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DR WIDODO JUDARWANTO
FIGHT CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE AND PEDOPHILIA
Yudhasmara Foundation
JL TAMAN BENDUNGAN ASAHAN 5 JAKARTA PUSAT, JAKARTA INDONESIA 10210
PHONE : (021) 70081995 – 5703646
email : judarwanto@gmail.com,
http://pedophiliasexabuse.blogspot.com/
A series of accusations of sexual abuse against minors has battered the American priesthood, yet the National Federation of Priest's Councils, the unofficial priests' union, has failed to assume responsibility. Never hesitant about offering advice to both church and state on national and international problems, the federation is silent on the scandal. This seeming indifference is typical of the head-in-the-sand reaction of most priests to the pedophile problem.
The priesthood may be the only profession in this country that makes no attempt to police itself against unprofessional behavior. Moreover, when a sexual abuse case arises, priests usually distance themselves from it. They claim it's the bishop's problem, maybe, but not theirs. In Chicago, where Joseph Cardinal Bernardin is attempting major reforms and re-examing decades of accusations, there is little enthusiasm among priests for what he has done and much sullen mumbling and complaint.
If Catholic clerics feel that charges of pedophilia have created an open season on them, they have only themselves to blame. By their own inaction and indifference they have created an open season on children for the few sexual predators among them.
Even now the typical priestly reactions to a pedophile charge are denying that the sexual abuse occurred, protecting the accused priest at whatever cost, covering up and blaming the victim and the media. He was cleared by the police, they often claim, ignoring the well-known truth that in many law enforcement jurisdictions there is a powerful, unwritten rule against arresting or indicting a priest. Or they will assure you that it was the boy's father who molested him or that the boy's mother brought the charges because the priest had rebuffed her sexual advances.
Personnel boards have had no hesitation in reassigning, after a few months of treatment, clerics who have faced such accusations -- sometimes to the role of pastor.
Bishop Raymond Goedert, former Vicar for the Clergy in the Archdiocese of Chicago, compared the scandal to the Clarence Thomas hearings, saying that it all depends on who you believe -- the priest or the alleged victim.
And his successor as vicar, the Rev. Patrick O'Malley, a past president of the priests' federation, assured a TV audience that members of a parish have the same sympathetic understanding for priests with sexual abuse problems that they do for alcoholic priests. "Slayers of the Soul," a book about pedophilia edited by a priest, asserts that psychologists think sexual abuse, like alcoholism, can be controlled through therapy groups. It does not occur to these "experts" that alcoholics are dangerous only to themselves, their families and the people they smash with their cars, but each pedophile is a threat to the future lives of hundreds of children.
As far as I am aware, no priest has ever turned another in for abusing a child or even testified against such a man. No diocesan senate of priests has spoken out publicly against the harm done by the predators of children to the church and to the priesthood. The priests' senate in my own archdiocese showed concern only for accused priests and for a hope that the Cardinal might keep me from writing more on the problem (he did not try). Concern for victims, past and future, was nonexistent.
Caught up in denial and defense mechanisms, priests seem unable to imagine what it must be like to be a victim or a member of a victim's family -- "a terror," in Cardinal Bernardin's words, that "will haunt them for the rest of their lives." Rarely have I heard that priests agree with the Cardinal that "we must protect children from them just as we protect women from rapists."
Some priests argue that pedophilia and related forms of sexual abuse are no worse in the priesthood than in any other profession. This shows a total misunderstanding of the priest's role in the life of the Catholic laity. To be defiled sexually by a priest is far worse than by anyone except a parent.
All professions rally to support their own when they are under attack. But the priesthood is a special profession. Its failure to police itself is a special disgrace.
Andrew M. Greeley, a Roman Catholic priest, is professor of social science at University of Chicago.
NEWS II : Aftermath of Internet Pedophilia Case: Guilt, and a New Awareness of Danger
source : new york time
First there were cryptic notes left next to the computer. Then phone calls in the middle of the night. Sometimes, half asleep, she would hear the front door gently closing and someone whispering in the driveway. By the time she got up, her son would be gone. Off again with the high school's bad crowd, she supposed at first. Out of control.
Later, she realized he was a victim of Internet pedophiles. But it was only after another boy, a 12-year-old named Orlandito Rosario Maldonado, was found buried along the Saw Mill River Parkway, and the police told her about it, that the woman discovered in how much danger her 15-year-old son had really been.
