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View all search results‘The Church betrays us’: More Catholic school abuse victims speak up
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wo more victims of childhood sexual abuse at a Catholic school have spoken up following collaborative reports between The Jakarta Post and Tirto.id on abuse in the Catholic Church, as the Church continues to remain passive in dealing with sexual assault allegations.
Now grown women, the victims, Anna and Vivian, who chose pseudonyms to protect their privacy, said they read the reports of Sisca and Ellen, also pseudonyms, and found similarities between their experiences.
Anna and Vivian reached out to the collaboration team shortly after the reports were published last month in the hopes of bringing broader awareness to the case and "ending the perpetrator's years of lies".
Vivian said a priest at the Maria Bunda Karmel (MBK) parish still texted her from time to time, asking personal questions such as whether she was married. He also asked her to send him pictures of her. The last message sent was in May.
Anna said she experienced abuse – allegedly from the same priest – about 15 years ago when she was a student at Sang Timur Catholic Junior High School, which is located next to the MBK parish.
As a Catholic, she was mandated to attend school confessions twice a year, and that was when she said the abuse began.
The priest, she recalled, "would run his hand up and down my chest while I sat kneeling in front of him during confession. He did it so carefully that as a 15-year-old, I was not sure if it was his way of showing unconditional love to us, or if it was something else."
