Sex Abuse Scandals News Stories

Excerpts of Key Sex Abuse Scandals News Stories in Major Media

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The Roman Catholic Diocese of Helena [Montana] planned to file for bankruptcy protection [on January 31] as part of a proposed settlement of $15 million for hundreds of victims who say clergy members sexually abused them over decades while the church covered it up. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Montana would be responsible for approving and supervising the disbursement of $15 million to compensate the 362 victims identified in the two lawsuits. In addition, at least $2.5 million will be set aside for victims who come forward later, [Diocese spokesman Dan] Bartleson said. Molly Howard, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said she believes the bankruptcy process will resolve the case more quickly than years of litigation and trials with uncertain outcomes. The Helena diocese is the 11th in the nation to seek bankruptcy protection in the face of sex-abuse claims. In one of the lawsuits, the plaintiffs said they were repeatedly raped, fondled or forced to perform sexual acts while at school, on the playground, on camping trips or at the victims' homes. The second lawsuit, filed a week after the first in 2011 ... alleged that nuns at the Ursuline Academy in St. Ignatius abused dozens of Native American children.

Note: If you are ready to see how investigations into a massive child sex abuse ring have led to the highest levels of government, watch the suppressed Discovery Channel documentary "Conspiracy of Silence," available here. For more articles on sexual abuse, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Papers documenting allegation of sexual abuse by priests in the Chicago Archdiocese were released to the public today by victims' attorneys. The documents cover only 30 of at least 65 priests for whom the Chicago church says it has substantiated claims of child abuse. The papers, put online, were made available through settlements between Church and victims' lawyers. Church officials said most of the abuse occurred before 1988, none after 1996. The documents tell one heartbreaking story after another - 6,000 pages detailing not just how children and adult victims were abused by trusted priests, but also how church officials often bungled their responses, failing to turn sexual predators over to criminal authorities and often shuttling the offending priests from parish to parish, where they abused again. That deception ... came from the cardinal on down. Not only were the victims and their families deceived, but so too were parishioners where offending priests were transferred, as well as the police and the public at large. In one case in 1979, a priest raped a 13-year old boy and later warned him at gunpoint not to tell anyone. The documents show the boy's parents were assured that the priest would get treatment and would be kept away from minors, but he wasn't. Within a year, that priest was returned to ministry in another parish where he abused again. In another case, the late Cardinal John Cody tells a priest accused of sexually abusing a girl that the allegations, quote, "should just be forgotten." That priest later abused again.

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The Vatican has been confronted publicly for the first time over the sexual abuse of children by clergy, at a UN hearing in Geneva. Officials faced a barrage of hard questions covering why they would not release data and what they were doing to prevent future abuse. Last month, the Vatican refused a request from the UN's Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) for data on abuse, on the grounds that it only released such information if requested to do so by another country as part of legal proceedings. Victims say they hope the hearing, which is being broadcast live, will prompt the Church to end its "secrecy". Pope Francis announced last month that a Vatican committee would be set up to fight sexual abuse of children in the Church. The Holy See is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a legally binding instrument which commits it to protecting and nurturing the most vulnerable in society. It ratified the convention in 1990 but after an implementation report in 1994 it did not submit any progress reports until 2012, following revelations of child sex abuse in Europe and beyond. The Vatican was asked why it continued to describe abuse as an offence against morals rather than a crime against children. While Thursday's questions were numerous and far-ranging, some observers vented frustration at the lack of specific answers.

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A paedophile ring that streamed live child abuse from the Philippines over the internet has been broken up after an operation by UK police and their counterparts in Australia and the US. 17 Britons have been arrested in Operation Endeavour, which spanned 14 countries. Three other inquiries into men who pay to see abuse via webcams are under way, with 139 Britons among 733 suspects. The NCA say it is an "emerging threat", particularly in developing countries. It said: "Extreme poverty, the increasing availability of high-speed internet and the existence of a vast and comparatively wealthy overseas customer base has led to organised crime groups exploiting children for financial gain." The man whose arrest sparked the entire investigation was already a convicted paedophile. Five of the 17 UK suspects arrested have been convicted; one will face no further action, and two are dead. Nine more are still being investigated. Operation Endeavour has also resulted in 29 arrests in other countries, including 11 people suspected of facilitating the abuse in the Philippines. Suspects have been identified in Australia, the US, France, Germany, Canada, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Taiwan, Denmark and Switzerland. In the Philippines, some 15 children aged six to 15 were rescued after being identified as victims. Payments by customers totalling more than Ł37,500 were uncovered by the investigation, with relatives getting paid for abuse of the children in some instances.

