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SNAPs clergy abuse victims mark 25 years and eye new targets
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Washington Post
Posted: August 11th, 2014
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/snaps-clergy...
When victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests first organized into a small band of volunteer activists in the late 1980s, reports of clergy molesting children were still new and relatively few. Today, as the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, marks its 25th anniversary at a conference in Chicago (Aug. 1-3), its members can take satisfaction in seeing that its claims have been validated, and a few (though hardly all) of its recommendations have been implemented by the church hierarchy. SNAPs advocacy on the Catholic scandal also helped push the reality of sexual abuse into the public consciousness to the point that victims can regularly win in courts and get a hearing in the media, and they are much more likely to come forward to tell their stories, whether they were abused by clergy or by athletic coaches or Boy Scout leaders. Yet that success is also presenting SNAP with a daunting new challenge as it looks to the future: how to respond to a flood of new inquiries from victims from other faiths and institutions, and how to push for changes beyond the familiar precincts of the Catholic Church. We are continuing to grow, and more of the growth is coming overseas and in non-Catholic institutional abuse, mostly religious institutions but a surprising number of secular ones as well, said David Clohessy, SNAPs national director. The appeals for help from SNAP have increased so much from students abused by teachers to victims of former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky that SNAP has set up chapters specifically for victims from non-Catholic churches and for those who were abused in the Boy Scouts.
Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandals news articles from reliable major media sources.
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