UNITED STATES
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests
For immediate release: Monday, November 16, 2015
Statement by Kevin Flood of Washington DC, SNAP spokesman (Horizons3@verizon.net)
Along with other groups, we in SNAP today are pushing for a governmental investigation into child sex crimes and cover ups, like Australian officials are doing and officials in other nations have done.
Kids are safest when those who commit and conceal child sex crimes are behind bars. When that can’t happen, those who commit and conceal child sex crimes should at least be exposed and deterred.
That’s what an independent, thorough government-sponsored inquiry can do. It’s also the very least that our federal government should do, since it has completely refused to take even a single meaningful step in response to the Catholic church’s on-going clergy sex abuse and cover up crisis.
Catholic experts have admitted that an estimated 100,000 US kids have been sexually assaulted by priests.
We applaud the governments that have conducted investigations and issued reports about this continuing crisis, including Ireland, Australia, Canada and Belgium.
We applaud the local US jurisdictions that have done such investigations: New York (Westchester County Grand Jury Report, June 19, 2002 and the Suffolk County Grand Jury Report, February 10, 2003), New Hampshire (Attorney General’s Report with investigative archive, March 3, 2003), Maine (Attorney General’s Report, February 24, 2004. See also the attorney general’s investigative materials released on May 27, 2005 and July 8, 2005), Boston (Reilly Report and Executive Summary, July 23, 2003), three in Philadelphia, PA (Report of the Grand Jury, September 25, 2003, unsealed September 15, 2005, made public March 29, 2011, another Grand Jury Report, September 15, 2005, and a third, Report of the Grand Jury, dated January 21, 2011, released February 10, 2011).
We appaud non-profits that have done investigations, like CRIN, the Child Rights International Network (Child Sexual Abuse and the Holy See: The Need for Justice, Accountability and Reform, January 15, 2014) and Amnesty International.
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