The Onondaga County District Attorney’s Office is probing whether any students at All Saints Elementary School were physically abused, an official confirmed.
Their probe comes amid a federal child pornography case against school aide Emily Oberst, 23, who was fired Monday after being charged with sexually exploiting a 16-month-old girl.
Oberst, of Syracuse, is accused of helping Jason Kopp, 40, of Liverpool, sexually exploit the young girl for pornography.
A letter sent to All Saints parents Monday warned that students might also be victims.
“Unfortunately, this morning in a meeting with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we learned that there may be additional victims of Miss Oberst’s criminal activity, including students at All Saints,” the school’s letter read.
First Chief Assistant District Attorney Rick Trunfio said that the DA’s office is looking into the reports of abuse.
“We are actively investigating any and all allegations of any sexual abuse of any children in this case,” he said.
For their part, federal authorities have remained tight-lipped. Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Southwick confirmed today that the FBI is investigating matters involving Emily Oberst at the All Saints school. He would not comment further.
All Saints is housed in an old parochial school building at 112 Wilbur Ave., but is not sanctioned by the Syracuse Catholic Diocese.
Syracuse.com is continuing to reach out to school administrators. Check back to Syracuse.com for more details as they become available.
Full article with links here: http://www.syracuse.com/crime/index.ssf/2016/03/da_probes_allegations_of_abuse_at_all_saints_elementary_amid_child_porn_case.html
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-03-25 13:23:382016-03-25 13:23:38Douglas Dowty, DA looks into allegations of possible sex abuse at All Saints Elementary amid baby porn case, Syracuse.com
A victory for children occurred last week in Johnstown PA. The state’s attorney general pressed criminal charges against three former Catholic church officials — not for molesting children themselves, but for failing to stop a serial child predator whom they supervised.
The three former officials are charged with child endangerment and criminal conspiracy for enabling an already-accused cleric, Brother Stephen Baker, TOR, “to have contact with children and the public as part of his ministry.” [See the grand jury presentment.] The three consecutively led from 1986 to 2009 a small group of priests and religious brothers, the Third Order Regular Franciscans, Immaculate Conception province, based in Hollidaysburg PA.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called the charges by PA Attorney General Kathleen Kane “one of the broadest-ever drives to hold [the] Roman Catholic church accountable for clergy abuses of minors.”
The province knew of alleged child sexual abuse by Baker as early as 1988. A church-paid psychologist who evaluated Baker in 1991 urged that he not have one-on-one contact with children. Baker’s superior at the time, Minister Provincial Anthony J. (Giles) Schinelli, Jr., TOR, appears not to have taken the recommendation to heart. The following year, Rev. Schinelli assigned Baker to teach at Bishop McCourt High School in Johnstown. The results were catastrophic.
From April 1992 to January 2010, Baker allegedly abused more than 100 children in the area of Johnstown, including 88 students from Bishop McCourt, where he taught religion and acted as an unofficial sports trainer.
According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the cleric lacked “any professional qualifications, and under the guise of offering massages or other treatment, Baker handled boys’ bare genitals with his hands and digitally penetrated their anuses, among other offenses.”
Rev. Schinelli and his successors never reported Baker to law enforcement. Baker killed himself in January 2013, shortly after his crimes were first made public.
The filing of charges against Schinelli and his successors by Attorney General Kane was as unusual as it was bold.
In the 13 years since the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team published the secret files of Cardinal Law, hundreds of bishops and other senior Catholic officials have been named in court actions, news reports, and grand jury investigations as enablers of child sexual abuse.
Astonishingly, though, fewer than ten Catholic church officials and dioceses have been criminally charged for their roles in managing the cover-up.
But today, ever so slowly, this accountability gap is closing. In the last few years, we’ve seen more determined public prosecutors like Kane. They are the vanguard of a societal shift: an increasing willingness to insist that religious institutions obey the same child protection laws that apply to everyone else.
Last June, Ramsey County MN Attorney John Choi announced criminal charges against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis on six gross misdemeanor counts for its “role in failing to protect children and contribution to the unspeakable harm” done to three children who were sexually molested by Rev. Curtis Wehmeyer in 2010.
Last April, Bishop Robert W. Finn resigned as leader of the Kansas City-St. Joseph MO diocese, a belated measure of ‘bishop accountability’ by Pope Francis. Two-and-a-half years earlier, Finn had been convicted for violating the state’s mandated reporter statute. He is the first (and still the only) U.S. bishop to be convicted for not reporting a pedophile priest.
And last week, Philadelphia district attorney R. Seth Williams signaled his intent to fight the latest setback in the Commonwealth’s long and winding case against Msgr. William J. Lynn, Cardinal Bevilacqua’s Vicar for Clergy 1992-2004. In 2011, Williams indicted Lynn for child endangerment and criminal conspiracy, becoming the first prosecutor in the U.S. to charge a senior Catholic official for enabling abuse. Lynn was convicted of child endangerment in 2012, but the case is hardly resolved. Last week, Williams appealed to the state’s Supreme Court to reverse a December ruling by the Superior Court overturning Lynn’s conviction. It’s the second time the Superior Court has tossed out Lynn’s conviction, and the second time that Williams has appealed their decision.
The French Spotlight: “They thought that it was enough to relocate him …”
Early signs of a shift toward prosecuting institutional enablers of child abuse are happening outside the U.S. too, including an extraordinary example unfolding now in France. The daily newspaper Le Figaro iscalling it the French Spotlight.
Early this month, the public prosecutor of Lyon launched an investigation of possible criminal wrongdoing by Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the country’s most prominent Catholic cleric. In his capacity as archbishop of Lyon, Barbarin allegedly kept two known abusers in ministry, including a serial abuser named Fr. Bernard Preynat.
A longtime leader of a local Catholic Boy Scouts troop, Preynat is believed by a survivors’ group to have sexually assaulted 60 boys between 1986 and 1991. Barbarin didn’t remove Preynat from ministry until May 2015, although his crimes long had been an open secret. The priest had confessed to church superiors in 1991, and even sent letters to the families of children he had molested, admitting to his crimes.
Last month, the priest’s lawyer, Frédéric Doyez, bluntly blamed the cardinal and his predecessors. “If justice has not been rendered until now, it is not Father Preynat who prevented it. From the moment he was uncovered, he confessed. He is a man who has been living with the offenses that he committed for over 25 years. The odd thing is that he was granted a great deal of trust, as if nothing had happened. They thought that it was enough to relocate him, for things to fall into oblivion.”
A child protection initiative unlike any we’ve seen in the United States
However, the world’s pacesetter in terms of holding religious and other institutions accountable for child protection is Australia. Since January 2013, its Royal Commission has been waging an extraordinary inquiry into “institutional responses to allegations and incidents of child sexual abuse.” It is investigating most of the country’s major religious and child-related secular institutions, including the Catholic church.
The Royal Commission has muscle and resolve unlike any government-led child protection initiative we’ve seen in the United States. It has compelled production of secret documents and published thousands of pages on its website, along with transcripts of testimony. It has forced the nation’s most powerful institutional leaders to testify, and many of the hearings are live-streamed.
With still more than a year of hearings to go, the Commission already has had enormous impact. It has made 961 reports to police and other authorities, many of which have resulted in arrests and charges.
Earlier this month, in a four-day live-streamed public hearing, the Commission grilled one of Pope Francis’s top aides, Cardinal George Pell, former bishop of Melbourne and Sydney.
The Commission members questioned Pell from Sydney via video-link, while he sat in a hotel conference room outside of Vatican City. In the room with him were more than a dozen survivors of the priests he allegedly protected. After Pell had said he would not be returning to Australia to testify, citing bad health, the Commission granted the survivors permission to attend the hearing in Rome. A crowd-funding campaign paid for many of their flights.
Pell was questioned in careful detail about his knowledge of a priest sex ring at a Catholic school in the city of Ballarat, where he began his priesthood. He was also asked why as auxiliary bishop of Melbourne, he had ignored repeated complaints about a gun-packing abuser named Father Peter Searson, who terrorized children at a primary school in the poor migrant town of Doveton.
Whether the Royal Commission will recommend criminal charges against Pell remains to be seen.
Pope Francis’s tribunal for bishops is “going nowhere fast”
While Pope Francis has said repeatedly that bishops must be held accountable, it is becomingly increasingly clear that he has neither the political capacity nor the personal conviction to do so.
The Pope raised the hopes of survivors and Catholics everywhere last June when he announced a new Vatican tribunal to judge bishops who fail to protect children.
But according to a devastating article on March 9 by Nicole Winfield, the Associated Press’s respected Vatican reporter, the tribunal has not gotten off the ground. Nine months after it was announced, there has been no follow-up, Vatican sources told Winfield. Indeed, it seems unlikely ever to be implemented.
“It’s a victim of a premature roll-out, unresolved legal and administrative questions, and resistance both inside and outside of the Holy See,” Winfield reported.
This news, along with the recent revelations about Cardinal Pell, Cardinal Barbarin, and the former religious order officials in Johnstown, is bleak confirmation of what we already know. When it comes to child protection, the Catholic church cannot police itself.
That is why it’s crucial that this shift continue — that more civil authorities recognize their duty to hold Catholic officials accountable for reporting allegations and removing abusers. We need more actions like Attorney General Kane’s, and the U.S. needs a broad, powerful, neutral national inquiry similar to the Royal Commission.