''I don't know if he was incredibly naive, or bent on self-destruction or sexually addicted to the Internet, or what,'' the mother said of her son, who was sexually abused by several middle-aged men he met through an Internet chat room. One of the men was Robert D. DeRosario, a convicted child abuser whom the police have identified as the main suspect in Orlandito's killing.
The two boys lived a few miles and several worlds apart. One was wealthy and skilled in computers, pointing and clicking his way to disaster. The other, Orlandito, was simply unlucky. They never met, but the boys were linked to each other and to an unlikely group of successful suburban men by a criminal investigation that is a reminder of how technology can bring different people and diverse worlds together for worse, as well as for better.
For the past year, a wide-ranging investigation into Internet pedophilia has cast Westchester County in a surreal new light that is part David Lynch, part Wired magazine. In all, nine middle-aged men have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to sexually abusing boys as young as 13 whom they met through the Internet. The defendants include a Yonkers city official, a former member of the Somers school board, a former chairman of the New Castle planning board and a retired spokesman for PepsiCo Inc.
The police had not set out to arrest pedophiles. That happened almost by accident. Their investigation was intended to solve the killing of Orlandito.
''We opened up Pandora's box,'' said Lt. Christopher Calabrese, commander of the Major Case Squad of the Westchester County Police. ''You like to think you have your finger on the pulse of the county, and then you come across this. It gives you a different perspective.''
Orlandito, a sixth grader from Yonkers, disappeared on Nov. 2, 1998, after he skipped on a haircut appointment and went to buy a toy laser pointer.
His body was discovered nearly three months later, on Jan. 23, 1999, next to an abandoned ice cream stand along the parkway in Dobbs Ferry.
A skinny boy with curly black hair, Orlandito loved football and loved having a few extra dollars in his pocket. Too young to work legally, he hung around a local supermarket and delivered groceries for tips.
But his experience with the digital age began and ended with Nintendo. He had never even been on the Internet, so it is odd that his death would set off a high-tech cybercrime investigation.
From the beginning, however, Mr. DeRosario, 37, a carpenter who lived just two blocks from Orlandito, was considered a suspect in the killing, the police said. Orlandito was last seen alive in Mr. DeRosario's apartment building, the police say. Mr. DeRosario has not been charged with the killing, but the investigation is focused on him.
As part of the investigation, the police seized Mr. DeRosario's computer and quickly discovered a gay men's chat room that they said he frequented under the screen name BobbyD63.
That America Online chat room, WestchesterNYm4m, is reminiscent of pre-AIDS bathhouses: it is anonymous, it is local and it is largely about arranging in-person sexual encounters. The men who enter the chat room display personal profiles that sum up their characteristics and desires in a direct way. Few of the participants appeared interested in pedophilia. On a recent night, a ''6-foot-2 slim Italian'' signed on, saying he was interested in meeting ''fat or chubby black men,'' while a man who called himself ''Tarrytown'' was less discriminating: he wanted to meet anyone who was ''up for hot fun tomorrow eve.''It was in this chat room that a troubled teenager, who was struggling in school, socially unpopular and questioning his own sexuality, found the men who would rush at the chance to abuse him, his mother said. For nearly a year, from the spring of 1998, when he was 14, to January 1999, when his parents sent him away to boarding school, this boy, who had once loved tennis and been commended by his teachers for his talent as a peer counselor, became a chat room regular.
His profile said that he liked older men, and the feeding frenzy began.
''I think these people got him when he was vulnerable,'' said his mother, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her name and where she lives not be revealed. ''He didn't have a lot of interests. He wasn't involved in high school life at all. He was getting bad grades. He was coming home in the afternoon and spending all of his time on the computer.''
All nine of the men who were prosecuted in the sex-crimes investigation after Orlandito's killing preyed on the 15-year-old boy, though some were also charged with abusing other boys. The boy gave statements to the police implicating all nine and testified in the one case that went to trial. Two other boys gave statements implicating separate men. Police investigators insist there were many other victims whom they could not persuade to come forward and provide evidence for the prosecution.
Mr. DeRosario pleaded guilty in May to abusing 12 boys, including the 15-year-old. Under his plea agreement, he will get 10 years in prison when he is sentenced in July. His lawyer, Vincent Lanna, did not return several phone calls seeking comment about the plea or about Orlandito's death.
