BATON ROUGE (LA)
WAFB TV
February 4, 2019
By Kevin Foster
Nearly a week after the Catholic Diocese of Baton Rouge released the names of clergy members who have faced credible accusations of sexual abuse involving children, the city is still processing the shocking details of some accusations.
The information below is adapted from The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priest’s website, which published it as a resource for community members struggling to reconcile with the priest abuse revelations.
1) Remain open-minded. The natural human instinct is to recoil from alleged horror, and immediately assume that the allegations are false. In every case, the proper response is to remain open-minded, SNAP says.
2) Allow those impacted to feel whatever emotions arise. Those close to the situation may feel angry, betrayed, confused, hurt, worried and sad. These are all natural, “typical” responses to an allegation of sexual abuse. None of these feelings are inappropriate or “bad.
4) Remember that abuse, sadly, is quite common, SNAP says.
5) Don’t try to “guess” or figure out who the accuser is. Abuse victims, like rape victims, need their privacy to recover from their trauma. Openly speculating about who is alleging abuse is essentially gossiping, and helps to create a hostile climate that will keep other victims (even those abused by non-clerical perpetrators) from coming forward.
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