PENNSYLVANIA
Tribune-Review
BY BRAD BUMSTED | Monday, March 7, 2016
HARRISBURG — When his wife was pregnant in 1996, Mark Rozzi said he “prayed to God we wouldn’t have a boy.”
Rozzi, 44, a Democratic state House member from Reading, had a reason for that prayer. Rozzi says he was raped by his priest at the Holy Guardian Angel Catholic Church when he was 13. The vast majority of sexual abuse by priests is perpetrated against boys, experts and national studies suggest.
Rozzi, elected in 2012, is at the forefront of an effort in the state Legislature to provide greater criminal and civil recourse to child sexual assault victims. One bill would eliminate the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse in criminal and civil cases. Rozzi is sponsoring legislation that would raise the age from 30 to 50 years for an adult victim of child sex abuse to file a civil complaint.
He’s driven to push ahead, not only because of his own reported molestation by the late Rev. Edward Graff, but for his friends who were abused and struggled with alcoholism or drug addiction, and those who committed suicide.
“I have had three childhood friends kill themselves,” he said. All were abused. Last year, before Easter, the third friend killed himself.
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