Note: For a Discovery Channel documentary revealing a widespread pedophile ring which leads to the highest levels of government, click here. For more on sexual abuse of children, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

In one of the largest settlements in the Roman Catholic church's sweeping sex abuse scandal, an order of priests agreed [to] pay $166.1 million to hundreds of Native Americans and Alaska Natives who were abused at the order's schools in the northwestern U.S. The settlement between more than 450 victims and the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus also calls for a written apology to the victims and disclosure of documents to them, including their personal medical records. "It's a day of reckoning and justice," said Clarita Vargas, 51, who said she and her two sisters were abused by the head of St. Mary's Mission and School, a former Jesuit-run Indian boarding school on the Colville Indian Reservation near Omak, Washington state, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The abuse began when they were as young as 6 or 7, she said. The province ran village and reservation schools in Oregon, Washington state, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. The claims are from victims who were students at schools in all five states. Nearly all the victims are American Indian or Alaska Native. The province previously settled another 200 claims. Then the organization filed for bankruptcy in 2009, claiming the payments had depleted its treasury. But victims argued the province remained wealthy because it controls and owns Gonzaga University, Gonzaga Preparatory School, Seattle University and other schools and properties. Many of the abuses happened in remote villages and on reservations. The order was accused of using those areas as dumping grounds for problem priests.

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A Lismore [Australia] Catholic priest who sexually abused children was ordered by the Vatican to “live a life of prayer and penance” and offer a Mass every Friday for his victims, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been told. But the “overwhelming majority” of clerical sex abuse cases are not reported to Rome because the Vatican wants to know only about incidents which occurred within the past 10 years, the Commission heard. The Bishop of Lismore, Geoffrey Jarrett, did not pass on any complaints for five years, probably because a directive from the Pope to do so was filed in a drawer and forgotten, he told the Commission. In a day of astonishing revelations about the Australian Catholic church’s lackadaisical attitude to child sex abuse allegations, Bishop Jarrett admitted he did not pass on a 2002 complaint in which a woman alleged she “walked in on Father [Paul Rex] Brown in the act of sexually abusing a child in the sacristy of the cathedral” in 1959. That alleged incident preceded Father Brown’s abuse of Mrs Jennifer Ingham in the late 1970s by two decades. In 2001 [a] Holy See directive ordered bishops to refer to it every case with a “semblance of truth” involving sexual abuse of children by clerics who were still living. The revised rule that bishops should refer only allegations concerning incidents from the past 10 years came into effect in 2002 after the Holy See was “unable to deal with the vast number of referrals” from all over the world.

Note: For more on sexual abuse of children, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane [Australia] has admitted to “spectacular bungling” and “drastic failure” in dealing with a child sex abuse victim and flagged his willingness to revisit cases where victims’ needs have not been met. Archbishop Mark Coleridge said it was wrong that insurers and lawyers had determined how much victims were paid out. His archdiocese had $52 million from which he was prepared to draw for victim payouts. ‘‘In the end, I [as archbishop] decide whether a sum conforms to the criteria of justice and compassion’’. In the strongest statements yet by a senior Australian Catholic Church official about the church’s mishandling of sex abuse claims, Archbishop Coleridge said a “tsunami” of child sexual abuse allegations had caught bishops and other officials “like rabbits in a headlight”. The failures of the Towards Healing protocol, in use since 1997, meant other ways of dealing with victim complaints needed to be explored “if we are serious about coming to the aid of victims”, the archbishop told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. He said powerful cultural factors had converged to create a “perfect storm” around child sex abuse in the church. One factor was the “absurd” lack of training in the past for would-be priests about human and sexual relationships: “We have reaped the harvest of horror of that”. The Brisbane archdiocese has had 99 cases of child sex abuse and nine current matters, with $2.5 million in payments made to victims.

