PENNSYLVANIA
The Patriot-News
By MATTHEW KEMENY, The Patriot-News
It took decades for a Bethlehem man to come forward with his story.
The man, now in his 70s, reached out to Tammy Vonada Lerner, vice president of the Foundation to Abolish Child Sex Abuse, and told her he was “sick of living like this.”
He said he couldn’t even allow his grandchildren to sit on his lap because it reminded him of how his priest molested him many years ago, Lerner recalled.
The case, explained at a Patriot-News Editorial Board meeting Thursday, illustrates the difficulty victims often have in coming forward to report abuse and the need for reforms to the state’s statute-of-limitations laws for civil litigation, Lerner said.
“It runs counter to the nature of the crime,” she said. “It’s insidious in that it takes decades for a person to understand how [the abuse] has impacted their lives.”
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