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-03-23 12:55:212016-03-23 12:55:21Anne Barrett Doyle, BishopAccountability.Org: Making Children Safer: More Prosecutors Are Charging Catholic Officials for Enabling Abusers, Hamilton and Griffin on Rights
The three veteran investigators were speechless.
‘I only answer to God. Bishops don’t bother me.’
For just a few months, they had waded into a probe of clergy sex abuse in central Pennsylvania. They didn’t yet know much. But they had heard about a man near Altoona named George Foster.
Foster, they were told, had long been “making noise” about eliminating abusive priests in the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown – writing letters in the local papers, meeting with church leaders. Daniel Dye, the deputy attorney general leading the investigation, knew he was someone worth meeting.
But Dye and the two agents with him were not prepared for what they saw as Foster arrived at a Pittsburgh hotel to meet them for a cup of coffee in late 2014.
Foster came carting an armload of manila folders. Each was labeled. “Victim 1.” “Victim 2.” And so on. Others bore the names of priests. Inside were detailed accounts from victims and others.
“Oh, yeah,” he told them. “People have been coming to me for years.”
“Why didn’t you ever take these files to the police?” Dye asked him.
“Well,” Foster said, “some of what’s in here, I’m getting from the police.”
His information became a critical building block for investigators as they developed the case that led this month to the release of two grand jury reports outlining years of child sex abuse by clerics in the eight-county Altoona-Johnstown Diocese.
The grand jury was livid that parents sought justice but civil authorities took no action to help them. Instead, people with badges and law degrees deferred to bishops and other Catholic leaders, who largely buried what was known about child abusers under their charge.
Foster, however, refused to turn away. For that, Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane and the grand jury branded him a hero.
“This is not about a religious order. This is not about Catholicism,” Kane said last week, taking a moment in her news conference at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown to point out Foster, a silver-haired man with hazel eyes. “This is about the law. And this is about people standing up for other people.”
Dye put it another way.
“George became like a compass” for the investigation, he said in an interview. “George got us there quicker.”
Inspired by his faith
A devout Catholic and family man, Foster, 55, is like and unlike many who live in the Altoona-Johnstown area.
He has spent his whole life in the neighboring postindustrial cities, which are shells of what they once were. He is married, has six children, and adheres to church dogma with deep loyalty.
“I don’t think I did anything special,” he said in his office in Duncansville, surrounded by photos of his family and a Star Trek cup and saucer.
But where fierce devotion to the church blinded others from taking action, Foster drew on his faith as fuel to do the right thing.
“I only answer to God,” he told the grand jury. “Bishops don’t bother me.”
The path that led him there had begun more than a decade earlier.
In 2002, a man in his 30s showed up without an appointment at Foster’s workplace, the Altoona-area office for the billboard and advertising giant Lamar Advertising Co.
As the clergy sex-abuse scandal was unfolding nationally, Foster had already taken bold stands in letters to the local paper about removing abusive priests. The man knew this. Foster and he were about the same age.
“I came to you,” he said, “because you’re not afraid of the diocese.”
The stranger told Foster that as a youth he had been sexually abused by a local priest and then berated by the priest’s jealous lover – another priest, who worked at the high school the victim attended.
“The one guy’s abusing me, and the other guy’s screaming at me when I’m at school,” he explained, according to Foster.
The victim said the diocese leaders knew about the sexually abusive priest but did nothing. He wanted to rent a billboard to expose the priest as a molester.
Foster was shocked. And yet, he instinctively reached for a notebook: “I immediately started writing things down. I said, ‘Let me look into this.’ ”
Foster had come from a devout family. An uncle and a brother were priests. And he knew a lot more priests, too. So he called one and asked, discreetly, about the alleged abuser.
“Oh, yeah,” the priest replied. “I think he could do that.”
Wow, Foster thought. The priests knew.
More phone calls and visits followed.
Foster also heard about a 1994 Blair County civil trial and guilty plea delivered by an accused predator named the Rev. Francis Luddy. So he went to the courthouse, found the case file. Couldn’t believe what he read.
“It was like the roots of a tree spreading out,” Foster said. “I realized, if I’m just a lay person and just asking a few questions, I’m getting all this information, how widespread and deep is this?”
Bearer of influences
A Johnstown native who lives in a once-grand Hollidaysburg house built for a 19th-century banker, Foster carries profound influences forged in childhood.
His father, James, said the rosary every night. He enlisted at age 17 to serve in World War II, and then raised seven children as a life-insurance salesman, proud he had what he considered a noble job.
James Foster went to every client’s funeral. When he died in 2000, so many came to his, you couldn’t get in, recalled his son, John.
To him, George is a lot like their father.
“George is one of the few guys who puts his life where his mouth is,” said John Foster, 59, of Collingswood, N.J., the only one of seven siblings who moved away.
But George recalls the righteous passions of his mother, Patricia.
“She was like the Blessed Mother – but with a machine gun,” he said.
“We grew up with pictures of aborted kids on the kitchen table,” Foster went on. “A lot of that burned into me.”
And yet, as strong as her religious identity was, he is convinced that his mother would have insisted he do nothing other than what he has done the last 14 years. Her maternal and advocate soul would have agreed.
“Child molestation is wrong,” Foster said. “And it doesn’t take a bunch of psychiatrists or a bunch of bishops to hold a meeting to figure that out.”
The first grand report alleged decades of clergy sex abuse ignored or concealed by the leaders of the diocese. Prosecutors say as many as hundreds of children may have been assaulted, but that the statute of limitations, or the deaths of accused priests, prevented them from bringing charges.
In a potentially groundbreaking prosecution, however, Kane last week announced charges against three priests who as leaders of a Franciscan order allegedly failed to remove a friar suspected of sexually assaulting more than 100 minors since the 1980s.
Minutes before announcing those charges, Kane met privately with Foster to thank him. He came at her invitation.
Dye also shook his hand – again.
“You can’t have mercy,” Foster told Dye, “without justice.”
At home the next day, Foster’s wife of 27 years, Katie, 51, said she does not view him so much as a hero as a man who strives to live by his faith. She kissed him on the cheek as she spoke of him.
“George is a father,” she said. “I think that maybe that instinct is what came through.”
Both are relieved that “truth has been heard.” But they are sad – that the scandal has driven people away from their faith, that it has caused so many souls so much damage.
“It took this long to be heard,” Katie Foster said. “How many people were hurt in the interim?”
Foster is convinced he was guided by an invisible hand. “I got wrapped up in this,” he said, “and that was God’s will.”
Perhaps his late father helped keep him strong, too. Long before the grand jury’s work was made public – and his name in it – word had spread through the local church that he was an agitator, worthy of excommunication.
One day not long after his father died, in 2009, one of his dad’s friends – “Uncle Harry” to the seven kids – called from Johnstown with a message.
“I just want you to know,” Harry told him, “your dad would be proud.”
As he recalled the message last week, tears welled in Foster’s eyes.
“He knew,” Foster whispered, “I was taking heat for this.”
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20160322__I_only_answer_to_God__Bishops_don_t_bother_me__.html#TFez6tDXEBWFblyt.99
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The U.S. military has stepped up investigations of high-ranking officers for sexual assault, records show, curtailing its traditional deference toward senior leaders as it cracks down on sex crimes.
Since September, the armed forces have court-martialed or filed sexual-assault charges against four colonels from the Air Force, Army and Marines. In addition, a Navy captain was found guilty of abusive sexual contact during an administrative hearing.
Historically, it has been extremely rare for senior military officers to face courts-martial. Leaders suspected of wrongdoing are usually dealt with behind the scenes, with offenders receiving private reprimands or removal from command with a minimum of public explanation.
“There’s not a lot of transparency when it comes to senior-
officer misconduct,” said Don Christensen, a former chief prosecutor for the Air Force who now is president of Protect Our Defenders, a group that advocates for victims of sex crimes in the military. “They don’t like the American public knowing what’s going on, so they drag their heels in getting information out.”
That has gradually changed as the Defense Department — under pressure from Congress and the White House — has revamped its policies to prevent sexual assault and to hold perpetrators accountable.
During the federal fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 116 officers of all stripes were court-martialed, discharged or received some sort of punishment after they were criminally investigated for sexual assault. That was more than double the number from three years earlier, according to Defense Department figures.
Of last year’s cases, eight were against senior officers holding a rank equivalent to colonel or Navy captain or higher. While that figure may seem small, it represented a fourfold increase from 2012.
Overall, the vast majority of troops investigated for sexual assault are enlisted personnel, who accounted for 94 percent of all cases last year. In the active-duty military, enlisted troops outnumber officers by a ratio of 4.6 to 1.
But high-ranking leaders are finding they no are longer off-
limits as allegations of cringe-worthy behavior increasingly come to light in military courtrooms and public records.
This month, during a court-martial at Fort McNair in Washington, an Army colonel who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl and taking photos of her nude. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.
In February, the Marine Corps charged the commander of its Wounded Warrior Regiment with sexually assaulting a female corporal, violating protective orders and other misconduct.
In January, at a disciplinary hearing, the Navy found the former captain of a guided missile cruiser guilty of abusive sexual contact and sexual harassment. An investigative report chronicled in embarrassing detail how he got drunk with crew members at a Virginia bar and brazenly pressured a junior officer to have sex with him to advance her career.
In December, the Air Force charged a colonel at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado with raping or assaulting four victims, committing adultery with four other women, and taking photographs of himself in uniform at his office — with his genitals exposed.
