Victim Gender in News Coverage of the Priest Sex Crisis by the Boston Globe

Despite its 2002 lawsuit to force the Catholic Church to reveal cover-ups of sexual abuse by priests, prior to 2002 the Boston Globe engaged in a consistently misogynistic and homophobic bias in its reporting on the crisis. Its journalistic choices supported the frame of the Vatican and the influential Archdiocese of Boston: that this universal crisis was a problem only of a few liberal, “gay,” American priests. International, national, and Massachusetts reporting by other newspapers included hundreds of stories of bishops’ relationships with women; of priests impregnating nuns; of priests raping female novitiates; and of priests serially raping girls as young as four years old. Yet the Boston Globe chose to cover stories almost exclusively involving boy victims. This analysis shows how differently the Globe and other newspapers covered the stories of Father Robert E. Kelley, who admitted to raping more than 100 girls while serving the diocese in Worcester, Massachusetts.