Press in 2006. She coedited a book Predatory Priests and Silent Victims to be published by The Analytic Press in 2006. She is the coauthor of Treating the Adult Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse (Basic Books, 1994), which has become a classic text.]

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