Pentagon officials say the rash of cases is evidence that senior officers will be held to the same standards as everyone else in uniform.
“We’ve made it abundantly clear that this is not tolerable,” said Nathan Galbreath, senior executive adviser for the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. “The numbers suggest that people are reporting when they see the officers appointed above [committing a crime], and they really do expect that their bosses walk the walk and talk the talk.”
The unofficial taboo against putting senior leaders on trial in sex-abuse cases was shattered three years ago when the Army prosecuted Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair on charges of forcible sodomy, adultery and other offenses. It was only the third time in 60 years that the Army had court-martialed a general for any type of offense.
Prosecutors ended up dropping most of the charges and cutting a plea deal that spared Sinclair jail time. But the spectacle of a general sitting in the dock as witnesses testified about his volatile affair with a junior officer captivated the military.
Since then, the Defense Department has tried to reassure lawmakers, the public and its own troops that it takes sex-assault allegations seriously. It has expanded awareness training, bolstered support for victims and required command-level review of all investigations.
There are signs that the training is starting to pay off.
Crew members from the U.S.S. Anzio, a guided missile cruiser, blew the whistle on their commanding officer for sexual misconduct last year, leading to his removal from the ship and his probable ouster from the Navy.
According to a Navy investigative report, the Anzio’s captain, Brian K. Sorenson, got drunk Aug. 30 at a pub party in Yorktown, Va., and began to make advances toward a female sailor who needed his approval to become certified as a surface warfare officer.
The sailor told investigators that Sorenson asked her how many people she had slept with, whether she liked having sex with women and whether she would let him have anal sex with her.
Her account was buttressed by an eyewitness who said he overheard the captain saying, “Does anal interest you?”
At some point, he also grabbed the woman on the buttocks and told her to report to his quarters on the Anzio the next morning, where he again pressured her to have sex, the Navy investigation found.
Crew members quickly intervened at the pub, with one telling investigators that the situation resembled a scene from “one of the Navy’s Sexual Assault Bystander Intervention Videos.” The ship’s executive officer grabbed the captain, and the party ended.
During the van ride back to the ship, however, an intoxicated Sorenson kept acting out and asked the male driver if he “liked anal,” according to the investigation.
As rumors spread on the ship about the captain’s behavior, crew members revolted. Other officers confronted the captain in the ship’s wardroom and demanded an outside investigation.
Sorenson apologized to the officers for his conduct the night before, according to the Navy’s investigative report. But he also blamed them for not intervening sooner.
“He said it was our fault for letting him drink too much,” an unidentified officer told investigators.
After an administrative hearing in January, Sorenson was found guilty of sexual harassment, abusive sexual contact and conduct unbecoming an officer, Navy officials said. He faces discharge proceedings from the Navy.
In an interview with Navy investigators, Sorenson admitted to drinking that night but declined to answer questions about whether he pressured the female subordinate for sex.
His attorney, Greg McCormack of Virginia Beach, did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Other cases indicate that military investigators are pursuing evidence more aggressively than they may have in the past, regardless of the rank of their target.
During a court-martial at Fort McNair last week, Army Col. James C. Laughrey, a career intelligence official, pleaded guilty to child pornography charges and abusive sexual contact with a 15-year-old girl.
According to court documents, his actions started in 2009 and came to light years later only by chance. The victim, then a young adult, took a polygraph test during a job interview with an intelligence agency and was asked if she had ever been the victim of a crime.
The woman divulged the abuse but didn’t want to cooperate with an investigation or press charges against Laughrey, according to his defense attorney, Haytham Faraj. The intelligence agency nevertheless reported the matter to the Army, which found corroborating evidence on Laughrey’s computer.
“Frankly, they harassed her,” Faraj said, calling the case “an abusive government investigation.”
Laughrey admitted to his actions in court. When asked by the judge why he did it, he replied: “Your honor, I cannot give you a good answer for that. I do not understand or defend why I did it.”
Under the military justice system, senior officers are responsible for deciding whether individuals under their command should be prosecuted.
Some lawmakers and advocacy groups are pushing to strip commanders of that power and to give it instead to uniformed prosecutors. The Pentagon has resisted such proposals, saying they would undermine command authority.
When senior officers themselves are charged with sexual assault, it “makes it appear as if the fox was guarding the henhouse,” said Christensen, the president of Protect Our Defenders, which has lobbied Congress to change the law.
He cited the case of Col. Eugene Marcus Caughey, formerly the vice commander of the Air Force’s 51st Space Wing. In December, Caughey was charged with rape, assault and other charges in a case involving four women in Colorado, where he served at Schriever Air Force Base.
According to charging documents, Caughey raped one woman as he held her against the wall and floor, groped women on two other occasions, and violated an order from a two-star general to stay away from another victim.
In addition, the married colonel is charged with six counts of adultery — a crime in the military — for allegedly having consensual sex with four other women, according to the documents.
A preliminary hearing was held Friday to determine whether Caughey will face court-martial. A decision is pending. His attorney, Ryan Coward, declined to comment.
In other cases, even after charges have been filed against senior officers, the armed forces still cling to their old habit of trying to shield commanders from public embarrassment.
In November, the Air Force announced in a news release that Col. David S. Cockrum, former commander of the 51st Medical Group at Osan Air Base in South Korea, had been charged with sexual assault. The Air Force said he had been previously relieved of command for “fraternization” and “unprofessional relationships” but gave no other details.
When The Washington Post requested public records in the case against Cockrum, the leadership of the 7th Air Force, which oversees operations in South Korea, at first refused, citing a need “to protect the rights of Col. Cockrum and the integrity of ongoing legal proceedings.”
After repeated appeals, however, Air Force officials released documents showing that Cockrum had been charged with sexually assaulting men in two separate incidents in South Korea in 2014. He also had been charged with conduct unbecoming an officer.
Cockrum’s court-martial is scheduled for April 11. His military attorney did not respond to requests for comment placed through the Air Force.
The Marine Corps filed criminal sex-abuse charges on Feb. 12 against Col. T. Shane Tomko, the former commander of its Wounded Warrior Regiment in Quantico, Va.
The Marines kept the charges a secret, making no public announcement about the case. In response to a query from The Post last month, Marine officials at the Pentagon confirmed that Tomko had been charged with abusive sexual contact, obstruction of justice, illegal possession of steroids and other crimes.
Officials also revealed that Tomko had been relieved as commander a year earlier because of “a loss of confidence in his leadership.” But they would not provide other details or release public records in the case.
According to a copy of Tomko’s charging documents, seen by a Post reporter, the colonel was accused of sexually assaulting a female Marine corporal in October 2014 by forcibly kissing her on the mouth. He later referred to her as “a hot intriguing dyke who makes me wish I were a woman,” according to the documents.
Tomko faces a preliminary hearing scheduled for March 23 to determine if he will be court-martialed.
His military defense attorney, Marine Col. Stephen Newman, declined to comment.
Documents filed in civilian court show that Tomko has also been investigated by the Marines on allegations of sexually assaulting other women after he took charge of the Wounded Warrior Regiment in July 2014. As commander, he was responsible for overseeing battalions across the country that care for wounded and injured Marines.
According to a lawsuit filed against him in Circuit Court in Prince William County, Va., Tomko allegedly got drunk during a official trip to London in September 2014 and assaulted a civilian woman who worked for him by “shov[ing] his face into her breasts.”
Tomko denied the allegation in court filings and noted that the woman had also filed an administrative discrimination complaint against him with the federal government. The woman withdrew the lawsuit in January.
In an interview, the woman said she dismissed the lawsuit because her discrimination complaint was subsequently upheld. (The Post has a policy of not identifying victims of sexual abuse.)
She also said that Tomko had been disciplined — but not charged criminally — by the Marines last year for sexually assaulting her in London, as well as for a separate incident involving another female civilian working for the Wounded Warrior Regiment.
The Marines, she added, were slow to pursue her complaint against Tomko and dragged the case out.
“He’s the commander, that’s why it went on so long,” she said. “He’s the kind of guy everyone loves.”
Full article with links: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/more-high-ranking-officers-being-charged-with-sex-crimes-against-subordinates/2016/03/19/3910352a-e616-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html
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When your old students — forever young to you — step up to call their alma mater to account, you must celebrate the justice of their cause and stand right there beside them.
Recent letters in The Horace Mann Record by distressed alumni, Marc Fisher’s article in The New Yorker, Amos Kamil’s 2012 New York Times Sunday Magazine and New York Magazine articles and now the publication of his “Great Is The Truth” document the revelations of sexual abuse at Horace Mann. All call on the school to abandon its misguided and heartless institutional defense and to do the right thing: embrace an independent investigation of what happened in its formerly hallowed halls.
As former teachers at Horace Mann in the dark then about decades of abusive faculty, our colleagues and predecessors, and sickened by the harms chased to ground by committed alumni, brave survivors and their friends, we are eager for the school to make public how it was possible for years of rampant sexual abuse by scores of predatory faculty to take place.
For instance, a male teacher in his forties brings a girl student to a faculty party: this is an enormous red flag, yet the abuser was not reprimanded by the department head or by faculty members or by anyone in the administration. How could this happen? What kind of school culture existed that prevented people from doing then what was morally right and from protecting our students, Horace Mann’s greatest asset? Why wouldn’t the school and its board want to hear all the truth, to look underneath that rock, to ensure it is doing now what is morally right? Its cornerstone will only become more secure when the rot is exposed.
