Of course I had to try to dig up a little of the research to which you refer. Here’s a recent piece in a South Florida paper, “Misconceptions abound in child sexual abuse”, inspired by the misinformation streaming out of the media in the wake of the Foley revelations. The main point: girls are the primary victims of child sexual abuse, and men are the primary perpetrators. This journalist cited a long-term CDC study, which I dug around a little and couldn’t find. But according to this journalist, the CDC report found that “heterosexual men were responsible for 94 percent of the abuse committed against girls.”

But I did go to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center site, and found a study released in 2000 on Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement, and it includes comprehensive data from 12 states over the course of over five years.

Extremely tough reading, given the cold hard facts in it, but the corroborating details are: (a) “Females were more than six times as likely as males to be the victims of sexual assaults known to law enforcement agencies. More specifically, 86% of all victims of sexual assault were female,” and (b) Nearly all of the offenders in sexual assaults reported to law enforcement were male (96%).”

It seems a little hard to convey, in print, the combined package of the shoulders hiked up, and the head shaking back and forth really fast, all the while emitting the creeped-out/chilly “brrrrrr” sound. But if I could, that’s what I’d do.

Next you’re going to tell me that faiths that ordain women see child sexual abuse by
priests go down…

I know it to be true, but cannot cite the study, that 99 % of all child sexual abuse,
against boys and girls, is perpetrated by straight men. It saddens me that that fact is
lacking from almost all discussions of the issue, as if we somehow need to be fair.
Also, it of course allows for people to confuse the abuse of boys by men with
homosexuality which is criminal (the confusion).