Three years ago, when I began my research Masters into clerical sexual misconduct involving adults (CSMIA), I wrote an article for Eureka Street on this issue. I have now completed that study.
It revealed highly relevant and crucial information towards the understanding of CSMIA. One conclusion based on my and other studies is that three major aspects need to be included in any discussion of CSMIA, in order to reach a fuller understanding of how CSMIA is able to occur, how it is interpreted, how it affects people's lives, and how it is dealt with. Those three aspects are language, power and vulnerability, and harm.
Language and definitions surrounding CSMIA, consent, celibacy and vulnerability are of major importance in coming to a balanced understanding of this phenomenon. CSMIA continues to be commonly defined as simply a mutually consensual affair, albeit sinful and canonically illegal. However, when perceived as abuse of power, abdication of fiduciary duty, or the crossing of ethical and professional boundaries, a very different discussion emerges.
For example, when defined as such, instead of the focus being on the victim/survivor and whether they consented to such a relationship or not, it shifts to the behaviour and role of the professional/cleric. All the experts reviewed agree that the responsibility for all professional sexual misconduct lies with the more powerful person — the professional/cleric.
Until such behaviour is discussed and defined under these more professional concepts, aspects such as consent, power, vulnerability, and harm are not considered seriously or intelligently enough to do justice to the reality of victims/survivors.
However, such a concept is still quite foreign to both common and official language surrounding CSMIA. The major Church document, Integrity in Ministry, at least, is partly acknowledging this more professional approach when it states that clerics must 'exercise caution in the use of one's status or institutional power, never using these for one's own advantage'.
That fact that clerical positional power has been used as a tool for the abuse by both male and female clerics is obvious — the evidence lies in the stories of victims/survivors themselves. Clerics are the respected and trusted religious professionals ordained by the church to minister to the needs of its members. In the course of Catholic life, women and men often divulge very private vulnerabilities to these clerics which becomes, by nature, a relationship based on a power imbalance.
The power imbalance is not the issue — all professional interactions are