Abused children get help at Finger Lakes facility
SENECA LAKE — Taylor C. has been through hell, but the 16-year-old is on her way back.
Taylor was just 8 years old when her mother’s boyfriend crept into her bedroom with a video camera, filming and sometimes fondling her while she slept.
A camera he hid in the room filmed her while she dressed for school in the morning.
Authorities don’t know if any of the pictures ended up on the Internet, but when Taylor’s abuser was arrested in Onondaga County, police found pornographic images of other children.
“It stripped away my self confidence,” said Taylor, now receiving therapy at a residential facility near Seneca Lake in Yates County. “I didn’t care about myself. I’d let guys do what they wanted to feel love and acceptance,” she said.
Child pornography isn’t the big moneymaker in the United States that it is in Russia and other former Soviet bloc countries. Instead, it usually takes the form of trusted family acquaintances or neighbors taking advantage of children.
Locally, a 54-year-old Jamestown man was sexually abusing an 8-year-old girl and transmitting images live on an Internet Web cam. Authorities caught up with the man in 2004, but the abuse had already occurred for two years. The girl continues to suffer.
She became violent and suicidal. The abuse erased boundaries, according to her father, who said his daughter behaved inappropriately at school with male teachers and students.
Now 12, the girl is in a home for troubled children. Her father doesn’t think his daughter will ever recover.
In another local case, authorities were investigating the sexual abuse of a Niagara County girl who had been a victim for several years.
Elizabeth Donatello, an assistant district attorney, had the unpleasant task of telling the teenager authorities found photos of her on the Internet.
“You could literally see this child just shrink in front of you,” Donatello said. “You could see the kid … work out what images we were talking about. And then the horror of knowing that everyone in the world now had access to them. The child just … cried and cried.”
Distribution on the Internet magnifies the harm because it allows the images to live on forever. But at its core, the root problem is the sexual abuse, said Williamsville psychologist Kenneth N. Condrell.
“The sexual acts they are made to do, that’s what’s so damaging,” he said.
Today, Taylor is at Freedom Village USA in Lakemont, off Seneca Lake, a home for troubled teenagers, where she, like some 240 other young people, receives counseling and structured living in a religious environment.
Taylor and two other sex abuse victims at the facility spoke to The Buffalo News, wanting to get a message to other victims: What happened to you is not your fault.
It was the abuser who did something wrong.
Understanding that will allow young victims to begin to heal, they said.
Like Taylor, Alaina F., now 20, was raised by a single mother and abused by her mom’s boyfriend.
“I never had a father, and I thought pleasing him would make him my dad,” Alaina said, recalling the sexual abuse she experienced as a child of about 7 or 8 years old.
“It’s so stupid to think you can please people with your body,” she said. “Once you go down that path, it’s so hard to stop. It’s like a snowball going down a mountain.”
— By Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck
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