Victims: Forgotten Figures Of Crime

The story was only a few paragraphs long, tucked inside the newspaper on a Saturday.

“A former Cub Scout leader convicted of molesting an 8-year-old boy in 1989 has been sentenced to 90 years in prison by a Cook County Circuit judge.”

So we know what happened to the man, child molester Edward Pence, now 34.

Here is what’s happening to the boy.

He is 14 now.

Even today, after all that has occurred, “everyone tells me, he’s the kindest of all of my kids. He’ll give you everything he has,” says his mother, Diane.

“But when he clicks, it’s like he has two different personalities in his life.” The second one is angry, withdrawn, almost violent. “You touch him, and he’ll swing at you.”

She laughs at her naive self for buying one of those balloon punching-bag clowns that bounces back after you hit it. She foolishly had hoped it would help her son ease his fury.

Nobody is certain when the sexual abuse began, but it was going on, for sure, when Luis (his middle name) was a cute third-grader.

Diane, who lived in public housing in the far southeast corner of Chicago, enrolled Luis in Cub Scouts to keep him off the streets and out of trouble. “There’s not much around where I live,” she says.

Cub Scout meetings are “supposed to be a safe place.”

Of course, for Luis, they were anything but.

Diane says she knew something was wrong when her son’s nightmares started. “He was crying, curled up like a baby. … He would try to jump out windows.

“That’s when I took him to see a psychiatrist. They told me he wasn’t fit to be around other children” because he was so enraged and wild.

Luis was sent to a state mental hospital for children on the northwest side of Chicago, but his common-sense mother was convinced he didn’t belong there. She says she brought him home after just a couple of weeks.

It was then that Luis confided his secret to his big sister. Authorities were notified, and Pence was arrested.

Luis had venereal disease of the throat.

It’s not that the boy’s story is unusual. It’s that it is so horridly common.

A recent study at the University of Chicago shows sex abuse of children is far more widespread than commonly believed. About 12 percent of men (one in eight) and 17 percent of women (one in six) said they had been fondled sexually - and much worse - when they were children.

But even after the steamiest trials, we hardly ever hear what has happened to the victims.

As far as anyone knows, since Luis testified at Pence’s trial, Luis never again has spoken about what pudgy, blue-eyed Eddie Pence did to him at the Cub Scout meetings.

Until he is willing to talk about it, his mother worries, “I don’t think he can have a regular life.

“We used to be close. That’s what hurts the most.”

Luis is doing miserably in school. He hangs out with gang-banger friends. He has tried drugs and even has come home drunk.

Diane holds down two jobs - at Venture and K mart - so she can stay off welfare and out of public housing. But that makes it harder to keep an eye on Luis.

“My son needs everything,” she says. “Right now, he feels like he doesn’t belong anywhere.”

Diane says she doesn’t think Luis is going to drop out of high school: “The thing is, I know he will.”

“If I could live his life, I would live it,” she says, like the mother who willingly would trade places with a child with cancer.

“I’m scared he’s not going to care about nothin’.”

Diane, 35, raised in an Italian Catholic family, used to go to Mass regularly at St. Kevin’s on the southeast side of Chicago. But no more. “When he got hurt, I just felt God wasn’t there,” she says.

At the trial, Assistant State’s Attorney Kathy Gallanis told the jury, “Between the dependency of babyhood and the dignity of manhood, you find a delightful age called childhood.”

Edward Pence is in prison.

But where does Luis go to get his childhood back?

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