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Criminal Justice and Behavior, Vol. 35, No. 5, 570-582 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0093854808314340
© 2008 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology

Trajectories of Abuse and Disclosure

Child Sexual Abuse by Catholic Priests

Margaret Leland Smith

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, mlsjjc{at}gmail.com

Andres F. Rengifo

University of Missouri at St. Louis

Brenda K. Vollman

John Jay College of Criminal Justice City University of New York Graduate Center

The distribution of the incidents of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the United States (event structure) and the reports of these abuse events (reporting structure ) present two distinct trajectories, confounding existing individual-level research results. Data from an institutional census of records of abuse between 1950 and 2002 show a steady increase in cases through the late 1970s and early 1980s, followed by a surge in reporting in the mid-1990s and again in 2002. These patterns are stable throughout all regions of the Catholic Church in the United States. Rather than analyze the abuse or reporting from a conventionally individual, psychological framework, this research reframes the analyses for the event structure and the reporting of abuse by priests.

Key Words: sexual abuse • prevalence • incidence • priests


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