WASHINGTON (DC)
WJLA TV
July 12, 2019
By Jay Korff
Survivors and experts who work in the field of child sex abuse will tell you there are many reasons why it’s difficult for some to report priest sex abuse. Denial, fear and shame are just a few of the reasons. So, we asked survivors and experts on this subject why sex abuse is so often unreported or reported decades after occurring.
“I always blamed myself,” Becky Ianni says. “I was taught that he was sent by God so therefore God is punishing me. I must be a bad little girl. There must be something that I’ve done and I carried that through adulthood always thinking that I wasn’t a good person. That somehow, even though I did not remember my abuse until I was 48, that feeling of inadequacy was with me my entire life.”
Becky Ianni says Father William Reinecke sexually abused her for years when she went to St. Mary Catholic Church in Alexandria, Virginia.
“I knew that God could read my thoughts and I thought if he knows that this is happening then I’m going to hell so I just buried it until I came across this picture. I was looking through old pictures and I found this picture of myself with him and I started getting sick at my stomach, I started having anxiety attacks and a few days later I started having flashbacks to the abuse,” says Ianni.
The Diocese of Richmond and Arlington spent months deciding who would handle Ianni’s case since her abuser worked for both.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.