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Finding New Ways to Blame Old Victims After months of complaints from various quarters, the Spotlight Team finally published its first article focusing on female victims of predatory priests. Since Sacha Pfeiffer, the author of the story, can't mention the untold number of female survivors who have contacted the Globe over the past year, she comes up with a familiar angle that is captured by the headline: "Women Face Stigma of Clergy Abuse; Many are reluctant to come forward.' In other words, victims - rather than Spotlight reporters - are to blame for the Globe's stand-alone failure to profile female survivors. One would never guess from Pfeiffer's article that a significant number of female victims have come forward in Massachusetts, nor would anyone suspect that many of these women have spoken at length with the Spotlight Team. However, if Pfeiffer's article was designed to paper over the Globe's previous indifference toward women survivors, it achieved a different purpose. Instead of explaining why women have been almost entirely absent from Globe reports, the piece underscores the damaging effects of the Spotlight Team's anti-investigatory approach to the scandal in the Church. As Pfeiffer observes, "while reliable statistics are hard to come by, many specialists on clergy sex abuse say they believe that girls represent a substantial portion - some say a third or more - of minors who are molested by priests." So why, Pfeiffer wonders, have so few women in the Boston area contacted lawyers or reported their histories to Church officials? If experts estimate that at least a third of survivors are female, how is it that, as Pfeiffer writes, "Boston attorneys Mitchell Garabedian and Jeffrey A. Newman, whose law firms represent at least 300 of the estimated 500 people with abuse claims against the Boston Archdiocese, say that 95 percent of their clients are male?" Certainly part of the explanation for this riddle lies in factors that many other articles have mentioned --some of which Pfeiffer cites: Church officials and, to some extent, public sentiment encourage the notion that girls provoke the crimes committed against them; most women are loath to see their sexual histories subjected to public scrutiny; and female survivors are less likely to be believed when they do speak out. On the other hand, seemingly unwittingly, Pfeiffer stumbles on one of the most powerful reasons why so few women contact Boston lawyers such as Newman and Garabedian: These victims have never seen women with similar histories portrayed in the Globe. Pfeiffer accordingly reports, "Since the disclosures in recent weeks about priests, like Meffan, who abused females, the number of women who have contacted Greenberg Traurig, a Boston law firm that represents about 220 victims of sexual abuse, has increased, according to Diane Nealon, a social worker at the firm. In the third week of December, Nealon said, a half-dozen woman victims approached the firm." Given the immediate reaction to the Globe's unavoidable coverage of the Meffan case, imagine how many more women might have come forward if the Globe followed the example of other major newspapers such as the New York Times, The Boston Herald, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Washington Post by publishing stories on female victims earlier in the year? What if the documented histories of Boston-area survivors such as Christine Hickey, Carol McCormick, Susan Renehan, Joyce Nebush, Ann Hagan Webb, Debbie Doucet, Nicole Cormier, Heather Mackey, Cindy Desrosiers, and Susan Gallagher had not been rejected by the Spotlight Team? In short, what if Spotlight reporters had simply published credible accounts as they came along or--imagine this!--as ongoing investigations revealed new information, rather than, as the Globe ombudsman explained, putting "the 'female victims' story" on their "rather long to-do list?" Apart from its insensitivity toward the hundreds of girls and women who have been raped by priests, the very notion that the Spotlight Team had compiled a "to-do list" sheds some light on the otherwise inexplicable lack of judgment that these reporters have demonstrated over many months. Like their wrongheaded decision to set up Monsignor Michael Smith Foster as the poster priest of the falsely accused, their assumption that one "female victims" article could somehow cover what the Globe itself has now described as at least one third of all survivors' stories suggests a fill-in-the-blank approach to news that could not help but skew their perspective. Unlike reporters at the Boston Herald, who have cultivated sources, tracked down new leads, and engaged in real detective work, the Spotlight Team seems to have been working on some preconceived Pulitzer package: False allegations? Check. Female Victims? Check. Law's Resignation? Check. Nice to Lennon? Check. Why else would Globe reporters spend so much time shaping stories to fit their earlier conclusions? And why else would female survivors have to fight so hard to force the Globe to provide an accurate portrait of the scandal in the Church? Now, having darkened all the right circles, Spotlight reporters can drop their Pulitzer application in the mail and revive the complete lack of interest they showed in this story when the Geoghan case was first reported in the Herald in 1998 and in the Phoenix in 2001. In any event, now that the Globe has succumbed to public outcry about its hostile response to female victims, we may not be able to convince the Spotlight Team to abandon its formulaic agenda, but if we keep up the pressure, we might be able to correct the distorted picture that the Globe has presented and defended for months on end.
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