U.S. Protestants face abuse scandals, too

The flood of sex abuse allegations against priests this year has focused attention on the Roman Catholic Church, but Protestant denominations have also faced sex scandals involving clergy over the years.

In fact, while data are sketchy, at least one expert believes the incidence of clergy molesting young children may be about as frequent -- or infrequent -- in Protestantism as it is in Catholicism.

Others have found Protestant scandals have a tendency to surface in cases where male ministers are counseling women or teen-age girls, while the allegations against priests have frequently involved underage males.

Penn State historian Philip Jenkins argued in his 1996 book, "Pedophiles and Priests," that both secular and Catholic media exaggerate the extent of Catholic cases involving minors, while downplaying Protestant abuse.

For instance, the Rev. Robert Eckert of Grand Rapids, Mich., a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was sent to prison in 2000 for sexual involvement with a 15-year-old girl who worked as his baby sitter -- but the case received relatively little attention.

Jenkins, an Episcopalian, thinks a 1992 survey from the Chicago Archdiocese is more representative of the true picture in Catholicism.

Among 2,252 priests serving over four decades, 39 priests (1.7 percent) apparently abused minors. Only one abuser could be termed a pedophile under the strict, clinical definition of the word -- meaning the victim was prepubescent.

"I am prepared to be convinced the Catholics have a bigger problem" than Protestants, Jenkins said, but nobody has good data, partly because Protestant groups are too numerous. "I certainly haven't seen anything, and I'm looking hard."

Minneapolis psychologist Gary Schoener agreed.

"There are no real scientific data" on Protestants, he said. Since 1974, his Walk-In Counseling Center has been consulted on more than 2,000 cases of clergy sexual misconduct of all types, two-thirds of them with Protestants.

He finds that sex with adult women or teen-age girls is the most frequent Protestant problem.

$10 million award

In a typical Protestant case, a jury awarded $10 million in February to relatives of the late Deborah Yardley of Columbus, Ohio.

The suit charged that the Rev. Steven Colliflower, a United Methodist, had an affair with Yardley when she sought his help with alcohol and emotional problems. He left the ministry shortly after she made the allegation. She later died of liver disease.

The conservative World magazine says Protestantism faces a "severe problem" of clergy involvement with people the ministers are counseling, calling this "an egregious abuse of power."

Schoener said that clergy having sex with prepubescent victims is "very rare" in all denominations.