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Only 12 of the hundreds of staff members accused of child abuse in Ireland's Christian Brothers order since the mid-1970s have been convicted, the watchdog of the country's Catholic Church said [on December 10]. The report from the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church looked into how the Christian Brothers, a Catholic order set up to run schools, handled abuse allegations. It said although abuse claims were made against 325 of the order's officials since 1975, only a dozen were convicted of crimes. It was the latest setback for the Christian Brothers, whose history of running schools for boys across Ireland dates back to the early 1800s. The order's reputation has been damaged in recent years by the revelation of widespread child abuse in Irish Catholic institutions. Cardinal Sean Brady, the leader of Ireland's 4 million Catholics who himself was widely criticized for being implicated in covering up the abuse of children, said he is "truly sorry". The report was released along with a series of others on dioceses around Ireland. In the Armagh Archdiocese, run by Brady, the watchdog reported that there was a lack of records on allegations made before 1995. It said the situation has improved since then and praised Brady for the improved safeguarding of children.

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Lord Patten, the chairman of the BBC Trust, has warned a Conservative MP that he risks legal action if he publishes evidence calling into question the corporation's handling of the Jimmy Savile scandal. Robert Wilson, Tory MP for Reading East, has obtained an audio recording in which the author of an independent inquiry into the scandal at the BBC reportedly undermines his own findings. [Wilson] is planning to publish the audio recording today but Lord Patten has written to him warning that he should be "weighing up the legal liabilities that might arise". Nick Pollard, the former head of Sky News, last year [led] an independent inquiry into the BBC's decision to drop a Newsnight investigation into allegations of sex abuse by Savile. Mr Pollard's final report found that while the decision was "flawed", it was not driven by a desire to avoid a clash with tribute programmes. However, it did not include testimony from Helen Boaden, the BBC's former Head of News. She alleged that Mark Thompson, the corporation's former director-general, was aware of the content of the Newsnight investigation. Despite her testimony Mr Pollard's inquiry found that there was "no evidence to doubt" Mr Thompson's version of events. In the audio recording obtained by Mr Wilson, Mr Pollard reportedly privately admits that he was wrong to overlook Miss Boaden's evidence. The report disclosed that BBC executives were warned that Jimmy Savile had a “darker side” but pressed on regardless with tribute programmes to the child abuser.

Note: The evidence was released in full. To read or listen to the tape, click here. For more on sexual abuse scandals involving respected institutions, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

In his first concrete step to address the clerical sexual-abuse problem in the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis will establish a commission to advise him on protecting children from pedophile priests and on how to counsel victims, the Vatican said. The announcement was a forthright acknowledgment by the Vatican of the enduring problem of abusive priests, and fit with Francis’ pattern of willingness to set a new tone in the governance of the church nine months into his tenure. Whether the new commission portends a significant change in how the Vatican deals with abusive priests and their protectors remains to be seen, experts on the church said. Yet the timing of the announcement, two days after a United Nations panel criticized the Vatican over its handling of abuse cases, suggested that the pope and his closest advisers wanted to at least be seen as tackling the issue with greater firmness. Soon after he became pope, Francis directed the Vatican last April to act decisively on abuse cases and punish pedophile priests, in a meeting with subordinates at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church’s enforcement arm. The announcement elicited a mixed reaction, reflecting some skepticism, particularly among victims and their advocates, over whether a new commission would be more than cosmetic. The commission will have a broad mandate including the development of “norms, procedures and strategies for the protection of children and the prevention of abuse of minors,” the Vatican said in a statement.

Note: For more on sexual abuse scandals, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The notices arrive almost every day. They tell a young woman named Amy, as she is called in court papers, that someone has been charged with possessing child pornography. She was the child. “It is hard to describe what it feels like to know that at any moment, anywhere, someone is looking at pictures of me as a little girl being abused by my uncle and is getting some kind of sick enjoyment from it,” Amy, then 19, wrote in a 2008 victim impact statement. “It’s like I am being abused over and over and over again.” Next month, the Supreme Court will consider what the men who took pleasure from viewing Amy’s abuse must pay her. Images of Amy being sexually assaulted by her uncle are among the most widely viewed child pornography in the world. They have figured in some 3,200 criminal cases since 1998. Amy is notified through a Justice Department program that tells crime victims about developments in criminal cases involving them. She has the notifications sent to her lawyer. There have been about 1,800 so far. Her lawyer often files a request for restitution, as a 1994 law allows her to do. Every viewing of child pornography, Congress found, “represents a renewed violation of the privacy of the victims and repetition of their abuse.” Amy’s losses are in most ways beyond measure, but some of them can be calculated in dollars. She has found it hard to hold down a job. She needs a lifetime of therapy. She has legal bills. Her lawyers say it adds up to about $3.4 million. The question for the justices is how to allocate that sum among the participants in the sordid marketplace for pictures of her.

