Relationship of abuse by religious authorities to depression, religiosity, and child physical abuse history in a college sample.

Abstract

Objective: Discussion of sexual abuse by religious authorities has been plagued by allegations of false memories and misreports, often attributed to media attention. An analysis of a historical archive with information on abuse by religious and other authority figures and coexisting psychopathology is extremely useful to the current debate on outcomes of sexual abuse. Method: The present study utilizes a database from the late 1970s that contains data on physical abuse and sexual abuse by various perpetrator types as well as on symptoms of depression, anxiety, and religiosity in a college population sample. Results: Students alleging sexual abuse by religious authorities were as symptomatic (depressed and anxious) as students abused by parents and were more symptomatic than controls. Further, those abused by religious authorities showed greater variance in religiosity and a greater likelihood of breaking ties with their religious communities. Students self-labeling as physically abused by parents were more at risk for sexual abuse by religious authorities. Conclusions: Religious authorities often play complex roles in social and family life. These complexities then may produce parallel complexities in the patterns of symptoms. The intensity of the trauma from abuse by religious authorities may make it more difficult to study, treat, and recover from sexual abuse. Additional research is needed.

Consequences of abuse by religious authorities: A review.

“…Luepker (1999), using a clinical sample, found that 40% of the 56 SARA participants reported a Catholic perpetrator. The figure reported by Stevens, Arzoumanian, Greenbaum, Schwab, and Dalenberg (2018) is even higher (58%). Although the methodology in the Stevens et al study is superior relative to other work, and the full sample size surveyed is adequate ( n = 353), the number of abuse survivors citing abuse by religious authority was small ( n = 19).…”

“…The lack of control groups in the majority of the quantitative studies does limit the ability the judge the severity of the symptoms shown by SARA survivors. An exception is the Stevens et al (2018) study, showing that SARA survivors displayed symptoms that were equal in severity to those who had been sexually abused by a parent and higher in severity to other survivors with nonrelative perpetrators. The Stevens et al study, however, did not include measures that would allow clinical diagnoses and did not include a measure for PTSD.…”

“…Bottoms, Shaver, Goodman, and Qin (1995) and Stevens et al (2018) both found relatively equal numbers of male and female victims, but both extended the methods to all religious authorities, rather than restricting the data to Catholics. The outlier in the quantitative data appears to be Disch and Avery (2001), who found that only 26% of their sample of 38 adults were men (perhaps complicated by targeting newsletters, in part, that were largely devoted to women’s issues).…”

“…Depression as a consequence of the sexual abuse is reported by a number of the quantitative researchers in Tables 1 and 2 (Bottoms et al, 1995; Lueger-Schuster, Kantor, et al, 2014; Luepker, 1999; Rassenhofer et al, 2015; Shea, 2008). Unfortunately, although these researchers (with the exception of Bottoms et al) did use validated instruments, only one (Stevens et al, 2018) compared the resultant figure directly to nonabused control groups in the same settings. Lueger-Schuster, Kantor, et al (2014) and Shea (2008) did show that the elevations in depression on the Brief Symptom Inventory and Beck Depression Inventory were similar to those in other sexually abused groups in the literature.…”

“…Trauma survivors in some research (outside the clergy abuse area) report a strengthening of faith after a traumatic event (Walker, Reese, Hughes, & Troskie, 2010; Pargament, Ano, & Wachholtz, 2005). Such variance in responses (strengthening of faith in some survivors and weakening of faith in others) leads to a larger standard deviation in religious belief in abused adults when compared with nonabused adults (Stevens et al, 2018). It is less clear whether the strengthening of faith is a phenomenon that occurs after clergy abuse, which may limit the ability of the SARA survivor to engage in some forms of posttraumatic growth that are available to others after traumatic events (although this finding did occur in the Stevens et al study).…”