The public impression that abusive priests preyed only on boys hasn't just caused abused women to feel pushed aside. It has provided fuel for a drive on the part of conservative Catholics to rid the priesthood of gay men, who, Sipe estimates, make up about a third of the priesthood. The focus on boys is encouraged by the Vatican, says Sipe, and is seen to provide convenient scapegoats -- gay priests -- for a problem that has nothing to do with the issue.

In the Vatican's first comments about the developing American scandal last spring, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, chief spokesman for Pope John Paul II, said gay men should be barred from the priesthood. "People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained," he said.

The public perception that sex-abuse victims in the church are almost exclusively men is so distorted, says Gallagher, that men who attend SNAP meetings are surprised to find women there -- and women are astonished that they are not alone in a sea of men. This sense of isolation only serves to keep women silent about their abuse, says Gallagher.

Gallagher says that even when women have the courage to come forward and publicize their abuse, they are often shunned. She says she has protested repeatedly about the lack of coverage of female victims of priest sex abuse. She took her complaints to the Boston Globe, which spearheaded coverage of the Boston priest abuse scandals, but the paper, she said, failed to cover her story despite several interviews. Gallagher then turned to the New York Times, which did run a story about her abuse.

Meanwhile, a Globe ombudsman responded to Gallagher's complaints, saying that a story about female victims of priest sex abuse was on its "to-do list" and that "a four-person reporting team can only do so much." The Globe finally did a story on Dec. 27 about female victims in the Boston Archdiocese -- almost nine months after the Times.

"If by [the Globe's] own admission as many as a third of the victims are female, I don't think a single story does it," says Gallagher. "The press has to keep up coverage of female victims so that more people come forward. I told my story because I thought it would do some good -- that others would see Father Nugent's name and come forward. He was working for years with children."

Gallagher says she knows victims so mortified by their experiences that they're "waiting for their parents to die" before they'll come forward. Light says she was relieved when her attacker died. She remained frightened of him even into adulthood. "These priests seemed almost supernatural to us when we were children," she said.

The amount of fear, shame and self-loathing experienced by victims of abusive priests has tended to be the same regardless of the victims' genders, says Schoener. And the patterns of abuse also are similar. Attorney Michael Meadows of Walnut Creek, Calif., says he consistently finds eerie parallels in the cases of male and female clients.

"It's uncanny how similar these cases are," he says. "These kids were abused at 12 or 13. They're singled out by priests as being from broken or troubled homes. They're least likely to have someone to turn to. Then it gets buried for years and years. Their lives deteriorate. At some point in their late 20s or mid- to late 30s they hit rock bottom. That's when they confront what happened to them, but under the statute of limitations it's usually too late."

The statute of limitations often means that cases are lost before they're even filed because of a "technicality," says Meadows. "These people have lives with a deep, dark secret for years. It doesn't mean these people suffered any less because time has passed. These are some of the most psychologically damaged people you can imagine."

But the new California law, the first of its kind in the nation, has suspended the statute of limitations on all sex-abuse cases in the state for one year as of Jan. 1, 2003. The law came before the California Legislature last summer at the height of the Boston scandal and passed without opposition. Last month, church officials in California issued a letter to priests and parishioners warning them of an expected flood of lawsuits.

"Some of these lawsuits may involve the revival of already settled cases and some may involve alleged perpetrators and witnesses long since dead," said the letter. "Under those circumstances, it will be difficult, if not impossible to ascertain the truth." Church officials have indicated they're willing to settle many cases without a court fight.

Jeffrey Anderson is joining with attorneys Dave and Larry Divron in Stockton, Joe George in Sacramento, and Ray Boucher in Southern California, to file some 250 suits in California during the coming year. "We expect more as victims see their abusers' names in the press and continue to come forward," says Divron. The chances are good that many women will be among the plaintiffs.

Meadows, who plans to file seven cases representing clients ranging in age from 30 to 52, welcomes the California law and says financial compensation does help, but doesn't go far enough. "It's one small step on the road to recovery," he says. "But there'd be nothing better than to see some of these guys behind bars.

"You read the documents and it's the same over and over," he says. "Abusive priests were moved from one church to another with no word of warning to anyone. You wonder, where was the one man of conscience looking out for the kids?"

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