UNITED STATES
The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing
Virginia Jones
Sometimes you just have to sue the b#$%#@&^!. You have simply suffered too much injustice, and nothing you do inspires the party who harmed you to do the right thing. You have no other choice.
I hate lawsuits. I don’t like what lawyers do in general. Only one lawyer donated $100 to my organization despite the fact that I have provided significant support to many of their survivors including survivors they have abandoned. So I have nothing to lose in criticizing lawyers and lawsuits. Truthfully I feel a bit used by the lawyers whose clients I have helped. I prefer mediation and mediators to lawyers and lawsuits. I think our Retributive Jusitce system, which is based on finding the perpetrator and punishing them, is incredibly wounding to all sides. Lawsuits are win/lose propositions, but the losing side often feels that justice has not been done and remains hurt and angry. Whenever someone feels hurt and angry, conflict continues. In addition, when your focus is on guilt and punishment, you have to have a threshold level of evidence before you decide a criminal act is significant enough to prosecute and then you need enough evidence to prosecute.
Too many times there is too little evidence or the crime is not significant enough. Civil lawsuits can help to a degree when criminal prosecution is not possible, but even civil lawsuits leave people without justice. I’ve met a number of survivors who have not been able to receive any form of justice.
These cases include a number of women who were sexually abused as children who then had “affairs” with priests as adults. All these women were vulnerable to a kind man who flattered them and was gentler than the abusers of their childhood. Many Catholic blame these women for “tempting” the priests. I don’t. The priest had a duty to be therapeutic and crossed the line into selfish and harmful behavior. Some of these women have struggled greatly to function long after their interactions with the priest ended. If the Catholic Church has given them support, it is likely to be less than $10,000. In one case, a kindly priest or two have been the main source of emotional support for the woman for years, but the rest of the Church has mistreated her. In the case of another woman who became pregnant, the priest father disappeared when she told him she was pregnant and pleaded vow of poverty when she needed child support for her sick son.
In another case, a survivor was abused by multiple people, including a priest, but the church denied having much responsibility for the damage she suffered. They offered her a small payout that barely covered what she had already spent on therapy and that was before her lawyer took one-third of the settlement.
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