''DeRosario basically had two pools of boys: one, boys from the neighborhood who would appreciate a dollar or a present, and the other, boys he met on the Internet,'' Lieutenant Calabrese said. The investigation into Orlandito's killing continues, but the police believe that the boy fit into the first of those pools.
They were two pools that could not have been further apart.
By the time Chief George N. Longworth of the Dobbs Ferry police visited the family of the 15-year-old to ask what their son might know about Orlandito's murder, the boy's parents had already sent him away to school.
They knew their son was involved with middle-aged men he had met on the Internet, but the youth officer of their community's police department had advised against reporting the abuse to the sex crimes bureau, mistakenly saying that if they did, their names would be in the police blotter, available for anyone to see. They decided to get the boy help privately rather than try to prosecute the men who abused him.
When Chief Longworth showed up with questions about a killing, the boy's parents realized their son faced more danger than they had ever imagined.
They persuaded him to cooperate with the police, though at first the boy was very reluctant to do so, the mother said.
''He thought he was in love with these men,'' the mother said with regret. She noted that her son took a laptop computer on family vacations and could unobtrusively send e-mail messages to them from wherever he was. ''Obviously the state of your mind when you're a teenager can be swayed so.''
Many of the men her son was involved with were prominent locally. They had professional credentials and admirable civic commitment, and some have long-running marriages. Some of the men who were arrested had chatted regularly with others online using their screen names, and the boy they abused gossiped about some of them with others, but the men did not appear to know one another, the police said.
Two of them tried to reach the boy even as their cases were in court, his mother said.
Mr. DeRosario called the family's home from jail just before the boy was scheduled to testify in the trial of Walter Salvatore, 39, a Staten Island man, who was convicted of sending the boy pictures of himself naked and faces sodomy charges after taking the boy to a Staten Island motel.
Patrick Murphy, 45, the Pepsico executive, has sent letters to the family home since the boy has been away. Mr. Murphy, who is H.I.V.-positive and admitted having unprotected sex with the boy, has pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment as well as to sodomy charges. The boy's mother said her son was H.I.V.-negative. The letters, she said, she turned over to the police.
If she could give a warning to other parents about the dangers of the Internet, the woman said it would be this: keep computers children use in a shared part of the house; limit computer time; and, most important, make sure children are involved in activities after school.
In the menacing southwest corner of Yonkers where Orlandito lived with his father, Jose Rosario, and three brothers in a fourth floor walk-up, the feeling is that Internet access ought to be denied to children, not just regulated. Orlandito's parents are separated. His father, who moved to Yonkers from Puerto Rico five years before the murder and does not speak English, has moved since Orlandito's death and was not reachable for comment.
But others in this hilly Nodine Hill neighborhood said they still felt the loss. Sharon Simon, who lived downstairs from Orlandito and often comforted him when he complained of missing his mother, who is in Puerto Rico, said he was a considerate child who was well liked by the neighbors.
''It's a shame,'' Ms. Simon said. ''He was a good boy.'' From his death and the news stories linking him to the Internet pedophile investigation, young mothers in the neighborhood, who sigh and shake their heads over how cute Orlandito was, have concluded that the Internet is no place for children.
''I'm not having my kids on the Internet,'' said Di'Maina Ballinger, 28, a mother of three who lives in Nodine Hill. ''They just got three new computers in school -- blue, pink, green -- they're beautiful. They sent a form home from school asking, 'Can your child use the Internet.' I just said no.''
But despite her advice to other parents in an interview, the 15-year-old boy's mother is so protective of the family's privacy that she has told few friends about her son's troubles, and even her own daughter has not been told the truth about what happened or why her brother was sent to a boarding school.
''It's hard, I have all these alibis,'' she said. ''My husband is an extremely private person. I think he feels even more like a failure than I do as a parent. And I feel like a failure as a parent.''
Try as they might, however, the pedophilia scandal is a difficult subject to avoid.
Commuters sometimes joke about the cases, on the Metro-North train, not realizing that a primary victim's father is among them. The mother has excused herself from dinner parties when neighbors smirk and say that they always suspected that one of the more prominent men who pleaded guilty in the case was gay.
''It's my son they are talking about,'' she said.
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