Blog

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and this year we are leading a couple of great events that we want you to be involved in. Read on for more information and how you can help us recognize survivors during Sexual Assault Awareness Month:

Empowering Survivors through our Survivor Speak Out

This April, we are again partnering with our friends at The Army of Survivors to hold a Survivor Speak Out. This event will be held virtually on April 13 from 4 to 6 PM ET.

At this event, we will have an opportunity for approximately 10 people to share their stories and experiences and welcome all survivors of sexual abuse as well as allies, advocates, friends, and family. 

Here's how you can get involved:

Please register to join us, even if you don't want to speak, and be there to support the survivors who are speaking out. If you know a survivor you think might want to share their story, please share the registration info with them.

This profile was written by Patrick Price, Fundraising and Development Manager of SNAP, to honor our courageous and dedicated supporters and donors.

In the early 1970s during most of his senior year in high school, Brian Toale was sexually abused by a faculty member who ran the Ham Radio Club of which Brian was a member. For more than 20 years, Brian’s struggle with the effects of those events led him ultimately to 12 Step recovery and therapy, which allowed him to slowly, over the next 25 years, put his life back together. He came to realize that the sexual abuse was not his fault and the shame he had felt all those years should never have been his to bear.

In order to “move on” and symbolically give back the shame, Brian wrote a letter to the principal of his old high school describing the facts and details of what he had undergone during the sexual abuse encounter and the effects the abuse had on his life. The goal of his letter was closure and as Brian puts it, to bring “relief to his mind and spirit.”

By- 

Marc Artzrouni, Europe Coordinator

Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP)

[email protected]

February 21, 2022 

Italy is a country that has had a long and cozy relationship with the Vatican which sits in the heart of Rome. Italy is a country where 80% of the population is catholic and the Church's moral authority is mostly unchallenged. Italy is a country which under Mussolini signed a treaty with the Vatican that provides the latter with "legal autonomy" from the Italian state.

Italy is a country where the priest Gianni Bekiaris can keep an eight-year-old boy in sexual slavery for 16 years.  When he was finally reported to religious authorities Bekiaris was found guilty under canon law and was banned from "administering his duties with minors" - but not defrocked.

As a result of the aforementioned "legal autonomy" and of Italy's statutes of limitations, Bekiaris escaped civil prosecution.  When ambushed by a BBC reporter who asked him if he was a pedophile, he answered that "those are your words".  He's right to protest: he's no pedophile, he's a monster,  a monster who's walking free.   How shocking is that? 

Despite the constant denial of the existence of organized pedophilia and sexual
abuse by the clergy of the Orthodox Churches who want to show it as individual
cases, the facts say the opposite, says the priest Bojan Jovanović.

For a second year in a row, we are delighted to announce that Ribera Law Firm of San Francisco, California, has become a Gold Level Sponsor for each of SNAP’s virtual mini conferences. Each one of these four one-day conferences throughout 2022 is free to attendees and will provide new resources for support of and education to our audience of advocates, sexual abuse survivors, and their families. The first 2022 mini conference is scheduled for March.

Ribera Law Firm has had much success in representing victims of clergy sexual abuse. Attorney Sandra Ribera Speed says that the key to her firm’s success is that she doesn’t just see her clients as clients but as partners with whom she walks side by side throughout the emotional journey that bringing a clergy sexual abuse case entails. At Ribera Law Firm, Sandra Ribera Speed’s primary focus is on supporting her clients in any way she can and empowering them as they continue their path toward justice.

We offer our sincerest gratitude to Ribera Law Firm for its support of our mini conferences and for the excellent work it does for survivors within our network.

This profile was written by Patrick Price, Fundraising and Development Manager of SNAP, to honor our courageous and dedicated supporters and donors.

As a child, Mona Randolph experienced horrific and terrifying violence at home, where her father beat her regularly and, as she grew older, her grandfather sexually molested her. Vulnerability, fear and victimization were the dynamics that Mona lived with constantly, always looking for a loving place where she could belong.

At 19, during her second year of college, Mona was invited to attend a church gathering at the Cathedral of The Holy Spirit, a charismatic, Pentecostal megachurch in a suburb of Atlanta. This church was founded by Earl Pearly Paulk, Jr., who would later become a self-proclaimed “archbishop.” Because of the liturgical arts of dance and drama incorporated into each gathering, and because of her love of singing, Mona became a member of the church and eventually the church’s lead vocalist. At this place of worship, Mona thought she had found a new home among the more than 20,000 congregants. However, darkness lurked within the walls of the cathedral.

By Marc Artzrouni

SNAP- Europe Coordinator 

After a trial that lasted almost two years, a court in India has acquitted  Bishop Franco Mulakkal who had been accused of repeatedly raping a nun in a church guest house in Kerala between 2014 and 2016. 

The victim reported the crime in 2018  - but following months of protests, Mulakkal was charged only in 2019.  The charges included   "wrongful confinement, rape, unnatural sex, and criminal intimidation".  Nuns who had joined the protests against the attempted cover-up of his crimes were disciplined, transferred, or even expelled from their congregation.  

The not-guilty verdict was based on the fact that the victim's statement was made of  "exaggerations and embellishments".  The judge helpfully added that  "The claim [...] that she was raped on 13 occasions under duress cannot be taken reliance on the basis of her solitary testimony. There is no consistency in the statement of the victim.” 

By blaming the victim and casting doubts on her testimony the Catholic Church (through the legal system)  sends once again a chilling message to future victims: "See what happens when you accuse us of sexual abuse?".  Indeed, what victims in the future will have the courage to report these crimes when they know the legal system will blame them and let the perpetrators off the hook?

Although many Orthodox Churches, including Russia, Greece, and Serbia, have denied the existence of systemic clergy abuse for years, pretending instead that there are just a few bad apples, the facts completely deny them.