UNITED STATES
Brain Blogger
by Richard Kensinger, MSW | March 18, 2016
I am prompted to compose this article for two primary reasons. First, I live in a Catholic Diocese (Altoona-Johnstown, PA) where a grand jury report very recently exposed that over four decades, over 50 priests and other church officials have harbored, protected, and enabled the victimization and mortification of hundreds of innocent children and youth in our community. Second, an article appearing in the New York Times written by Frank Bruni and published this past week, explores the impact of child sex predators in the Boston, Mass. Archdiocese.
These incidents are revealed in the searing and troubling movie Spotlight. This movie’s focus is on the very courageous efforts of investigative journalists to expose the wide complicity of many in that community who protected these predators. The article is entitled “The Catholic Churches Sins Are Ours”.
In Bruni’s article, he highlights how “churches benefit from the American Way of giving religion a free pass”. He ends his article by indicating that “if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one”!
My intent here is to discuss the clinical impact of this type of abuse by focusing what happens to these innocent victims. In a previously published article appearing on BrainBlogger, I offer a profile of a serial preferred predator in my area: Jerry Sandusky and the Penn State Scandal still rocking our community.
I am guided in my clinical focus by Erik Erickson’s stages of psychosocial development, Abraham Maslow’s needs hierarchy, and Judith Herman who published a book in 1992, Trauma and Recovery. I present here the accumulative damage of lifelong development of this kind of trauma.
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