The illusion of justice for sexual abuse victims

UNITED STATES
Washington Post

By Paul Mones
May 1

Paul Mones is a Los Angeles lawyer who represents victims of sexual abuse.

After decades of representing victims of sexual abuse, I was convinced that Jerry Sandusky’s arrest at Penn State in 2011 would put to rest the belief that child molesters are slovenly, leering guys wearing dirty raincoats and lurking outside playgrounds. But when word leaked last year that former Republican House speaker J. Dennis Hastert had paid hush money to a high school student he had allegedly sexually abused decades earlier, while he was a high school wrestling coach, the reaction by many in his home town of Yorkville, Ill., in Congress and elsewhere proved that the myth was alive and well. Not Denny Hastert, the beloved coach. Impossible!

The enduring fantasy that nice guys don’t molest children provides dangerous cover to perpetrators and engenders abject hopelessness in victims. Hiding behind a facade of kindheartedness, child molesters know they are committing the perfect crime, one that silences most of its victims forever. For those few able to muster the strength to come forward years later, it is not their perpetrator but the law itself that denies them justice. Maryland is a case in point: It gives victims just seven years after their 18th birthdays to file civil lawsuits — a period when few victims are yet able to acknowledge the horrific violation they experienced. …

Child molesters are a patient lot. A 2015 study on offenders in youth organizations found that more than half joined specifically to gain access to children. In no rush to achieve their goal, they are willing to spend months working their way into the fabric of a child’s life. Constantly proving “nice-guyness” is essential to abusers. They exploit the child’s inherent lack of life experience by lavishing him or her with gifts and adulation. The molester then manipulates the child’s reality — soon making an “innocent” rub of the shoulder, or a casual tussle of the hair, a normal part of his relationship with the child. Then the more invasive forms of abuse begin, and the child’s fate is sealed.

If you need a primer on how these molesters operate, read the U.S. attorney’s sentencing brief detailing not just the way Hastert allegedly went about sexually abusing the victim to whom he was paying the hush money, but also the tactics he used on other teenagers on his team. One victim, who was 14 at the time, alleged that Hastert told him to get up on a table so he could “loosen him up,” then in the process molested him.

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