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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
While male victims of predatory priests dominate the headlines, abused girls and women suffer in silence.
Jan 9, 2003 | It wasn't until Terrie Light had children of her own that she revealed her darkest secret: She had been raped, at the age of 8, by a priest in the rectory of a church in the Oakland Diocese.
"It was a violent, sadistic attack. I kept it inside of me for years," says the 51-year-old mother of six. "When my oldest son turned 7, I couldn't ignore it any longer. I was a good Catholic girl -- obedient, respectful. I always felt guilty because I was pretty. I tried not to be attractive because I thought that being attractive was somehow sinful. I think a lot of sex abuse victims were good Catholic girls."
Light, the Northern California representative of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), who eventually reached an out-of-court settlement with the church, hopes a new California law suspending the statute of limitations on sex abuse will give others like her the courage to finally come forward and begin to shift national attention in the burgeoning clerical abuse scandal to include a hidden but major population of victims -- women.
Abuse survivors, along with their attorneys and psychologists, say that sexism and social conditioning, magnified many times over within the Catholic Church, have led to the trivialization of harm suffered by women who have come forward to finally report abuse by priests. At the same time, these same factors have caused women to be ashamed -- and keep silent -- about their experiences.
"There's no question that abuse of women [by priests] has been vastly underreported," says A.W. Richard Sipe, a former priest and psychotherapist who has studied priests' sex lives for more than 30 years. "There's a tremendous bias against women in the U.S. -- and the world -- and a tremendous callousness about sexual abuse against women."
No secular organization has statistics on the total number of people abused by priests; the most complete numbers are held by church officials, who aren't sharing. But attorneys and survivor networks estimate that from one-third to over a half of all victims of sexually abusive priests are women. And criminal cases filed in the last year in Los Angeles County involve approximately the same number of male and female victims.
Gary Schoener, a Minneapolis psychologist whose Minneapolis Walk-in Counseling Center has worked on more than 2,000 cases of clerical sex abuse, says the majority of clerical abusers that he and his staff deal with (from several denominations) victimize girls and women. Yet, he says, public perception is that far more males are abused, and that the harm they suffer is more serious than what females experience.
"Women and girls are every bit as much at risk as boys and men," says Schoener. "But the sexual abuse of a boy is treated far more seriously, and is considered a far worse offense. Men are regarded as too strong to be victims; their victimization is somehow more shocking to the public. Women are expected to put up with more.
"The press also tends to cover -- and the big damage awards go to -- the boy cases," he adds. "The altar boy cases tend to make better copy -- they're more salacious."
Schoener says notorious, headline-grabbing cases of "gross mismanagement" in places like Boston, where predatory priests were moved from one parish to another and given easy access to large numbers of altar boys, tend to distort the real picture of sex abuse in the church.
To begin with, women appear less likely to report abuse, says Schoener. The shame of sexual abuse is similar for both genders, but women tend to be "trashed" by church officials and supporters as being seductresses, he says. "We have seen girls as young as 10 portrayed as sirens." Reporting sex abuse also tends to have more serious ramifications for a woman's marriage.
"A lot of men blame their wives for abuse and are shocked by the sexual history," says Schoener. "Societal preoccupation with virginity at the time of marriage cuts across many cultures. It's mind-bending."
