Recent research published by Alessandro Piazza and Julien Jourdan in Academy of Management Journal provides important answers. Their approach was intuitive and important.
If members of the same large organization (the Church) are responsible for the
same kind of abuse in many communities, but this is kept quiet in some
communities but not in others, maybe it is valuable to find out what kind of communities
protects the organization and lets its employees victimize its vulnerable members?
What they found is
depressingly familiar to anyone who studies organizations and communities. Communities
who identify with the organization protect it – so although a majority Catholic
community would have many more potential victims and families reporting abuse, a
greater proportion of Catholics in the community actually protected the church
against having misconduct made public.
Well-organized
communities also protected the Church. Many voluntary associations and informal
meeting places indicate a community capable of much joint social action and
self-improvement. In the case of abuse by local clergy, this positive community
characteristic instead turned negative. Rather than acting to reveal the abuse,
the communities showed inaction.
Finally, community
homogeneity also predicted communities that protected the abusers and the Church.
Specifically, ethnic homogeneity (for example, nearly all White) was an
indicator of communities that would be unlikely to making public cases of sex
abuse.
Why did this
happen? Homogeneity, organization, and identification are characteristics of
communities that are capable of a great deal of organized action, but in the
abuse case, they instead seemed to display organized inaction. But let us not
make a theory of grand conspiracies of communities against vulnerable members:
a simpler explanation is probably correct.
Speaking out is
costly. It is especially costly when the complaints are sensitive, as in sex
abuse. It is even more costly when the accusation is directed at a highly respected
pillar of the community, as when the abuser is clergy. The costs increase when community
homogeneity and organization create the suspicion (and often, reality) that others
will organize against the whistle-blower, and when community identification
with the organization makes such counter-organization a near certainty.
So, parents would
be quiet, journalists would not write stories, editors would not allocate space
in newspapers, and the Church would quietly reassign and sometimes defrock the
perpetrators. For decades. We need to understand this because the processes are
general, and they can happen for similar or different kinds of abuse, and for similar
or different organizations.
