Clergy sexual misconduct, however, is limited neither to the Roman Catholic Church nor to boarding schools on other continents. While firm numbers about the prevalence of clergy sexual misconduct are hard to come by, those working to prevent such damaging misbehavior say cases fall into common patterns.
Often, the perpetrator is male and married. Often, the victim is an adult woman from the congregation — many times someone who has turned to the minister for counseling or assistance at a vulnerable time. Usually, there is an imbalance of power in their relationship.
And while what happens between them often takes place behind closed doors, the ripple effects of the misconduct can be felt throughout the congregation — sometimes for years, as trust is demolished and congregants take sides in the resulting dispute.
Most victims are adults
For Protestant denominations, few statistics are available on how prevalent clergy sexual misconduct is, although some in the field say anecdotal evidence has convinced them the numbers are significant.
“This is not an isolated problem,” said Diana Garland, dean of the School of Social Work at Baylor University in Texas and the co-author along with Mark Chaves of Duke University of a study of clergy sexual misconduct released in 2009.
“Clergy sexual misconduct of adults is far more widespread than clergy sexual abuse of children,” Garland said. “And it’s a problem that’s not addressed because it’s confused with consensual sexual relationships.”
The Baylor study involved a national, random survey conducted in 2008 with 3,559 persons, as well as phone interviews with 59 people — from 17 denominations in the Christian and Jewish traditions — who had experienced clergy sexual misconduct as adults.
That study concluded that:
» More than 3 percent of women who had attended a congregation in the last month had experienced clergy sexual misconduct at some point in their adult lives;
» Of the whole sample, 8 percent said they knew of clergy sexual misconduct having taken place in a congregation where they had attended worship.
Waking from denial
Protestant denominations, aware of the tumult within the Catholic Church over cases of clergy sexual abuse and the damage and litigation that have resulted from the church’s flawed response, have begun to consider their own responsibilities. The United Methodist Church, for example, convened a “Do No Harm” meeting in January, pulling in 320 ministers and lay leaders to a summit in Houston to discuss issues such as pornography, sexual abuse and sexual harassment.
“The good news is that a steadily increasing number of United Methodists in leadership have awoken from the sleep of denial and apathy,” M. Garlinda Burton, general secretary of the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women, told that gathering, according to the United Methodist Reporter.
The PC(USA) is encouraging both presbyteries and congregations to adopt sexual misconduct policies and to offer training.
In July 2010, the General Assembly of the PC(USA) approved a proposed amendment to the denomination’s constitution — which must be approved by a majority of the 173 presbyteries to take effect — to require all governing bodies in the denomination, including sessions, to have a sexual misconduct policy.
The PC(USA) has no mechanism for comprehensively collecting reports on ministers accused of sexual misconduct, said Laurie Griffith, the denomination’s manager of judicial process and social witness. Disciplinary cases are handled at the local governing body level, so her office doesn’t receive a report unless a minister is removed permanently or temporarily from office. Even then, the reason for removal is not specified, and could be anything from embezzling to sexual misconduct.
“That being said, anecdotally it’s pretty clear that a significant percentage of the disciplinary cases and offenses do have to do with sexual misconduct,” Griffith said. “What the percentage is, I don’t know that, but it’s a pretty significant percentage, at least up to 50 percent.”
While in most cases both the offender and the victim are adults, there also have been cases of adults in congregations sexually abusing teenagers or children.
Why does this happen?
The research literature and interviews with ministers who have been in treatment for sexual misconduct suggest that, at one extreme, offenders include “pastors who actually sought out being religious leaders because of the access it gave them — they had sociopathic tendencies, or they were predators,” Garland said. At the opposite extreme, she said, are “pastors who are just working hard, have got stress on them, begin to feel entitled, they’re working so hard for God that it’s OK” to cross sexual boundaries.
Imbalance of power
Congregants often see their pastors as spiritual leaders, caregivers, people to be trusted. Sometimes ministers use that power to cross boundaries, which is made easier if they have been given considerable authority with little accountability.