The school’s current stonewalling, its retreat from a public airing of this miserable history, is a position difficult to justify when it insists at the same time on its good stewardship of the current student body. Willful, self-serving ignorance cannot be bliss nor bland, uninformed assurances reliable guarantees. But Horace Mann can be a great school when it not only gives its students an extraordinary academic education in a safe environment, but also when it examines and corrects the prevailing atmosphere that enabled these events to occur.
Publication of this letter is a strong step in the right direction.
Horace Mann faculty:
Maryanne Bonello Boettjer (1970 to 1978)
Joyce Fitzpatrick [Leana] (1974 to 1983)
Jo Anderson Strouss (1968 to 1984)
Gary J. Tharp (1968 to 1975 Barnard, English Department head; Horace Mann, 1975 to 1981)
Bruce Weber (1978 to 1981)
Cynthia Rivellini D’Urso (1978 to 1987)
Genevieve Castelain [Vergerio] (1983 to 1984)
Richard Warren (1965 to 1979)
Elisabeth Sperling (1990 to 2004)
Ricki Ivers Lopez (1970 to 1973)
Carmen San Miguel (1968 to 1971, 1987 to 1999)
Jane Genth (Horace Mann, 1987-1999; Riverdale Country School, 1962 to 1964; Fieldston, 1967-1983)
David Rocks (1983 to 1984)
Michael Passow, HM ’66 (1976 to 1985)
The signatories sent this letter to Horace Mann’s student newspaper, The Horace Mann Record, on Jan. 27, but received no confirmation it was published and editions posted online since then do not include the letter. For more background, click here.
Full article with links: http://riverdalepress.com/stories/Horace-Mann-teachers-demand-justice,59458
Isabelle Angell, Former Horace Mann teachers call for probe, The Riverdale Press
Nearly four years after the news of widespread sexual abuse at Horace Mann became public, a group of former faculty members have added their voices to the call for the school to cooperate with an independent investigation into the scandal.
An investigation commissioned by the Horace Mann Action Coalition that proceeded without help from the school identified 64 credible victims of abuse at the school between 1962 and 1996. The report implicated 22 staff members.
In what was originally a letter to the editor of student newspaper The Horace Mann Record, 14 former teachers urged the school to provide a path to healing for the community and open itself up to an investigation.
“I can’t speak for the other signatories, but it seemed important to give support to those who have spoken up already,” said Joyce Fitzpatrick, who wrote an early draft of the letter. She taught at Horace Mann from 1974 to 1983.
“There have been letters in The Record from our students who are now adults, and that was part of the impetus,” she said.
However, it appears the letter was not published in The Record. Ms. Fitzpatrick said she emailed the letter to the paper’s staff on Wednesday, Jan. 27. The following Friday paper, Issue 16, is not available in the online archive. The letter does not appear in any of the subsequent issues.
Horace Mann staff did not respond to inquiries asking why Issue 16 was not made public, or if it was ever published in the first place.
In a phone interview last week, Ms. Fitzpatrick said she did not know if The Record published the letter because she never received a response from the newspaper staff. She noted she had never submitted a letter to the paper before, so she does not know what its policy is for communicating with letter writers.
“I couldn’t speculate if [the letter] might not be to the school’s taste,” she said. “But I cannot imagine the earlier letters from alumni were any more palatable and they were published.”
In the Nov. 6, 2015 issue, The Record published a letter to the editor from two alumni who had been abused during their time at Horace Mann. The survivors, Jon Seiger and Joseph Cumming, had been incorrectly named as proponents of renaming the school’s sports field as “Alumni Field” in an article. Known most recently as “Main Field,” for many years it was called “Clark Field” in honor of longtime headmaster R. Inslee Clark, who has since been named as a perpetrator of abuse.
Their letter addressed the inaccuracy, called on the school to meet with survivors and advocated for the independent investigation.
“There is a constructive way to move forward toward healing and eventually to an on-campus memorial. Since the abuse was revealed publicly in 2012, many in the HM community, including the Survivors’ Group, the Alumni Council, and The Record’s former Editor-in-Chief (in a May 2014 opinion piece), have called upon the school’s leadership to provide a public accounting and acknowledgment of what happened, based on the memories of current and former school personnel and based on the school’s own files,” Mr. Seiger and Mr. Cumming wrote in their letter.
Exonerating effect
In a phone interview Tuesday, Mr. Seiger, who was allegedly abused by eight teachers at Horace Mann including Mr. Clark, said he was aware of the letter signed by the former teachers and that their support was important.
“It’s not at all surprising that there were good people mixed in with the bad people, but it’s nice to know that there’s that many of them,” he said.
He noted that several teachers had tried to report abuse cases while they were happening, but they took their complaints to Mr. Clark — himself an abuser.
“The ones who tried to say stuff back then were completely shut down,” he said.
Mr. Cumming said the chief concern of the survivors has been an independent investigation done with the school’s cooperation to determine who knew what, and when, and to have former faculty sign a letter supporting such action was validating.
“It’s important to remember that the large majority of teachers were completely innocent. It has been very painful for current and retired faculty who have felt discredited by a cloud of suspicion. Some of the teachers who signed the letter were my best teachers at Horace Mann. They have the right to have their names cleared,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday. “One of the things an independent investigation would achieve is it would exonerate the innocent.”
Mr. Seiger said that while an independent investigation would force the school to admit it covered up the abuse at the time, he personally also sees other ways for survivors like himself to heal. He mentioned last year’s Hilltop Cares benefit concert, which raised money for survivors’ therapy bills, and his own communications with current Head of School Thomas Kelly.
“We are working on a path forward and talking about starting to get together with Tom Kelly, the school and survivors,” he said.
Full article: http://riverdalepress.com/stories/Former-HM-teachers-call-for-probe,59448
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-03-18 03:51:012016-03-18 03:51:01Letter from Horace Mann teachers, and article, The Riverdale Press
Adults have a duty to love and protect children. Yet not a day goes by when we don’t hear a story about children abused by someone they know and trust. Perpetrators cover a very wide spectrum, from parents to coaches to teachers to clergy. But especially bitter for the statewide Catholic community is a March 1 grand jury report detailing historical abuses that took place in Western Pennsylvania’s Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown.
This news brings back ugly feelings for so many within our archdiocese, which learned its own lessons about child sexual abuse the hard way. The most important lesson is that the persons who suffer most in these tragedies are the survivors and their families. I’ve met personally with many survivors over the years. Their stories and experiences are intensely painful. I am deeply sorry for all they’ve endured, for the past failures of the Church, and for the role it has played in their suffering.
When I arrived here more than four years ago, we committed the archdiocese to do all it can to support survivors on their path toward healing and to create Church and school environments to protect our young people and keep them from harm.
My predecessor, Cardinal Justin Rigali, had already started by hiring respected professionals – experts from the victim-services and law-enforcement communities – to establish and implement best practices. Their charge was based on two simple requirements: Law-enforcement authorities must be notified immediately and properly when any allegation of abuse is made; and survivors need to be cared for professionally and with compassion.
We’ve made progress. Today, the archdiocese has a zero-tolerance policy for clergy, lay employees, and volunteers who engage in misconduct with children, and it takes immediate action when an accusation is made. Any allegation of abuse must be reported immediately to law enforcement, and any substantiated allegation against a member of the clergy results in immediate removal from ministry.
Every year, our Victim Assistance Program offers substantial support to individuals and families. During the 2014-2015 fiscal year alone, the archdiocese dedicated more than $1.7 million to underwrite counseling, to provide medication, to eliminate barriers to receiving support such as travel and child care, and to provide other forms of support to survivors and their families.
Parents and families need to have confidence that their children are protected. To meet that need, members of our archdiocese play an important role every day in creating safe environments for anyone who participates in our parish, school, service, or recreational activities. Our Office for Child and Youth Protection provides mandatory training and educational efforts to clergy, staff, and volunteers on how to recognize improper conduct and report abuse or inappropriate behavior.
Since 2003, more than 92,000 adults in our archdiocesan community have received training to recognize, respond to, and report child abuse. And every year, more than 100,000 children receive age-appropriate abuse prevention education. These efforts are constantly reviewed, improved, and built upon. Next month, we launch a new education program in our diocesan schools, grades 9-12, focused on healthy relationships called “TeenTalk: Lessons to Empower Youth in a Modern World.”
We know that preventing new cases of abuse requires vigilance. We’re blessed by the dedication of more than 280 designated safe environment coordinators who work in our parishes, schools, and ministries to ensure compliance with laws and our own archdiocesan policies. Even before Pennsylvania law recently changed as a result of the work of the Task Force on Child Protection, the archdiocese had already required all people working with children, including volunteers, to undergo background checks and child-abuse clearances, attend safe environment and mandated reporter training programs, as well as report any suspicions of child abuse to the proper legal authorities.
This is a huge task, and I’m grateful to all of our safe environment coordinators and everyone in our parishes and schools for the work they do on the front lines, for their valuable input to our Office for Child and Youth Protection, and most importantly for their advocacy on behalf of our diocesan children. Their efforts have woven safety, prevention, and healing into the fabric of our diocesan life.
As part of our continued efforts, next month we will join with many others to mark Child Abuse Prevention Month with special events and education programs. But our work of helping survivors heal, protecting our people, and purifying the Church will go on – permanently.
