By Seth Meyers, Ph.D.
Created Jun 15 2010 - 8:14am
Published on Psychology Today (http://www.psychologytoday.com)

About a year ago, a woman in her mid-30s came to see me about a problem that seemed innocuous enough: She was having trouble with her boyfriend and wasn't sure that her relationship was going to last much longer. As soon as we began our work together, I recognized the cavalcade of psychological and emotional guards she'd erected over the years in response to the sickening sexual abuse she'd endured as a child at the hands of a depraved uncle.

Posted By Grant Gallicho
Commonweal Blogs
July 30, 2011

Full article with links to referenced works HERE

Last week, in an impassioned speech delivered form the floor of the Irish parliament, Prime Minister Enda Kenny offered some hard sayings [1] about the Vatican's handling of clergy sexual abuse in Ireland. Kenny said that the recent report [2] on the scandal in Cloyne "excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day." So much for Joyce's "Ireland my first and only love / Where Christ and Caesar are hand and glove!"

The Cloyne report examines the diocese's handling of abuse allegations between January 1, 1996, the year Irish bishops established procedures for dealing with abuse claims, and February 1, 2009 — well after the institutional church came to realize the gravity of such crimes. According to the report, two-thirds of allegations during that period were not forwarded to the police, as required by the Irish bishops' own '96 guidelines.

How-Tos HERE

2. Write/call your local legislator and tell them you support legislation that will eliminate the statutes of limitations that currently protect perps not children; (Find your local legislator HERE)

How-Tos HERE

3. Sign up for FACSA Newsletter. (Column on left.)

4. Donate to FACSA as we need funds to help get better laws passed. (The big fat Donate button on top of left column.)

As 78-year-old state Rep. Louise Williams Bishop (D-Philadelphia) began to speak to a crowd gathered in the rotunda of the capitol in Harrisburg at a public meeting in November, her voice wavered and shook, belying her decades of experience in public speaking as a polished politician, Baptist minister and radio DJ.

Shaky, Bishop revealed a secret she had held inside for six decades. "I discovered someone in the bed with me. [He was] doing a little more than feeling and touching," she told the hushed audience, recalling the night when her stepfather first raped her.

Bishop, who was 12 at the time, says that when she awoke to find her stepfather in her bed, she "didn't know how to react. I was afraid. There was fear. Fear in what my sisters, if they awakened, would think. Fear if I told my mother what she would say. Fear if my grandfather found out, he would have taken a shotgun and killed somebody and went to jail."

"So I lived with that fear," and the secret, "all these years." Even as a minister listening to survivors, who at 35, 40 years old were revealing their own childhood sex abuse, Bishop remained silent about her own. She never even told her husband.

But here, surrounded by child abuse survivors and in the shock and turmoil of allegations against former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky, Bishop says she was moved to share her story.

The mother of a Santa Barbara County teenager says he was wronged twice — once by the 450-pound Boy Scout leader who sexually abused him in 2007, and then by a local Scouts executive who she says told her not to call police.

"He said that wasn't necessary, because the Scouts do their own internal investigation," said the woman, whose name The Times is withholding to protect her son's identity. "I thought that was really weird.... I thought it was really important to call the sheriff right away."

So she did, triggering an investigation of volunteer Scout leader Al Steven Stein, then 29, who was charged with abusing her 92-pound son and two other boys. In 2009, he pleaded no contest to felony child endangerment. He was put on probation but later went to prison after authorities found pictures of nude children on his cellphone data card.

Truth and Reconciliation commissioners (from left) Marie Wilson, Justice Murray Sinclair and Chief Wilton Littlechild release their interim report on residential schools Friday.

VANCOUVER -- Tears form in Barney Williams' eyes and his hand rests over his heart when he speaks about how important a report on residential schools is for First Nations who grew up in the church-run schools.

"Many survivors are in terrible pain," said Williams, himself a residential school survivor and an elder with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which released its interim report Friday.

He said the report is proof many of the 150,000 aboriginal children who were put in the residential school system suffered horrible neglect or physical and sexual abuse.

Williams, 73, went to a residential school on the west coast of Vancouver Island, not far from his Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation reserve, near Tofino, B.C.

He was "not quite seven" when he was first sexually assaulted, he stated. "Pedophiles have their victims. They used you for a while until they found another victim."

(Reuters) - Federal authorities have joined the investigation into the Penn State sex abuse scandal and have requested information involving former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky as well as other top school officials involved in the case, according to local media.

Penn State received a subpoena from the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania for records involving Sandusky, former university president Graham Spanier , former athletic director Tim Curley and former finance official Gary Schultz , a university spokeswoman told The Harrisburg Patriot-News .

Sandusky is charged with 52 counts of abuse stemming from allegations that he molested 10 boys over a 15-year period.