In the interviews, victims of clergy sexual misconduct said that “often, pastors used prayer as the beginning of seduction, holding her hand in prayer and holding it a little too long, caressing her hand,” Garland said. “An embrace that becomes too close and too warm. Language — ‘God sent you to me … I need you as my partner in ministry.’ ”
When the advances are couched in theological language, it can take time for the victim to realize the pastor’s behavior is inappropriate. “Often, a woman believes she was at fault, that she had somehow signaled to her religious leader that she was sexually available,” Garland said.
The researchers also interviewed some women who were victims in cases involving sexual misconduct by female pastors. “The abuse of power is not a respecter of sexual orientation,” Garland said. “Power is power.”
Ongoing counseling relationships
Often, the misconduct occurs when a parishioner approaches a pastor seeking counseling — sometimes because of a divorce or other family difficulty or depression — and an ongoing counseling relationship is established. This is different, Garland said, than the common situation in which a parishioner turns to the pastor for short-term support.
“I certainly think pastoral care is very appropriate,” she said. “We’re there at the deaths and births and crises, offering pastoral care. That’s very different from saying, ‘Come and see me every Wednesday at 10 o’clock and we’ll work through the problems in your marriage.’ ”
Often in abusive relationships, the pastor entrenches himself in the woman’s life at a time when she is vulnerable. “For many of them, they didn’t seek the counseling,” Garland said. “The pastor recognized they were in some type of crisis and offered the (ongoing) counseling. That’s not typical.”
Congregational response
When an accusation of clergy sexual misconduct is made or the word seeps out, “usually the first reaction is to try to cover it up and hide it,” Garland said. “People say things like, `We don’t want to destroy the witness of our church in the community.”
People can be quick to blame the victim. “I heard often that ‘Don’t you think women come on to their pastors?’ ” Garland said. “That’s not the question. Certainly that happens.” But regardless of who introduces a sexual element into the relationship, she said, it’s the responsibility of the person in a position of power to stop it — as an adult in authority would be expected to do if a teenager made sexual overtures.
And “often the language we use is ‘affair,’ which implies mutual consent,” Garland said. People see it as “a private relationship, and we see it as immoral … That’s very different than abuse of power. Power is given to people by communities. That makes us responsible as a community.”
The accusation of misconduct often is divisive for a congregation, Griffith said.
“You get factions, people who start taking sides … It causes a lot of hurt in the community.”
Having a code of ethics or a congregational policy on sexual misconduct gives people language and a framework for discussing these issues as an abuse of power, Garland said.
“In most congregations, you will hear it quietly whispered about an affair that’s covered up. If the woman is asking for support, sometimes she is given a sum of money to pay for counseling services if she agrees to stay silent, which means the pastor can stay in the congregation and she leaves. In virtually every case, the victim lost her community. She was in crisis already. She becomes the scapegoat. If she tries to stay in the congregation she’s ostracized, and often she leaves,” sometimes losing her faith in God in the process. “The trauma comes from the community that does not believe them.”
Setting boundaries
Amy Delaney, a Presbyterian minister, helps conduct required sexual misconduct prevention workshops for the Seattle and North Puget Sound presbyteries, using the “A Sacred Trust” materials from the Faith Trust Institute in Seattle.
In the workshops, participants talk about setting up appropriate boundaries in ministry — including what are appropriate and inappropriate friendships; the limits for private counseling and spiritual direction; accepting gifts from congregants; and the complexities posed by communications technologies such as texting and instant messaging. “It used to be that to get hold of someone at home, you had to call the family phone number,” Delaney said. “Now you can get a private message to just one person in the family.”
Always, “the responsibility is with the leader” — the pastor, elder, Christian educator or youth ministry leader — “to hold that boundary,” Delaney said. “There are just no exceptions. You’re not an exception; no one on your staff is an exception. Once people start to claim they’re an exception, it’s a big red flag.”
Pastors are encouraged to have accountability groups or partners and self-care plans. “If you’re not taking good care of yourself,” Delaney said, “you’re more likely to collapse those boundaries.”