Charles J. Chaput is archbishop of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. commof@archphila.org
The archdiocese encourages anyone who needs to make a report of sexual abuse of a child by an archdiocesan priest, deacon, lay employee, or volunteer to contact their local law enforcement agency and/or the Archdiocesan Office of Investigations at 1-888-930-9010.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20160318_Commentary__Phila__archdiocese_committed_to_preventing_abuse__aiding_survivors.html#mF2mzJMgOPitGOkx.99
Douglas Dowty, DA looks into allegations of possible sex abuse at All Saints Elementary amid baby porn case, Syracuse.com
/in New York /by SOL ReformThe Onondaga County District Attorney’s Office is probing whether any students at All Saints Elementary School were physically abused, an official confirmed.
Their probe comes amid a federal child pornography case against school aide Emily Oberst, 23, who was fired Monday after being charged with sexually exploiting a 16-month-old girl.
Oberst, of Syracuse, is accused of helping Jason Kopp, 40, of Liverpool, sexually exploit the young girl for pornography.
A letter sent to All Saints parents Monday warned that students might also be victims.
“Unfortunately, this morning in a meeting with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we learned that there may be additional victims of Miss Oberst’s criminal activity, including students at All Saints,” the school’s letter read.
First Chief Assistant District Attorney Rick Trunfio said that the DA’s office is looking into the reports of abuse.
“We are actively investigating any and all allegations of any sexual abuse of any children in this case,” he said.
For their part, federal authorities have remained tight-lipped. Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Southwick confirmed today that the FBI is investigating matters involving Emily Oberst at the All Saints school. He would not comment further.
All Saints is housed in an old parochial school building at 112 Wilbur Ave., but is not sanctioned by the Syracuse Catholic Diocese.
Syracuse.com is continuing to reach out to school administrators. Check back to Syracuse.com for more details as they become available.
Full article with links here: http://www.syracuse.com/crime/index.ssf/2016/03/da_probes_allegations_of_abuse_at_all_saints_elementary_amid_child_porn_case.html
Anne Barrett Doyle, BishopAccountability.Org: Making Children Safer: More Prosecutors Are Charging Catholic Officials for Enabling Abusers, Hamilton and Griffin on Rights
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformA victory for children occurred last week in Johnstown PA. The state’s attorney general pressed criminal charges against three former Catholic church officials — not for molesting children themselves, but for failing to stop a serial child predator whom they supervised.
The three former officials are charged with child endangerment and criminal conspiracy for enabling an already-accused cleric, Brother Stephen Baker, TOR, “to have contact with children and the public as part of his ministry.” [See the grand jury presentment.] The three consecutively led from 1986 to 2009 a small group of priests and religious brothers, the Third Order Regular Franciscans, Immaculate Conception province, based in Hollidaysburg PA.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called the charges by PA Attorney General Kathleen Kane “one of the broadest-ever drives to hold [the] Roman Catholic church accountable for clergy abuses of minors.”
The province knew of alleged child sexual abuse by Baker as early as 1988. A church-paid psychologist who evaluated Baker in 1991 urged that he not have one-on-one contact with children. Baker’s superior at the time, Minister Provincial Anthony J. (Giles) Schinelli, Jr., TOR, appears not to have taken the recommendation to heart. The following year, Rev. Schinelli assigned Baker to teach at Bishop McCourt High School in Johnstown. The results were catastrophic.
From April 1992 to January 2010, Baker allegedly abused more than 100 children in the area of Johnstown, including 88 students from Bishop McCourt, where he taught religion and acted as an unofficial sports trainer.
According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the cleric lacked “any professional qualifications, and under the guise of offering massages or other treatment, Baker handled boys’ bare genitals with his hands and digitally penetrated their anuses, among other offenses.”
Rev. Schinelli and his successors never reported Baker to law enforcement. Baker killed himself in January 2013, shortly after his crimes were first made public.
The filing of charges against Schinelli and his successors by Attorney General Kane was as unusual as it was bold.
In the 13 years since the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team published the secret files of Cardinal Law, hundreds of bishops and other senior Catholic officials have been named in court actions, news reports, and grand jury investigations as enablers of child sexual abuse.
Astonishingly, though, fewer than ten Catholic church officials and dioceses have been criminally charged for their roles in managing the cover-up.
But today, ever so slowly, this accountability gap is closing. In the last few years, we’ve seen more determined public prosecutors like Kane. They are the vanguard of a societal shift: an increasing willingness to insist that religious institutions obey the same child protection laws that apply to everyone else.
The French Spotlight: “They thought that it was enough to relocate him …”
Early signs of a shift toward prosecuting institutional enablers of child abuse are happening outside the U.S. too, including an extraordinary example unfolding now in France. The daily newspaper Le Figaro iscalling it the French Spotlight.
Early this month, the public prosecutor of Lyon launched an investigation of possible criminal wrongdoing by Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the country’s most prominent Catholic cleric. In his capacity as archbishop of Lyon, Barbarin allegedly kept two known abusers in ministry, including a serial abuser named Fr. Bernard Preynat.
A longtime leader of a local Catholic Boy Scouts troop, Preynat is believed by a survivors’ group to have sexually assaulted 60 boys between 1986 and 1991. Barbarin didn’t remove Preynat from ministry until May 2015, although his crimes long had been an open secret. The priest had confessed to church superiors in 1991, and even sent letters to the families of children he had molested, admitting to his crimes.
Last month, the priest’s lawyer, Frédéric Doyez, bluntly blamed the cardinal and his predecessors. “If justice has not been rendered until now, it is not Father Preynat who prevented it. From the moment he was uncovered, he confessed. He is a man who has been living with the offenses that he committed for over 25 years. The odd thing is that he was granted a great deal of trust, as if nothing had happened. They thought that it was enough to relocate him, for things to fall into oblivion.”
A child protection initiative unlike any we’ve seen in the United States
However, the world’s pacesetter in terms of holding religious and other institutions accountable for child protection is Australia. Since January 2013, its Royal Commission has been waging an extraordinary inquiry into “institutional responses to allegations and incidents of child sexual abuse.” It is investigating most of the country’s major religious and child-related secular institutions, including the Catholic church.
The Royal Commission has muscle and resolve unlike any government-led child protection initiative we’ve seen in the United States. It has compelled production of secret documents and published thousands of pages on its website, along with transcripts of testimony. It has forced the nation’s most powerful institutional leaders to testify, and many of the hearings are live-streamed.
With still more than a year of hearings to go, the Commission already has had enormous impact. It has made 961 reports to police and other authorities, many of which have resulted in arrests and charges.
Earlier this month, in a four-day live-streamed public hearing, the Commission grilled one of Pope Francis’s top aides, Cardinal George Pell, former bishop of Melbourne and Sydney.
The Commission members questioned Pell from Sydney via video-link, while he sat in a hotel conference room outside of Vatican City. In the room with him were more than a dozen survivors of the priests he allegedly protected. After Pell had said he would not be returning to Australia to testify, citing bad health, the Commission granted the survivors permission to attend the hearing in Rome. A crowd-funding campaign paid for many of their flights.
Pell was questioned in careful detail about his knowledge of a priest sex ring at a Catholic school in the city of Ballarat, where he began his priesthood. He was also asked why as auxiliary bishop of Melbourne, he had ignored repeated complaints about a gun-packing abuser named Father Peter Searson, who terrorized children at a primary school in the poor migrant town of Doveton.
Whether the Royal Commission will recommend criminal charges against Pell remains to be seen.
Pope Francis’s tribunal for bishops is “going nowhere fast”
While Pope Francis has said repeatedly that bishops must be held accountable, it is becomingly increasingly clear that he has neither the political capacity nor the personal conviction to do so.
The Pope raised the hopes of survivors and Catholics everywhere last June when he announced a new Vatican tribunal to judge bishops who fail to protect children.
But according to a devastating article on March 9 by Nicole Winfield, the Associated Press’s respected Vatican reporter, the tribunal has not gotten off the ground. Nine months after it was announced, there has been no follow-up, Vatican sources told Winfield. Indeed, it seems unlikely ever to be implemented.
“It’s a victim of a premature roll-out, unresolved legal and administrative questions, and resistance both inside and outside of the Holy See,” Winfield reported.
This news, along with the recent revelations about Cardinal Pell, Cardinal Barbarin, and the former religious order officials in Johnstown, is bleak confirmation of what we already know. When it comes to child protection, the Catholic church cannot police itself.
That is why it’s crucial that this shift continue — that more civil authorities recognize their duty to hold Catholic officials accountable for reporting allegations and removing abusers. We need more actions like Attorney General Kane’s, and the U.S. needs a broad, powerful, neutral national inquiry similar to the Royal Commission.
Maria Panaritis, ‘I only answer to God. Bishops don’t bother me.’, Philly.com
/in Pennsylvania /by SOL ReformThe three veteran investigators were speechless.
‘I only answer to God. Bishops don’t bother me.’
For just a few months, they had waded into a probe of clergy sex abuse in central Pennsylvania. They didn’t yet know much. But they had heard about a man near Altoona named George Foster.
Foster, they were told, had long been “making noise” about eliminating abusive priests in the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown – writing letters in the local papers, meeting with church leaders. Daniel Dye, the deputy attorney general leading the investigation, knew he was someone worth meeting.
But Dye and the two agents with him were not prepared for what they saw as Foster arrived at a Pittsburgh hotel to meet them for a cup of coffee in late 2014.
