A Theoretical Foundation for Understanding Clergy-Perpetrated Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACT

Incorporating elements from broadband theories of psychological adaptation to extreme adversity, including Summit's (1983) Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome, Finkelhor and Browne's (1986) Traumagenic Dynamics Model of sexual abuse, and Pyszczynski and colleagues' (1997) Terror Management Theory, this paper proposes a unified theoretical model of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse for future research. The model conceptualizes clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse as the convergence of interactive processes between the clergy-perpetrator, the parishioner-survivor, and the religious community.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual abuse
• clergy
• theory
• trauma
• terror management
• community

Notes

1. Hall and Hirschman (1991) propose that four “motivational precursors” (p. 662) increase the likelihood of sexual aggression: physiological sexual arousal (sometimes associated with extremely inappropriate stimuli, such as children or violence); justifying cognitions (e.g., “women want or deserve to be raped”); affective dyscontrol (e.g., anger and hostility); and personality problems, particularly antisociality.

2. There is a literature on the rehabilitation of sexual offenders that is beyond the scope of this paper. Readers are referred to the work of McGrath (1991) and Hanson and Bussière (1998).