NEW YORK
Jamestown Sun
By Reuters Media on Sep 22, 2015
NEW YORK — An artist and sexual abuse victim at the hand of a Catholic priest uses her artwork for survivors and supporters to connect.
“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.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.