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On November 25th, the most notorious rape case in recent memory took yet another shocking twist. In Steubenville, Ohio, where a 16-year-old girl was raped by two high school football players in August 2012, a grand jury indicted the city's School Superintendent, Michael McVey, on felony charges of tampering with evidence and obstructing justice. An elementary school principal and two coaches in the district were indicted as well, facing misdemeanor charges including failure to report child abuse and making false statements. Shortly after the news hit that morning, Deric Lostutter, a ... 26-year-old programmer in Lexington, Kentucky, [sent] me a message. "We were called liars and more," he wrote, but "we were right about it." He had reason to feel vindicated. As one of the most notorious members of the hacker collective, Anonymous, Lostutter battled to bring justice to Steubenville, exposing secrets of a town that's still reeling from the fallout today. He just never expected that he'd get raided by the FBI, and face more prison time than the rapists in the end. Anonymous is a purposefully chaotic and leaderless collective. Anyone can proclaim themselves a member or declare an "operation" against a target. But getting others to [care] is another story. This is what makes Lostutter stand out. Less than two months after creating his alter ego as KYAnonymous, he launched and organized two of group's most renowned and righteous operations yet: battling the Westboro Baptist Church and, most famously, the town of Steubenville, Ohio, after the high-profile rape of a teenage girl by players on the high school football team.

Note: On the final page of this revealing report, Lostutter claims he is facing 25 years in prison for his heroic acts. To learn about some of the disturbing forces which perpetuate sexual abuse in our society, watch the eye-opening Discovery Channel documentary "Conspiracy of Silence" at this link. For more on sexual abuse scandals, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

“We have called our report Betrayal of Trust,” said [Victoria, Australia MP] Georgie Crozier as she presented the findings of the parliamentary inquiry into the handling of child abuse by religious and other non-government organisations. “Children were betrayed by trusted figures in organisations of high standing and suffered unimaginable harm,” she said. “Parents of these children experienced a betrayal beyond comprehension. And the community was betrayed by the failure of organisations to protect children in their care.” The report’s criticism of the Catholic church is unsparing. Its recommendations are radical. If adopted they would strip the Catholic church of its virtual immunity in the courts and compel religious leaders of all faiths to report child abuse to the police. The committee has recommended that priests and other religious leaders face imprisonment if they fail to report or if they conceal criminal child abuse; or if they knowingly put a child at risk of abuse or fail to remove children to safety. Even more radical are recommendations that would open the courts to victims of abuse by clergy. All faiths would be exposed by legal changes that gave victims more time to take action and clarified the legal responsibility to protect children from offenders. But the particular legal protection now enjoyed by the Catholic church may be swept away if the Victorian government accepts the recommendation that the church – like other churches – becomes a legal entity under Australian law.

Note: For more on child abuse by trusted institutions, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here. For an in-depth report showing how even police assigned to investigate child abuse were intimately involved in the cover-up, click here.

