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February 22, 2005
Games pedophiles play
A priest being convicted of child molestation may no longer be front page news, but that doesn't mean the problem can be relegated to the inside pages of our collective conscience.
Thursday defrocked Roman Catholic priest Maurice Blackwell was convicted of molesting an altar boy during the 1990s, while serving at a church in Baltimore.
Sadly, we have heard some version of this story so often that we are now desensitized. But the Blackwell story is not exactly the same old story. A decade after alleging Blackwell molested him, Dontee Stokes shot and wounded the priest on the street in a fit of rage when Blackwell refused to apologize, the Associated Press reported.
"In May 2002, as the sex scandal that engulfed the Roman Catholic Church was unfolding in Boston, a tormented Stokes shot Blackwell three times in the hip and hand on a city street," AP reported.
The condensed version of what likely happened is that current events forced Stokes to relive a painful past. His past was especially painful because after suffering at the hands of a respected representative of God and all that is supposed to be good, authorities took no real action when he reported the abuse.
"Stokes reported the alleged abuse in 1993, at age 17, but prosecutors declined to press charges. He testified that he did not report the abuse earlier because he didn't want Blackwell to be removed, because of his stature in the community," AP reported.
It is not uncommon for a victim of abuse to seek an apology from the abuser. Because the victim's emotions have been locked away, he or she may appear unreasonable and out of control when confronting the abuser.
We don't have to condone being out of control to understand how it comes to be.
Victims are re-victimized when they are not believed. The victimization increases exponentially when the abuser refuses to apologize.
This is apparently what happened when Stokes confronted Blackwell. After the shooting, however, prosecutors reviewed Stokes' old allegations and charged Blackwell. And the Vatican, which had stripped Blackwell of his church authority in 1998 -- after he acknowledged having a sexual relationship with a teenage boy in the early 1970s -- finally defrocked him in October.
The defense characterized Stokes as a disturbed young man who made up the allegations to deal with his sexual identity crisis. That is probably a gross misrepresentation of the facts.
It is not uncommon for young boys exposed to the deviant desires of adult male authority figures to grow into adults who are confused about their sexual identity.
Many adults engage in sexual activities with children as a matter of experimentation, not orientation. Though these may be same-sex incidents, the men may not be gay.
But they are deviant and they do ruin lives of the children with whom they play sex games.
Posted by Nealus at February 22, 2005 12:41 AM
