Sex abusers often target most vulnerable, experts say

The two grown men with felony convictions who have accused Jim West of sexually abusing them as children can easily be dismissed as unreliable.

“Flat lies” was Mayor West’s response when asked about the allegations leveled against him by Robert Galliher and Michael Grant, who both accuse West of molesting them when they were boys in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“I categorically deny any allegations about incidents that supposedly occurred 24 years ago as alleged by two convicted felons and about which I have no knowledge,” the mayor wrote in a statement last week.

But long before their problems with the law began, Grant and Galliher were just children. They describe themselves as being impressionable, troubled boys looking for role models, craving the attention they never got in their broken, dysfunctional homes.

Vulnerable kids, like Grant and Galliher assert they were, are often the ones targeted by pedophiles and child molesters, experts say. And once they become victims of abuse, many of these children grow up to become troubled adults and struggle all their lives to recover.

“It’s like they have a radar,” Spokane psychologist Mary Dietzen said, describing how offenders gain access to children. They buy them gifts, she said, or take them on trips or to sports events. “They go for the kids whose parents aren’t involved in their lives. They ingratiate themselves into the family and show they care about the child.”

If what Grant and Galliher say is true and they were sexually abused – not only by West, but also by his friend, Spokane County sheriff’s Deputy David Hahn, who committed suicide in 1981 after he was accused of pedophilia – their experiences mirror those of other people who have been molested as children.

Child sexual abuse has been reported up to 80,000 times a year, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. But the number of unreported instances is believed to be much higher because children are usually afraid to tell anyone about the abuse.

The problem has received more attention in recent years given the sex abuse crisis that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church and other institutions. Locally, families and many organizations – churches, law enforcement, the Boy Scouts – are beginning to come to grips with how widespread and devastating the problem really is.

It’s not just about sex, according to experts and victims of abuse. It’s also about power and control.

“These are authority figures that children look up to, and children don’t question authority figures,” said Joe Newbury, a retired school principal who alleges he was abused as a 13-year-old by the late Joseph Knecht, a priest who worked for the Spokane Diocese.

“But they abused their power,” said Newbury, 65, one of roughly 130 alleged victims of clergy in Spokane. Molesting children became a “perk” that came with their positions of authority, he said.

Tragically, for some of these troubled kids, the people who took advantage of them came from organizations whose mission is to care for those in greatest need – schools, churches, police departments and other trusted institutions.

According to Cory Jewel Jensen and Steven Jensen, directors of the Oregon-based Center for Behavioral Intervention, adults who abuse children are placed “in a position of trust and are usually able to molest children in a manner that undermines the child’s ability to accurately perceive the behavior as abusive or report them.”

Dietzen, the Spokane psychologist, who has worked extensively with both sex offenders and victims of childhood sexual abuse, said molestation often leads to profound feelings of loss and shame. Children also fear that even if they do speak out, adults will not believe them. Some of these kids lack the vocabulary to describe the problem – they can’t find the words to explain the crimes committed against them, Dietzen said.

“There is such an incredible power imbalance between the offender and child,” she said. In some cases involving clergy sexual abuse, victims have even told her, “I thought the priest was God himself.”

And just because someone is 18, which is the legal age for consent, doesn’t mean the individual is emotionally ready to be in a relationship with someone much older. As a professional, Dietzen views such a relationship as another example of a power imbalance.

“The person in power has the responsibility to establish healthy, professional relationships,” said Molly Harding, a victim of clergy sex abuse and co-founder of the local Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

But because people sometimes have a hard time believing that people in power – leaders who are respected and trusted – can actually take advantage of their authority, the tendency is to blame the victim for the abuse.

People who abuse children and other vulnerable individuals don’t have a specific profile, Dietzen said. Many are well-liked by the community and often choose to work or volunteer with children.

Patrick O’Donnell, a priest accused of molesting dozens of minors in the Diocese of Spokane and in Seattle, often took teenage boys on boat trips and other excursions. He also was the assistant director of the Catholic Youth Organization and the Boy Scout chaplain for the diocese.

Deep inside, offenders also tend to be emotionally insecure, Dietzen said. Some have been sexually abused as children.

“Psychologically, they act out the role of the abusive other, so they don’t have to feel the vulnerable self,” said Kent Hoffman, a Spokane psycho- therapist who has spent years counseling victims of childhood sexual abuse. “They make the next generation carry out their feelings of powerlessness.”

Human beings are “hard-wired” for both survival and empathy, Hoffman said. When a person doesn’t have empathy – the ability to share in another’s emotions or thoughts, he said, survival becomes the motivating factor. “If we don’t have empathy, we fill that void with sex, power and possessions,” Hoffman said. “When it gets worse, it becomes sex for my sake, power for my sake and possessions for my sake.”

Power becomes very addictive, he said, and that becomes the focus of the abuser.

Meanwhile, victims are left to pick up the pieces. Those who have been abused as children feel betrayed and marginalized, Harding said. Shame, guilt and anger sweep over them. They lose their innocence, she said.

“Unless somebody has been a victim of sexual abuse, there’s no way to understand the kind of pain and chaos involved,” Hoffman said.

“The fundamental experience is one of abandonment. The core problem of sexual abuse is that the person I need to turn to for support is the very person perpetrating that abuse.”

Children who have a strong support system, who find people who believed them and who receive therapy are naturally better off than those who are shamed into silence, Dietzen said.

Years after the abuse, victims of childhood sexual abuse often relive their experiences. Something they see, hear or even smell can trigger the memories, Dietzen said.

As a result of their alleged abuse, three victims who say they were victims of Hahn, the sheriff’s deputy, say they share the same sense of trauma each time they see a cop in uniform.

“I also run from the police every time I see them,” Galliher wrote in a 2004 letter to Mic Hunter, a Minnesota psychologist and author of “Abused Boys.”

“If I am walking, I hide when I see a police car. If I can’t hide, I break out in a sweat and get sick to my stomach.”

To cope, some victims of abuse develop addictions – to drugs, alcohol, sex. Others have trouble with intimacy and suffer from depression, which then affects their relationships.

Some have killed themselves. Tim Corrigan, of Spokane, was 39 and the father of three young children when he ended his life on an August afternoon, several hours after seeing a newspaper photograph of Patrick O’Donnell, a priest now accused of molesting dozens of boys. Family members say his suicide was a result of the abuse he suffered as a child.

The road to healing is often long and pockmarked with bumps along the way, victims say. What helps, according to Harding, is to focus on the “exploitative nature of sexual behavior” instead of blaming the victim.

“Accurate naming of the behavior is an important step to reshaping our thinking about this troubling reality. Only when we name the behavior accurately can we hope to have a healing outcome for all involved.”