Nearly 400 children have been rescued and 348 adults arrested following an expansive and “extraordinary” international child pornography investigation, Canadian police announced [on November 14]. The three-year [investigation], named Project Spade, ... revealed an entire child movie production and distribution company in Toronto operating via the web site azovfilms.com. The site was run by 42-year old Brian Way, according to police, and sold and distributed images of child exploitation to people across the world. Investigators catalogued hundreds of thousands of images and videos of “horrific sexual acts against very young children, some of the worst they have ever viewed,” [Joanna Beaven-Desjardins, head of Toronto’s Sex Crimes Unit] said at the press conference. Police seized over 45 terabytes of data from the $4-million business that distributed to over 50 counties including Australia, Spain, Mexico, Sweden and Greece. As a result of the investigation thus far, 50 people were arrested in Ontario, 58 in the rest of Canada, 76 in the United States, and 164 internationally. Among those arrested were 40 school teachers, nine doctors and nurses, six law enforcement personnel, nine pastors and priests and three foster parents, she said. Citing a particularly egregious example, she said police found over 350,000 images and over 9,000 videos of child sexual abuse in the home of a retired Canadian school teacher. Some of the images were of children known to the man and he was also charged with sexually abusing a child relative. Police said the children were "rescued from child exploitation" but did not give more details.

Note: For more on sexual abuse of children, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The international band of Internet activists known as Anonymous has chosen the rural Missouri town of Maryville as the target of its latest campaign, after the Kansas City Star published a powerful examination of a possible rape case that went unprosecuted by local authorities. Known for successful hacks of organizations ranging from the Church of Scientology to PayPal to the government of Brazil, Anonymous released a statement: “If Maryville won’t defend these young girls, if the police are too cowardly or corrupt to do their jobs, if justice system has abandoned them, then we will have to stand for them." [Matthew] Barnett was a 17-year-old senior on the Maryville High School football team. Daisy, a freshman cheerleader, was delighted by the senior boy’s attentions, and ignored her older brother’s advice to steer clear of him, [the Star] reported. Barnett, the grandson of former state representative Rex Barnett, later admitted to police that he knew the girl was drinking at his house and that he had sex with her while she was drunk. He loaded the girl, in tears, into his car and left her unconscious on her front porch in subfreezing cold. Much of the town turned on the Coleman family, Daisy’s mother Melinda was fired from her job, and — after the Colemans left town — their house burned down under suspicious circumstances. Melinda Coleman is not the only one wondering whether the prominence of Barnett’s family had something to do with the decision not to prosecute.

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The trial in [a] Mumbai gang-rape case has opened ... without the crush of reporters who documented every twist in a similar case in New Delhi in which a woman died after being gang-raped on a private bus. The Mumbai case provides an unusual glimpse into a group of bored young men who had committed the same crime often enough to develop a routine. The police say the men had committed at least five rapes in the same spot. Their casual confidence reinforces the notion that rape has been a largely invisible crime here, where convictions are infrequent and victims silently go away. Not until their arrest, at a moment when sexual violence has grabbed headlines and risen to the top of the state’s agenda, did the seriousness of the crime sink in. “It was exactly like watching a kid in school who has been caught doing something,” said [the victim's coworker], who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the identity of the victim, who cannot be identified according to Indian law. “It’s like a bunch of kids who found a dog and tied a bunch of firecrackers to its tail, just to see what would happen. Only in this case it was far more egregious. It was malevolent, what happened.” None of the men worked regularly. There were jobs chicken-plucking at a neighborhood stand — a hot, stinking eight-hour shift that paid 250 rupees, or $4. The men told their families they wanted something better, something indoors, but that thing never seemed to come. They passed time playing cards and drinking.

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More than a million people have signed an online petition demanding justice after three men accused of brutally gang-raping a girl in Kenya were ordered to cut grass as punishment. The policemen who ordered the punishment should be disciplined for failing to investigate rape charges, the petition said. The 16-year-old was gang-raped and dumped in a pit latrine in Busia. When her case came to light earlier this month, it caused national outrage. The director of public prosecutions has ordered the national police to investigate why the local force, known as administration police, did not fully investigate the alleged rape, and instead ordered the suspects to cut grass. The alleged rapists are reported to have gone into hiding. The petition - published by online campaign group Avaaz called on Kenya's police chief David Kimaiyo to "deliver justice" for the girl, named Liz. Her alleged attackers should be immediately arrested and prosecuted and disciplinary action should be instituted against police officers who "dismally failed to handle her case", the petition said. "By holding these police officers to account you will send a strong message to police everywhere that rape is not a misdemeanour, it is a serious crime, and if police do not uphold the law they will be held to account," it added. "We call on you to ensure Liz's case is a turning point to end the war on girls." The 16-year-old was attacked after returning from a grandfather's funeral in a village in Busia, western Kenya, the local Daily Nation newspaper reported.