Foster came carting an armload of manila folders. Each was labeled. “Victim 1.” “Victim 2.” And so on. Others bore the names of priests. Inside were detailed accounts from victims and others.
Years’ worth.
“You kept files?” Dye asked incredulously.
“Oh, yeah,” he told them. “People have been coming to me for years.”
“Why didn’t you ever take these files to the police?” Dye asked him.
“Well,” Foster said, “some of what’s in here, I’m getting from the police.”
His information became a critical building block for investigators as they developed the case that led this month to the release of two grand jury reports outlining years of child sex abuse by clerics in the eight-county Altoona-Johnstown Diocese.
The grand jury was livid that parents sought justice but civil authorities took no action to help them. Instead, people with badges and law degrees deferred to bishops and other Catholic leaders, who largely buried what was known about child abusers under their charge.
Foster, however, refused to turn away. For that, Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane and the grand jury branded him a hero.
“This is not about a religious order. This is not about Catholicism,” Kane said last week, taking a moment in her news conference at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown to point out Foster, a silver-haired man with hazel eyes. “This is about the law. And this is about people standing up for other people.”
Dye put it another way.
“George became like a compass” for the investigation, he said in an interview. “George got us there quicker.”
Inspired by his faith
A devout Catholic and family man, Foster, 55, is like and unlike many who live in the Altoona-Johnstown area.
He has spent his whole life in the neighboring postindustrial cities, which are shells of what they once were. He is married, has six children, and adheres to church dogma with deep loyalty.
“I don’t think I did anything special,” he said in his office in Duncansville, surrounded by photos of his family and a Star Trek cup and saucer.
But where fierce devotion to the church blinded others from taking action, Foster drew on his faith as fuel to do the right thing.
“I only answer to God,” he told the grand jury. “Bishops don’t bother me.”
The path that led him there had begun more than a decade earlier.
In 2002, a man in his 30s showed up without an appointment at Foster’s workplace, the Altoona-area office for the billboard and advertising giant Lamar Advertising Co.
As the clergy sex-abuse scandal was unfolding nationally, Foster had already taken bold stands in letters to the local paper about removing abusive priests. The man knew this. Foster and he were about the same age.
“I came to you,” he said, “because you’re not afraid of the diocese.”
The stranger told Foster that as a youth he had been sexually abused by a local priest and then berated by the priest’s jealous lover – another priest, who worked at the high school the victim attended.
“The one guy’s abusing me, and the other guy’s screaming at me when I’m at school,” he explained, according to Foster.
The victim said the diocese leaders knew about the sexually abusive priest but did nothing. He wanted to rent a billboard to expose the priest as a molester.
Foster was shocked. And yet, he instinctively reached for a notebook: “I immediately started writing things down. I said, ‘Let me look into this.’ ”
Foster had come from a devout family. An uncle and a brother were priests. And he knew a lot more priests, too. So he called one and asked, discreetly, about the alleged abuser.
“Oh, yeah,” the priest replied. “I think he could do that.”
Wow, Foster thought. The priests knew.
More phone calls and visits followed.
Foster also heard about a 1994 Blair County civil trial and guilty plea delivered by an accused predator named the Rev. Francis Luddy. So he went to the courthouse, found the case file. Couldn’t believe what he read.
“It was like the roots of a tree spreading out,” Foster said. “I realized, if I’m just a lay person and just asking a few questions, I’m getting all this information, how widespread and deep is this?”
Bearer of influences
A Johnstown native who lives in a once-grand Hollidaysburg house built for a 19th-century banker, Foster carries profound influences forged in childhood.
His father, James, said the rosary every night. He enlisted at age 17 to serve in World War II, and then raised seven children as a life-insurance salesman, proud he had what he considered a noble job.
James Foster went to every client’s funeral. When he died in 2000, so many came to his, you couldn’t get in, recalled his son, John.
To him, George is a lot like their father.
“George is one of the few guys who puts his life where his mouth is,” said John Foster, 59, of Collingswood, N.J., the only one of seven siblings who moved away.
But George recalls the righteous passions of his mother, Patricia.
“She was like the Blessed Mother – but with a machine gun,” he said.
“We grew up with pictures of aborted kids on the kitchen table,” Foster went on. “A lot of that burned into me.”
And yet, as strong as her religious identity was, he is convinced that his mother would have insisted he do nothing other than what he has done the last 14 years. Her maternal and advocate soul would have agreed.
“Child molestation is wrong,” Foster said. “And it doesn’t take a bunch of psychiatrists or a bunch of bishops to hold a meeting to figure that out.”
The first grand report alleged decades of clergy sex abuse ignored or concealed by the leaders of the diocese. Prosecutors say as many as hundreds of children may have been assaulted, but that the statute of limitations, or the deaths of accused priests, prevented them from bringing charges.
In a potentially groundbreaking prosecution, however, Kane last week announced charges against three priests who as leaders of a Franciscan order allegedly failed to remove a friar suspected of sexually assaulting more than 100 minors since the 1980s.
Minutes before announcing those charges, Kane met privately with Foster to thank him. He came at her invitation.
Dye also shook his hand – again.
“You can’t have mercy,” Foster told Dye, “without justice.”
At home the next day, Foster’s wife of 27 years, Katie, 51, said she does not view him so much as a hero as a man who strives to live by his faith. She kissed him on the cheek as she spoke of him.
“George is a father,” she said. “I think that maybe that instinct is what came through.”
Both are relieved that “truth has been heard.” But they are sad – that the scandal has driven people away from their faith, that it has caused so many souls so much damage.
“It took this long to be heard,” Katie Foster said. “How many people were hurt in the interim?”
Foster is convinced he was guided by an invisible hand. “I got wrapped up in this,” he said, “and that was God’s will.”
Perhaps his late father helped keep him strong, too. Long before the grand jury’s work was made public – and his name in it – word had spread through the local church that he was an agitator, worthy of excommunication.
One day not long after his father died, in 2009, one of his dad’s friends – “Uncle Harry” to the seven kids – called from Johnstown with a message.
“I just want you to know,” Harry told him, “your dad would be proud.”
As he recalled the message last week, tears welled in Foster’s eyes.
“He knew,” Foster whispered, “I was taking heat for this.”
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20160322__I_only_answer_to_God__Bishops_don_t_bother_me__.html#TFez6tDXEBWFblyt.99
Craig Whitlock and Thomas Gibbins-Neff, More high-ranking officers being charged with sex crimes against subordinates, The Washington Post
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformThe U.S. military has stepped up investigations of high-ranking officers for sexual assault, records show, curtailing its traditional deference toward senior leaders as it cracks down on sex crimes.
Since September, the armed forces have court-martialed or filed sexual-assault charges against four colonels from the Air Force, Army and Marines. In addition, a Navy captain was found guilty of abusive sexual contact during an administrative hearing.
Historically, it has been extremely rare for senior military officers to face courts-martial. Leaders suspected of wrongdoing are usually dealt with behind the scenes, with offenders receiving private reprimands or removal from command with a minimum of public explanation.
“There’s not a lot of transparency when it comes to senior-
officer misconduct,” said Don Christensen, a former chief prosecutor for the Air Force who now is president of Protect Our Defenders, a group that advocates for victims of sex crimes in the military. “They don’t like the American public knowing what’s going on, so they drag their heels in getting information out.”
That has gradually changed as the Defense Department — under pressure from Congress and the White House — has revamped its policies to prevent sexual assault and to hold perpetrators accountable.
During the federal fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 116 officers of all stripes were court-martialed, discharged or received some sort of punishment after they were criminally investigated for sexual assault. That was more than double the number from three years earlier, according to Defense Department figures.
Of last year’s cases, eight were against senior officers holding a rank equivalent to colonel or Navy captain or higher. While that figure may seem small, it represented a fourfold increase from 2012.
Overall, the vast majority of troops investigated for sexual assault are enlisted personnel, who accounted for 94 percent of all cases last year. In the active-duty military, enlisted troops outnumber officers by a ratio of 4.6 to 1.
But high-ranking leaders are finding they no are longer off-
limits as allegations of cringe-worthy behavior increasingly come to light in military courtrooms and public records.
This month, during a court-martial at Fort McNair in Washington, an Army colonel who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl and taking photos of her nude. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.
In February, the Marine Corps charged the commander of its Wounded Warrior Regiment with sexually assaulting a female corporal, violating protective orders and other misconduct.
In January, at a disciplinary hearing, the Navy found the former captain of a guided missile cruiser guilty of abusive sexual contact and sexual harassment. An investigative report chronicled in embarrassing detail how he got drunk with crew members at a Virginia bar and brazenly pressured a junior officer to have sex with him to advance her career.
In December, the Air Force charged a colonel at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado with raping or assaulting four victims, committing adultery with four other women, and taking photographs of himself in uniform at his office — with his genitals exposed.
Pentagon officials say the rash of cases is evidence that senior officers will be held to the same standards as everyone else in uniform.
“We’ve made it abundantly clear that this is not tolerable,” said Nathan Galbreath, senior executive adviser for the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. “The numbers suggest that people are reporting when they see the officers appointed above [committing a crime], and they really do expect that their bosses walk the walk and talk the talk.”
The unofficial taboo against putting senior leaders on trial in sex-abuse cases was shattered three years ago when the Army prosecuted Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair on charges of forcible sodomy, adultery and other offenses. It was only the third time in 60 years that the Army had court-martialed a general for any type of offense.