Schultz was charged with perjury over his testimony to a grand jury about why he failed to act after he heard an accusation of abuse by Sandusky. He and Curley also were charged with failing to report the alleged crime to police.

BERNARDS — Not long ago, the Rev. Luke Travers strolled the sprawling bucolic grounds of Delbarton School as the high-profile headmaster of the exclusive Morris Township all-boys academy, sought out by the rich, famous and politically connected who wanted their sons enrolled.

Now, according to school officials and others familiar with the case, Travers is a virtual prisoner who rarely leaves the grounds, and when he does, he must be chaperoned.

Four men have come forward to say they are victims from decades ago as an eight-month investigation continues into Travers' alleged sexual misconduct. When the allegations were made public last month, Travers was exiled from a Virginia abbey, where he had been working, and sent back to Morris County. Abbot Giles P. Hayes, who runs St. Mary's Abbey and the private school, said Travers "is and will remain under the tightest restrictions" at the abbey.

Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua ordered aides to shred a 1994 memo that identified 35 Archdiocese of Philadelphia priests suspected of sexually abusing children, according to a new court filing.

The order, outlined in a handwritten note locked away for years at the archdiocese's Center City offices, was disclosed Friday by lawyers for Msgr. William J. Lynn, the former church administrator facing trial next month.

They say the shredding directive proves what Lynn has long claimed: that a church conspiracy to conceal clergy sex abuse was orchestrated at levels far above him.

"It is beyond doubt that Msgr. Lynn was completely unaware of this act of obstruction," attorneys Jeffrey Lindy and Thomas Bergstrom wrote.

Their motion asks Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina to dismiss the conspiracy and endangerment charges against Lynn, or to bar prosecutors from introducing Bevilacqua's videotaped testimony at trial.

by Betsy Fitzgerald
Posted on March 19, 2011
http://www.betsyfitzgerald.com/word/2011/03/stones-on-the-heart

Prime time television cop shows are filled with it. Massachusetts’ Senator Scott Brown recently took to the airwaves about it.

When a family friend posted on Facebook this week that he had begun a new blog where he planned to write, for the first time, about the sexual abuse that rampaged through his life, I responded: good for you.  Sexual abuse of children is an epidemic. A silent killer of spirits. To borrow a saying from my good friend Alan Lovins, it sits like stones on the heart. Crushing life and breath out of the victim. I picture the innocent women of Salem, accused of witchery. One of the punishments was to place boards across their chests and load stones on until the women were crushed to death.

In my friend Brad’s first blog, he says he is finally ready to face his past. However, he is not yet ready to reveal the name of his abuser, still afraid after many years. For now, the abuser is W***.  I immediately tried to fill in the blanks.  Walt? Whit? Will? Unfortunately, I didn’t know Brad back then and I came up blank.

We are Thank-Full for our often un-sung heroes:

1. Survivors of CSA (child sexual abuse) who choose to live yet one more day, despite the horrors they carry inside them still;

2. Survivors who have had the courage to speak their Truth to family, friends and others;

3. Survivors who have proclaimed the Truth in the public square, vowing that they will not stop speaking until children are more protected than they are currently;

4. Supporters, allies, law enforcement officials, and legislative representatives who "get it" and stand alongside survivors in demanding Justice and Accountability.

You are our heroes and we are so grateful for you!

As a therapist, I have worked with people who have been beaten, raped, psychologically tormented, severely neglected, and in many other ways profoundly betrayed by their parents or family members. Never, in my 15 years of working with people, have I heard of one of these abusers taking responsibility for what they did. Most of the time, my client is the one person in the family who is dealing with the abuse. The rest of the family and extended family refuse to talk about the incidents. Frequently, they belittle the truth teller, depict them as the one in the wrong, and even call them crazy. These clients over years of time, experience blame, shaming, walls of silence, verbal attacks, and are disowned if they continue to try and bring up the subject of past abuse. Many clients pretend the abuse never happened in order to stay close to family members while secretly suffering from the horrors of the damage. Most people don't realize how common the pattern is- the one who remembers loses everything. The one who got hurt carries all the pain. The one who was a child victim is victimized again as an adult. It is wrong and it happens everyday.

With the frenzied media coverage surrounding the Penn State and Syracuse University child sex-abuse scandals, one would be hard-pressed to find a soul who doesn't have an opinion on these cases.

Questions such as "Should JoePa have been fired?" and "Why did the victims take so long to come forward?" seem to have replaced the traditional "How about this crazy weather?" as conversation starters. In the past weeks I've heard these questions hotly debated in grocery store checkout lines, department stores and restaurants.

