Good morning ElissaF. No apology required. I think both of us are correct.

Pedophilia is such a sensitive issue, government data is difficult for the public to access – which explains the number of non-profits (like Rainn) working on this issue. If I am correct, you are looking at national data – not institution specific data. If so, I think your numbers are as close to correct, as they can be (legally speaking).

However, the general public, including non-profits, has limited access to government data – and usually for good reasons too. When data can be used to identify individuals, access is restricted. This is especially true when data involves children, the victims of crimes, sensitive personal/private information (like sexual preferences, religious practices, medical and mental health information), and national security (of course). Access to abortion data, for example, is limited in order to protect identifying characteristics of women who have had abortions.

Restricting public access to data, can also be a dis-service to society itself – especially children. For example, limiting public access to data on police and prison guard violence, places the interests of public employees above those of private citizens – especially children.

But… I was talking about pedophilia inside Christian Institutions– not the nation as a whole. . , Christian Institutions like the Catholic Church, Boy Scouts of America, Baptist Church, etc. are so powerful, influential, and well-funded, public access to government compiled data remains very limited (a court order is usually required and hard to obtain). I don’t know if data collection by organizations like Reinn include this subset (I hope they do, but I don’t know).

In the late 1990s through the early 2000s, I was involved in a state collaborative focused on data collection and access. In order to do our job, we had to review tons of data sets. The work was intense, exhausting and quite often disturbing.

In one of those coincidences so crazy it makes you afraid to even mention it, the state announced it would be building a mental institution for 3.500 sexually violent predators in my rural community. Of all things, the state was marketing that facility to our town as “economic development”. WTF? Well, acquiring a couple hundred resident psychiatrists specializing in pedophilia was not our cup of tea.

Suffice to say, I had access to data and I effing used it. Personally, I found pedophilia data so disturbing, it still makes me queasy. But that’s where my numbers come from.

Thanks to your comment, I edited my comment. By separating the sentence that you mentioned from the paragraph above, it was easy to get the wrong impression. By moving that sentence back to the paragraph, I hope I made it clear that I was talking about a subset (Christian Institutions).

PS Our community won its battle, then helped eleven other small towns and rural communities fight off that facility for sexually violent predators. When the state finally did open that facility, more than 5,000 pedophiles were moved in.

The legal issues regarding the incarceration and treatment of pedophiles and sexually violent predators remain UN-resolved.