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A Colorado court [has] released a long-sealed 1999 grand jury indictment of JonBenet Ramsey's parents for child abuse resulting in death, but it gave no specifics and did not accuse them of killing her. Prosecutors declined to act on the indictment and charge John or Patsy Ramsey at the time, and years later they publicly exonerated the couple and suggested an unknown intruder was the culprit. Yet the Boulder Police Department — which put the Ramseys under an "umbrella of suspicion" soon after the 6-year-old beauty queen's slaying in 1996 — portrayed the belated document release as a vindication of their investigation. "The grand jury of 12 objective jurors ultimately agreed with investigators that probable cause existed for the filing of charges," the department said in a statement. The Ramseys' lawyer, L. Lin Wood, however, called the unsealing of just four pages of the grand jury record a "miscarriage of justice" and noted that the panel did not have the benefit of DNA evidence that cleared the couple years later. JonBenet was found strangled in the basement of her home on Dec. 26, 1996 — the start of a murder mystery that would fascinate the nation for months and spawn books, TV movies and countless theories about who killed her. A grand jury spent more than a year combing through a mountain of evidence before preparing charges. But they were never made public after the Boulder district attorney announced there wasn't enough evidence to charge anyone.

Note: Why were these documents kept secret for so many years? Could there be more to this case than meets the eye? For more on abuse of children, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Although he’s known for successful comedies, '80s child actor Corey Feldman’s own story reads like a tragedy. In [his] new memoir, Coreyography, Feldman weaves a harrowing Hollywood tale of sex, drugs and profound loneliness on his road to stardom. Feldman’s book covers parental abuse, twisted friendships and devastating drug abuse. As his star began to rise in hit movies like “Stand By Me,” “The Lost Boys,” “Gremlins” and “The Goonies” — Feldman had no guidance or support from his parents. His mother -- a former Playboy model who suffered from depression and drug problems -- tortured her son about his weight and, at one point, force-fed him diet pills. He says his father was a musician who routinely encouraged Feldman to get high with him. By age 7, Feldman was a successful commercial actor and the main breadwinner of the family. Feldman found refuge on Hollywood sets and yearned for adult role models and supporters. While director Steven Spielberg became a trusted friend, many adults let him down. His father hired an assistant in his early 20s who Feldman calls “Ron.” The two became inseparable, with Ron providing Feldman with various drugs and eventually coercing him into sex. Feldman says he was “petrified,” and “revolted” the first time Ron abused him, but their twisted friendship lasted for years. Ron wasn’t the only pedophile Feldman encountered in his search for stable adult relationships. “Slowly, over a period of many years,” he writes, “I would begin to realize that many of the people I had surrounded myself with were monsters.” One person he felt safe with was Michael Jackson. He calls the singer's world his “happy place” and said Jackson brought him back to his innocence.

Note: For more on sexual abuse of children, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Grace Brown was sick of hearing about sexual assault. Having spoken with so many survivors over the years, she grew increasingly frustrated by her inability to help. Then, one night last October, another friend confessed that she too had been abused and it turned out to be the final straw. Brown went to bed determined to act and in the morning Project Unbreakable was born. The project uses photography to help survivors of sexual assault take back the power of the words used against them by their attacker/s and aid in the healing process. Participants write these phrases on a piece of cardboard and Brown, a 19-year-old freshman at The School of Visual Arts in New York City, takes their picture and uploads it on the project's website. Just as powerful are the images she creates. Amassing a tremendous amount of followers from around the world in just five short months, women and men as far as Australia, Europe and the Middle East have submitted their own photos to the site. What's especially striking is the number of people willing to show their faces, essentially outing themselves as survivors of sexual assault. "In the beginning most people didn't show their faces. It wasn't until maybe a month in. People are getting braver and it's been really amazing to watch it grow." Taking part in the project doesn't resolve the problem but it enables the healing to begin. For some, knowing they're not alone or confiding in someone can help kick-start the process and exposing the words used against you can release the hold that they have.

Note: To see powerful photos from Project Unbreakable, click here and here. For the moving website of Project Unbreakable, click here. For a treasure trove of great news articles which will inspire you to make a difference, click here.

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