Such lively banter and public opinion are to be expected as a result of any alleged heinous crime involving an adult, insidious sexual abuse of children and the ensuing concealment of it by adults in positions of power, right? Surprisingly, notably absent from those impromptu exchanges was discussion involving the root of the real problem: child sex abuse as the nation's worst public health epidemic and how to stop it.

Until now, where have the public outrage and media coverage been on this issue? And where have most of our state legislators been?

On Tuesday, Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware commuted the death sentence of Robert Gattis to life without parole. In doing so, he said he gave "great weight" to the careful decision of the state board of pardons to recommend that the sentence be commuted, the first such recommendation the board has made since the death penalty was reinstated there in 1974. As a condition of the commutation, which is supported by a long list of former judges and prosecutors, Mr. Gattis is expected to waive all legal challenges and live out his life in prison.

Mr. Gattis killed his girlfriend in 1990 after an angry quarrel. The pardons board wrote that before the murder, "Mr. Gattis complained to medical professionals of mental illness and involuntary violent impulses" from the extreme and continuous sexual abuse he suffered as a child. The governor called this background "among the most troubling I have encountered." Mr. Gattis's lawyers failed to submit much of the ample proof about his mental illness and its devastating effects. The board was able to take full account of that mitigating factor.

(Warning: This story includes graphic details of alleged sexual crimes.)

Three young women took to a Criminal Justice Center witness stand on Thursday to divulge the details of a darkened childhood.

Courtney Wilson, the 56-year-old former church deacon at the Remnant Church of God 7th Day on Ogontz Avenue, has been charged with two counts of rape, aggravated assault, terroristic threats, two counts of statutory sexual assault and a series of other charges.

In December, five women reported Wilson to the police, alleging sexual abuse that occurred repeatedly between 1997 and 2005 when they were minors. The women, now in their 20s, were affiliated with the church, located at 7708 Ogontz Ave., during the alleged abuse.

His preliminary hearing on those charges was held Thursday.

ROME -- Two American experts told a Vatican summit today that the full costs of the sexual abuse crisis – including financial payouts, emotional distress, alienation among both clergy and laity, and damage to the church's moral authority – is essentially incalculable, but massive beyond any doubt.

Focusing on the United States, the two speakers provided estimates suggesting that the American church has spent at least $2.2 billion settling litigation related to the crisis, and that there may have been as many as 100,000 total victims of clerical sexual abuse.

Before surveying the damage, Michael Bemi and Pat Neal rejected what they described as four "myths" about the crisis, which were:

• The crisis is an American problem.
• The crisis has been exaggerated by a Godless media that is antagonistic to people or institutions of faith.
• The crisis has been instigated by avaricious attorneys whose only objective is to enrich themselves financially.
• Homosexual orientation causes men to be sex offenders. ("Neither homosexual nor heterosexual orientation is a risk factor," they said, "but rather, disordered or confused sexual orientation is a risk factor.")]]> abolishs@abolishsexabuse.org (Abolishs) frontpage Thu, 09 Feb 2012 02:37:02 +0000 http://abolishsexabuse.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1524:vatican-abuse-summit-22-billion-and-100000-victims-in-us-alone&catid=71:world-news&Itemid=181 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AbolishChildSexAbuseNow/~3/MG2rbFsvLM4/index.php http://abolishsexabuse.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1535:meet-the-woman-who-exposed-jerry-sandusky&catid=78:penn-state-scandal&Itemid=205 She's Sara Ganim and she's just 24. In a Glamour exclusive, she tells how she broke the story of Penn State's sex-abuse scandal and changed college sports forever.

  by Liz Brody, Glamour

  "Anything else going on?" Sara Ganim asked her source late one night in 2009. As the crime reporter for a small newspaper in State College, Pennsylvania, it was a question she always ended with. And this evening, to Ganim's surprise, the source replied, "Well, actually, a boy just came forward to the police and alleged sex crimes against Jerry Sandusky."

  Jerry Sandusky. Like everyone in town, Ganim knew his name: He was the retired assistant coach of Penn State University's championship-winning football team. Ganim wrote Sandusky on a sticky note and, though she didn't know it at the time, had her first lead in breaking one of last year's most explosive news stories—the Penn State sexual-abuse scandal.

  Let's stop right here to say she was only 22 at the time.

  Ganim, a Penn State grad and a football fan herself, knew her way around the university's online message boards. There she quickly found gossip about Sandusky getting too friendly with young boys. So she started asking around. "I'd say, 'Hey, have you heard anything strange about Jerry Sandusky?'" And though people knew about the rumors, Ganim says, "almost no one believed they were true."

  ]]> abolishs@abolishsexabuse.org (Abolishs) frontpage Tue, 21 Feb 2012 03:06:34 +0000 http://abolishsexabuse.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1535:meet-the-woman-who-exposed-jerry-sandusky&catid=78:penn-state-scandal&Itemid=205