Advocates Push for Justice for Child Sex Abuse Victims

By Liam Migdail-Smith
Reading Eagle
May 19, 2016

http://www.readingeagle.com/news/article/advocates-push-for-justice-for-child-sex-abuse-victims#.Vz7Yu_mLS00

Legal experts and victims speak at a hearing in Harrisburg Wednesday. State Rep. Mark Rozzi organized the hearing.

It took a lawsuit for Phil Saviano to learn the truth that set him on the path of an activist fighting childhood sexual abuse. He had spent years trying to put his own abuse behind him. The Catholic priest who had molested him when he was an 11-year-old growing up near Worcester, Mass. was impulsive and reckless. Saviano figured he must have been caught and wouldn't have access to other kids.

He was in his 40s when he saw news reports that the priest had been arrested for abusing children in New Mexico. And when church officials contended the allegations were news to them, Saviano turned to the courts.

That's how he got his hands on the church documents that showed the priest had been kicked around to parishes all over the country before he was eventually arrested.

"What a lawsuit does for you is it gets you access to the personnel files," Saviano said during a panel discussion at the Pennsylvania Capitol Wednesday. "It gets you to the truth."

It was that discovery that he took to the Boston Globe reporters who, in 2002, revealed a systematic cover-up of abuse by church officials that allowed child predators to continue to operate. Saviano is a key character in "Spotlight," last year's Academy Award-winning film about the Globe investigation.