Prosecutors ended up dropping most of the charges and cutting a plea deal that spared Sinclair jail time. But the spectacle of a general sitting in the dock as witnesses testified about his volatile affair with a junior officer captivated the military.
Since then, the Defense Department has tried to reassure lawmakers, the public and its own troops that it takes sex-assault allegations seriously. It has expanded awareness training, bolstered support for victims and required command-level review of all investigations.
There are signs that the training is starting to pay off.
Crew members from the U.S.S. Anzio, a guided missile cruiser, blew the whistle on their commanding officer for sexual misconduct last year, leading to his removal from the ship and his probable ouster from the Navy.
According to a Navy investigative report, the Anzio’s captain, Brian K. Sorenson, got drunk Aug. 30 at a pub party in Yorktown, Va., and began to make advances toward a female sailor who needed his approval to become certified as a surface warfare officer.
The sailor told investigators that Sorenson asked her how many people she had slept with, whether she liked having sex with women and whether she would let him have anal sex with her.
Her account was buttressed by an eyewitness who said he overheard the captain saying, “Does anal interest you?”
At some point, he also grabbed the woman on the buttocks and told her to report to his quarters on the Anzio the next morning, where he again pressured her to have sex, the Navy investigation found.
Crew members quickly intervened at the pub, with one telling investigators that the situation resembled a scene from “one of the Navy’s Sexual Assault Bystander Intervention Videos.” The ship’s executive officer grabbed the captain, and the party ended.
During the van ride back to the ship, however, an intoxicated Sorenson kept acting out and asked the male driver if he “liked anal,” according to the investigation.
As rumors spread on the ship about the captain’s behavior, crew members revolted. Other officers confronted the captain in the ship’s wardroom and demanded an outside investigation.
Sorenson apologized to the officers for his conduct the night before, according to the Navy’s investigative report. But he also blamed them for not intervening sooner.
“He said it was our fault for letting him drink too much,” an unidentified officer told investigators.
After an administrative hearing in January, Sorenson was found guilty of sexual harassment, abusive sexual contact and conduct unbecoming an officer, Navy officials said. He faces discharge proceedings from the Navy.
In an interview with Navy investigators, Sorenson admitted to drinking that night but declined to answer questions about whether he pressured the female subordinate for sex.
His attorney, Greg McCormack of Virginia Beach, did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Other cases indicate that military investigators are pursuing evidence more aggressively than they may have in the past, regardless of the rank of their target.
During a court-martial at Fort McNair last week, Army Col. James C. Laughrey, a career intelligence official, pleaded guilty to child pornography charges and abusive sexual contact with a 15-year-old girl.
According to court documents, his actions started in 2009 and came to light years later only by chance. The victim, then a young adult, took a polygraph test during a job interview with an intelligence agency and was asked if she had ever been the victim of a crime.
The woman divulged the abuse but didn’t want to cooperate with an investigation or press charges against Laughrey, according to his defense attorney, Haytham Faraj. The intelligence agency nevertheless reported the matter to the Army, which found corroborating evidence on Laughrey’s computer.
“Frankly, they harassed her,” Faraj said, calling the case “an abusive government investigation.”
Laughrey admitted to his actions in court. When asked by the judge why he did it, he replied: “Your honor, I cannot give you a good answer for that. I do not understand or defend why I did it.”
Under the military justice system, senior officers are responsible for deciding whether individuals under their command should be prosecuted.
Some lawmakers and advocacy groups are pushing to strip commanders of that power and to give it instead to uniformed prosecutors. The Pentagon has resisted such proposals, saying they would undermine command authority.
When senior officers themselves are charged with sexual assault, it “makes it appear as if the fox was guarding the henhouse,” said Christensen, the president of Protect Our Defenders, which has lobbied Congress to change the law.
He cited the case of Col. Eugene Marcus Caughey, formerly the vice commander of the Air Force’s 51st Space Wing. In December, Caughey was charged with rape, assault and other charges in a case involving four women in Colorado, where he served at Schriever Air Force Base.
According to charging documents, Caughey raped one woman as he held her against the wall and floor, groped women on two other occasions, and violated an order from a two-star general to stay away from another victim.
In addition, the married colonel is charged with six counts of adultery — a crime in the military — for allegedly having consensual sex with four other women, according to the documents.
A preliminary hearing was held Friday to determine whether Caughey will face court-martial. A decision is pending. His attorney, Ryan Coward, declined to comment.
In other cases, even after charges have been filed against senior officers, the armed forces still cling to their old habit of trying to shield commanders from public embarrassment.
In November, the Air Force announced in a news release that Col. David S. Cockrum, former commander of the 51st Medical Group at Osan Air Base in South Korea, had been charged with sexual assault. The Air Force said he had been previously relieved of command for “fraternization” and “unprofessional relationships” but gave no other details.
When The Washington Post requested public records in the case against Cockrum, the leadership of the 7th Air Force, which oversees operations in South Korea, at first refused, citing a need “to protect the rights of Col. Cockrum and the integrity of ongoing legal proceedings.”
After repeated appeals, however, Air Force officials released documents showing that Cockrum had been charged with sexually assaulting men in two separate incidents in South Korea in 2014. He also had been charged with conduct unbecoming an officer.
Cockrum’s court-martial is scheduled for April 11. His military attorney did not respond to requests for comment placed through the Air Force.
The Marine Corps filed criminal sex-abuse charges on Feb. 12 against Col. T. Shane Tomko, the former commander of its Wounded Warrior Regiment in Quantico, Va.
The Marines kept the charges a secret, making no public announcement about the case. In response to a query from The Post last month, Marine officials at the Pentagon confirmed that Tomko had been charged with abusive sexual contact, obstruction of justice, illegal possession of steroids and other crimes.
Officials also revealed that Tomko had been relieved as commander a year earlier because of “a loss of confidence in his leadership.” But they would not provide other details or release public records in the case.
According to a copy of Tomko’s charging documents, seen by a Post reporter, the colonel was accused of sexually assaulting a female Marine corporal in October 2014 by forcibly kissing her on the mouth. He later referred to her as “a hot intriguing dyke who makes me wish I were a woman,” according to the documents.
Tomko faces a preliminary hearing scheduled for March 23 to determine if he will be court-martialed.
His military defense attorney, Marine Col. Stephen Newman, declined to comment.
Documents filed in civilian court show that Tomko has also been investigated by the Marines on allegations of sexually assaulting other women after he took charge of the Wounded Warrior Regiment in July 2014. As commander, he was responsible for overseeing battalions across the country that care for wounded and injured Marines.
According to a lawsuit filed against him in Circuit Court in Prince William County, Va., Tomko allegedly got drunk during a official trip to London in September 2014 and assaulted a civilian woman who worked for him by “shov[ing] his face into her breasts.”
Tomko denied the allegation in court filings and noted that the woman had also filed an administrative discrimination complaint against him with the federal government. The woman withdrew the lawsuit in January.
In an interview, the woman said she dismissed the lawsuit because her discrimination complaint was subsequently upheld. (The Post has a policy of not identifying victims of sexual abuse.)
She also said that Tomko had been disciplined — but not charged criminally — by the Marines last year for sexually assaulting her in London, as well as for a separate incident involving another female civilian working for the Wounded Warrior Regiment.
The Marines, she added, were slow to pursue her complaint against Tomko and dragged the case out.
“He’s the commander, that’s why it went on so long,” she said. “He’s the kind of guy everyone loves.”
Full article with links: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/more-high-ranking-officers-being-charged-with-sex-crimes-against-subordinates/2016/03/19/3910352a-e616-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html
Letter from Horace Mann teachers, and article, The Riverdale Press
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformTo The Horace Mann Record and administration:
When your old students — forever young to you — step up to call their alma mater to account, you must celebrate the justice of their cause and stand right there beside them.
Recent letters in The Horace Mann Record by distressed alumni, Marc Fisher’s article in The New Yorker, Amos Kamil’s 2012 New York Times Sunday Magazine and New York Magazine articles and now the publication of his “Great Is The Truth” document the revelations of sexual abuse at Horace Mann. All call on the school to abandon its misguided and heartless institutional defense and to do the right thing: embrace an independent investigation of what happened in its formerly hallowed halls.
As former teachers at Horace Mann in the dark then about decades of abusive faculty, our colleagues and predecessors, and sickened by the harms chased to ground by committed alumni, brave survivors and their friends, we are eager for the school to make public how it was possible for years of rampant sexual abuse by scores of predatory faculty to take place.
For instance, a male teacher in his forties brings a girl student to a faculty party: this is an enormous red flag, yet the abuser was not reprimanded by the department head or by faculty members or by anyone in the administration. How could this happen? What kind of school culture existed that prevented people from doing then what was morally right and from protecting our students, Horace Mann’s greatest asset? Why wouldn’t the school and its board want to hear all the truth, to look underneath that rock, to ensure it is doing now what is morally right? Its cornerstone will only become more secure when the rot is exposed.
The school’s current stonewalling, its retreat from a public airing of this miserable history, is a position difficult to justify when it insists at the same time on its good stewardship of the current student body. Willful, self-serving ignorance cannot be bliss nor bland, uninformed assurances reliable guarantees. But Horace Mann can be a great school when it not only gives its students an extraordinary academic education in a safe environment, but also when it examines and corrects the prevailing atmosphere that enabled these events to occur.
