Father Benedict Groeschel: You Have It Backwards, Those Kids Are Seducing US

"People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to [commit child molestation] — a psychopath. But that’s not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer.

"Well, it’s not so hard to see — a kid looking for a father and didn’t have his own — and they won’t be planning to get into heavy-duty sex, but almost romantic, embracing, kissing, perhaps sleeping but not having intercourse or anything like that.

"If you go back 10 or 15 years ago with different sexual difficulties — except for rape or violence — it was very rarely brought as a civil crime. Nobody thought of it that way....And I’m inclined to think, on their first offense, they should not go to jail because their intention was not committing a crime." - Father Benedict Groeschel, of the Archdiocese of New York, speaking to the National Catholic Register.

UPDATE: The National Catholic Register has now deleted the above-linked article. But it's too late as other sites have already reported on Groeshel's words too