Ecological way of understanding and explaining clergy sexual misconduct

• Main Author: Dagmang, Ferdinand D.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2012
• Subjects: Sexual misconduct by clergy; Catholic Studies; Religion
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/1488; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/faculty_research/article/2487/type/native/viewcontent
• Institution: De La Salle University

In trying to understand and explain clergy sexual misconduct, this article seeks the help of two interrelated interpretive frames: (1) social structures and other network of relationships that immediately surround or embed persons, and (2) human behavior which is expressed through and because of social rules and resources, groups and grids, structures and systems. It presupposes that the not-so predictable and less-visible sexual misbehavior could be brought into discussion with the help of other ideas: habitus (enduring predispositions) and limen (threshold). Through these ideas, covert behavior may become less hidden for it will be conceptually gathered from its entangled condition between the psychological and socio-cultural factors. In its more integrated psycho-social environmental way of explaining, this essay avoids both the overly psychological and the too-sociological approaches of interpreting behavior. In other words, it avoids a single manner of viewing sexual misconduct. This manner of understanding misconduct is a way of broadening the canvass and giving up an outdated either-psychology-or-sociology strokes. This study also raises some questions regarding character formation and institutions. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.