Publication of this letter is a strong step in the right direction.
Horace Mann faculty:
Maryanne Bonello Boettjer (1970 to 1978)
Joyce Fitzpatrick [Leana] (1974 to 1983)
Jo Anderson Strouss (1968 to 1984)
Gary J. Tharp (1968 to 1975 Barnard, English Department head; Horace Mann, 1975 to 1981)
Bruce Weber (1978 to 1981)
Cynthia Rivellini D’Urso (1978 to 1987)
Genevieve Castelain [Vergerio] (1983 to 1984)
Richard Warren (1965 to 1979)
Elisabeth Sperling (1990 to 2004)
Ricki Ivers Lopez (1970 to 1973)
Carmen San Miguel (1968 to 1971, 1987 to 1999)
Jane Genth (Horace Mann, 1987-1999; Riverdale Country School, 1962 to 1964; Fieldston, 1967-1983)
David Rocks (1983 to 1984)
Michael Passow, HM ’66 (1976 to 1985)
The signatories sent this letter to Horace Mann’s student newspaper, The Horace Mann Record, on Jan. 27, but received no confirmation it was published and editions posted online since then do not include the letter. For more background, click here.
Full article with links: http://riverdalepress.com/stories/Horace-Mann-teachers-demand-justice,59458
Isabelle Angell, Former Horace Mann teachers call for probe, The Riverdale Press
Nearly four years after the news of widespread sexual abuse at Horace Mann became public, a group of former faculty members have added their voices to the call for the school to cooperate with an independent investigation into the scandal.
An investigation commissioned by the Horace Mann Action Coalition that proceeded without help from the school identified 64 credible victims of abuse at the school between 1962 and 1996. The report implicated 22 staff members.
In what was originally a letter to the editor of student newspaper The Horace Mann Record, 14 former teachers urged the school to provide a path to healing for the community and open itself up to an investigation.
“I can’t speak for the other signatories, but it seemed important to give support to those who have spoken up already,” said Joyce Fitzpatrick, who wrote an early draft of the letter. She taught at Horace Mann from 1974 to 1983.
“There have been letters in The Record from our students who are now adults, and that was part of the impetus,” she said.
However, it appears the letter was not published in The Record. Ms. Fitzpatrick said she emailed the letter to the paper’s staff on Wednesday, Jan. 27. The following Friday paper, Issue 16, is not available in the online archive. The letter does not appear in any of the subsequent issues.
Horace Mann staff did not respond to inquiries asking why Issue 16 was not made public, or if it was ever published in the first place.
In a phone interview last week, Ms. Fitzpatrick said she did not know if The Record published the letter because she never received a response from the newspaper staff. She noted she had never submitted a letter to the paper before, so she does not know what its policy is for communicating with letter writers.
“I couldn’t speculate if [the letter] might not be to the school’s taste,” she said. “But I cannot imagine the earlier letters from alumni were any more palatable and they were published.”
In the Nov. 6, 2015 issue, The Record published a letter to the editor from two alumni who had been abused during their time at Horace Mann. The survivors, Jon Seiger and Joseph Cumming, had been incorrectly named as proponents of renaming the school’s sports field as “Alumni Field” in an article. Known most recently as “Main Field,” for many years it was called “Clark Field” in honor of longtime headmaster R. Inslee Clark, who has since been named as a perpetrator of abuse.
Their letter addressed the inaccuracy, called on the school to meet with survivors and advocated for the independent investigation.
“There is a constructive way to move forward toward healing and eventually to an on-campus memorial. Since the abuse was revealed publicly in 2012, many in the HM community, including the Survivors’ Group, the Alumni Council, and The Record’s former Editor-in-Chief (in a May 2014 opinion piece), have called upon the school’s leadership to provide a public accounting and acknowledgment of what happened, based on the memories of current and former school personnel and based on the school’s own files,” Mr. Seiger and Mr. Cumming wrote in their letter.
Exonerating effect
In a phone interview Tuesday, Mr. Seiger, who was allegedly abused by eight teachers at Horace Mann including Mr. Clark, said he was aware of the letter signed by the former teachers and that their support was important.
“It’s not at all surprising that there were good people mixed in with the bad people, but it’s nice to know that there’s that many of them,” he said.
He noted that several teachers had tried to report abuse cases while they were happening, but they took their complaints to Mr. Clark — himself an abuser.
“The ones who tried to say stuff back then were completely shut down,” he said.
Mr. Cumming said the chief concern of the survivors has been an independent investigation done with the school’s cooperation to determine who knew what, and when, and to have former faculty sign a letter supporting such action was validating.
“It’s important to remember that the large majority of teachers were completely innocent. It has been very painful for current and retired faculty who have felt discredited by a cloud of suspicion. Some of the teachers who signed the letter were my best teachers at Horace Mann. They have the right to have their names cleared,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday. “One of the things an independent investigation would achieve is it would exonerate the innocent.”
Mr. Seiger said that while an independent investigation would force the school to admit it covered up the abuse at the time, he personally also sees other ways for survivors like himself to heal. He mentioned last year’s Hilltop Cares benefit concert, which raised money for survivors’ therapy bills, and his own communications with current Head of School Thomas Kelly.
“We are working on a path forward and talking about starting to get together with Tom Kelly, the school and survivors,” he said.
Full article: http://riverdalepress.com/stories/Former-HM-teachers-call-for-probe,59448
Charles Chaput, Commentary: Phila. archdiocese committed to preventing abuse, aiding survivors, Philly.com
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformAdults have a duty to love and protect children. Yet not a day goes by when we don’t hear a story about children abused by someone they know and trust. Perpetrators cover a very wide spectrum, from parents to coaches to teachers to clergy. But especially bitter for the statewide Catholic community is a March 1 grand jury report detailing historical abuses that took place in Western Pennsylvania’s Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown.
This news brings back ugly feelings for so many within our archdiocese, which learned its own lessons about child sexual abuse the hard way. The most important lesson is that the persons who suffer most in these tragedies are the survivors and their families. I’ve met personally with many survivors over the years. Their stories and experiences are intensely painful. I am deeply sorry for all they’ve endured, for the past failures of the Church, and for the role it has played in their suffering.
When I arrived here more than four years ago, we committed the archdiocese to do all it can to support survivors on their path toward healing and to create Church and school environments to protect our young people and keep them from harm.
My predecessor, Cardinal Justin Rigali, had already started by hiring respected professionals – experts from the victim-services and law-enforcement communities – to establish and implement best practices. Their charge was based on two simple requirements: Law-enforcement authorities must be notified immediately and properly when any allegation of abuse is made; and survivors need to be cared for professionally and with compassion.
We’ve made progress. Today, the archdiocese has a zero-tolerance policy for clergy, lay employees, and volunteers who engage in misconduct with children, and it takes immediate action when an accusation is made. Any allegation of abuse must be reported immediately to law enforcement, and any substantiated allegation against a member of the clergy results in immediate removal from ministry.
Every year, our Victim Assistance Program offers substantial support to individuals and families. During the 2014-2015 fiscal year alone, the archdiocese dedicated more than $1.7 million to underwrite counseling, to provide medication, to eliminate barriers to receiving support such as travel and child care, and to provide other forms of support to survivors and their families.
Parents and families need to have confidence that their children are protected. To meet that need, members of our archdiocese play an important role every day in creating safe environments for anyone who participates in our parish, school, service, or recreational activities. Our Office for Child and Youth Protection provides mandatory training and educational efforts to clergy, staff, and volunteers on how to recognize improper conduct and report abuse or inappropriate behavior.
Since 2003, more than 92,000 adults in our archdiocesan community have received training to recognize, respond to, and report child abuse. And every year, more than 100,000 children receive age-appropriate abuse prevention education. These efforts are constantly reviewed, improved, and built upon. Next month, we launch a new education program in our diocesan schools, grades 9-12, focused on healthy relationships called “TeenTalk: Lessons to Empower Youth in a Modern World.”
We know that preventing new cases of abuse requires vigilance. We’re blessed by the dedication of more than 280 designated safe environment coordinators who work in our parishes, schools, and ministries to ensure compliance with laws and our own archdiocesan policies. Even before Pennsylvania law recently changed as a result of the work of the Task Force on Child Protection, the archdiocese had already required all people working with children, including volunteers, to undergo background checks and child-abuse clearances, attend safe environment and mandated reporter training programs, as well as report any suspicions of child abuse to the proper legal authorities.
This is a huge task, and I’m grateful to all of our safe environment coordinators and everyone in our parishes and schools for the work they do on the front lines, for their valuable input to our Office for Child and Youth Protection, and most importantly for their advocacy on behalf of our diocesan children. Their efforts have woven safety, prevention, and healing into the fabric of our diocesan life.
As part of our continued efforts, next month we will join with many others to mark Child Abuse Prevention Month with special events and education programs. But our work of helping survivors heal, protecting our people, and purifying the Church will go on – permanently.
Charles J. Chaput is archbishop of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. commof@archphila.org
The archdiocese encourages anyone who needs to make a report of sexual abuse of a child by an archdiocesan priest, deacon, lay employee, or volunteer to contact their local law enforcement agency and/or the Archdiocesan Office of Investigations at 1-888-930-9010.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20160318_Commentary__Phila__archdiocese_committed_to_preventing_abuse__aiding_survivors.html#mF2mzJMgOPitGOkx.99