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It Takes A Village To Torment A Child

I drew attention yesterday to Grant Gallicho’s excellent, lengthy post about the new sex abuse allegations in the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis. Gallicho sticks it to the archbishop and his men pretty hard, but he doesn’t let the laity off either. Gallicho: Of course, it’s not only clerics who help sustain this culture of denial. […]

I drew attention yesterday to Grant Gallicho’s excellent, lengthy post about the new sex abuse allegations in the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis. Gallicho sticks it to the archbishop and his men pretty hard, but he doesn’t let the laity off either. Gallicho:

Of course, it’s not only clerics who help sustain this culture of denial. The maintenance man for the Wehmeyer’s parish told the police that for two years he noticed the same boys going to and from the priest’s camper. “We told [the parish’s business administrator], and she should have done something about it.” Why didn’t he?

The answer is most likely that the maintenance man didn’t want to upset the order of things. One of the ugliest things about communities of all kinds is how they can police their boundaries by turning on someone within who makes them confront things about the community that they would prefer not to see. Case in point: Maryville, Missouri. Here’s how the shocking story begins in today’s Kansas City Star:

There wasn’t much left by the time she arrived, just a burnt-out structure and the haze of smoke that lingered around it.

The siding and gutters had melted. The roof was gone. Inside, piles of ash filled the rooms that had once bustled with the pleasant sounds of a family.

That morning last April when Melinda Coleman received word that emergency vehicles were gathering around her Maryville house, she had hoped for the best.

But if the events of the past year and a half had taught her anything, it was that when the town of Maryville was involved, that seemed unlikely.

Since the morning her daughter had been left nearly unconscious in the frost of the home’s front lawn, this northwest Missouri community had come to mean little besides heartache.

Few dispute the basic facts of what happened in the early morning hours of Jan. 8, 2012: A high school senior had sex with Coleman’s 14-year-old daughter, another boy did the same with her daughter’s 13-year-old friend, and a third student video-recorded one of the bedding scenes. Interviews and evidence initially supported the felony and misdemeanor charges that followed.

Yet, two months later, the Nodaway County prosecutor dropped the felony cases against the youths, one the grandson of a longtime area political figure.

The incident sparked outrage in the community, though the worst of it was directed not at the accused perpetrators but at a victim and her family. In the months that followed, Coleman lost her job, and her children were routinely harassed. When it became too much, they left, retreating east to Albany.

Please do read the whole thing.  It’s infuriating. One of these victims has tried to kill herself twice. And the alleged rapist, Matthew Barnett, who was at the time of the alleged rape a high school senior and popular football player from a politically prominent family?:

Two are now members of Northwest Missouri State University athletic teams, and Barnett is enrolled at the University of Central Missouri, his grandfather’s alma mater. Based on his Twitter account, before it was locked to non-friends, the events of the past two years haven’t dampened his enthusiasm for the opposite sex.

In a recent retweet, he expressed his views on women — and their desire for his sexual attentions — this way:

“If her name begins with A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z, she wants the D.”

 

 

 

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