Lytton on Clergy Sexual Abuse, Tort Litigation, and Media Coverage

Tim Lytton (Albany) has posted to SSRN Framing Clergy Sexual Abuse as an Institutional Failure:  How Tort Litigation Influences Media Coverage.  The abstract provides:

Tort litigation against the Catholic Church is largely responsible for the widespread understanding of clergy sexual abuse as an institutional failure on the part of Church officials. This essay focuses on three features of tort litigation that explain why it exerts such a powerful influence on the framing of clergy sexual abuse. The article concludes with a brief discussion of two implications of the analysis, one for the current controversy over tort reform and the other for our understanding of child sexual abuse in institutional settings.

–CJR