"To me it's just a different thing that people can relate to," said Megan Peterson, a leading member of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) in New York on Tuesday.
"It's a very raw expression of what many of us go through and I feel like a lot of times for me personally as an artist the abuse and the things that I've endured, I can't necessarily put words to it. So I just feel like this is an opportunity for people to connect on that level and people that are walking that path currently."
Twenty-five-year-old Peterson is one of the tens of thousands of people who allege sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests across the globe.
As a child, Peterson was a devout Catholic who attended church in the diocese of Crookston, Minn. Every morning, before school, she would stop by her local church to pray in the hope of becoming a nun. She says everything changed one morning in 2004 when, as a 14-year-old, she was assaulted by Father Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul. Jeyapaul came from India in 2004 to preach at the Blessed Sacrament Church in Greenbush, Minn., a small town near the Canadian border. In 2005, after being accused of sexual misconduct by another girl, a 16-year-old, Jeyapaul left Minnesota and returned to India to attend to his ailing mother.
After attempts by Peterson and her legal team to have him defrocked and removed from his diocese in India, Peterson says he was extradited to the U.S. but has since returned to India after taking a plea deal. He continues to work at a Catholic school and interact with children.
"I haven't seen enough change in the sense that we're still having to do this work, we're still on the ground with survivors that aren't being supported by the church. They're still perpetrators allowed within the ministry," Peterson said.
"My own perpetrator being criminally charged and admitting guilt is still, to my knowledge, in good standing within the Catholic Church."
Pope Francis has moved quickly to identify and remove members of the Catholic clergy who are known to have participated in the sexual abuse of children, as well as diocesan officials who may have looked the other way to keep the scandal in-house and away from public scrutiny. Despite those efforts, SNAP members say the church hierarchy has not been sufficiently aggressive in cleansing the church of the taint of scandal.
"Pope Francis and the Vatican officials have not taken to heart the recommendations of two independent committees at the United Nations who have made strong recommendations and one of them is so simple and it seems so obvious, like why wouldn't they do that? And that is, remove the sexual perpetrators from ministry, and they haven't done it," said Barbara Blaine, founder and president of SNAP.
"There is no zero tolerance for sexual abuse in the priesthood," said Peter Isely, Midwest director and founding member of SNAP.
"So in other words, if you've raped or sexually assaulted or sexually abused a child and you're a priest, there is no rule or law in the church that you are automatically removed from the priesthood, in other words, that your license is revoked from you. I'm not talking about an allegation, I'm talking about where it's been proved and demonstrated. So I would like to know, if I ever get a chance to talk to the pope, this is the one question I would ask him, 'You can't be a woman in a Catholic Church, I'll accept that for a moment. You can't be a married man and a priest, I'll accept that for the moment. But you can be a child molester and a priest?'"
The pope arrived on his first visit ever to the United States on Tuesday. He will find that wounds from the U.S. Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal are still festering more than a decade after it burst onto the national stage.