The distribution of the incidents of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the United States (event structure) and the reports of these abuse events (reporting structure ) present two distinct trajectories, confounding existing individual-level research results. Data from an institutional census of records of abuse between 1950 and 2002 show a steady increase in cases through the late 1970s and early 1980s, followed by a surge in reporting in the mid-1990s and again in 2002. These patterns are stable throughout all regions of the Catholic Church in the United States. Rather than analyze the abuse or reporting from a conventionally individual, psychological framework, this research reframes the analyses for the event structure and the reporting of abuse by priests.
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