For weeks, ripples from the sex scandals enveloping the Catholic Church -- scandals that have transformed what was originally a New England story into an international one -- have spread throughout American media. While the stories of sexual abuse by priests, and problem priests being protected for years by the Church, have been spread throughout a number of countries (in Ireland, the Church agreed in January to pay $110 million to some 3,000 abuse victims), the United States has been the center of the scandal, and American media has, as usual, focused on the domestic angles. But ethnocentricity has been, for a change, the least of the problems of U.S. media coverage.

In story after story in TV and print, the "scandal" has focused on the willingness of the Catholic Church to shuffle priests with clear records of pedophilia around to different parishes where they could, depending on your view, either get a fresh start or find a new batch of kids to victimize in an unsuspecting community. Most notoriously, such policies have cost the job of Bernard Cardinal Law, until recently the Archbishop of Boston; Law resigned due to fallout from the original Boston Globe stories that broke the saga of John J. Geoghan, a priest well-protected enough to violate scores, if not hundreds, of trusting children.

The story mushroomed from there, with at least 80 priests now credibly accused of similar crimes in Boston alone -- some 2,000 priests nationally. In many of those cases, the accusers went first to the church itself, and the result was that the accused sexual predator would then be put in a position of trust somewhere else. And, when the accusations were public, the accusers would often be publicly vilified as well.

Simply to get a handle on such widespread abuses, U.S. media coverage has focused either on the original firestorm in Boston, or on the response of Church authorities up to and including (obliquely, gently, and far too late) Pope John Paul II. The coverage has been exhaustive, and in it all, only one class of people seems to have been completely forgotten.

The victims.

Pedophilia among religious figures of all kinds, but particularly among Catholic priests (owing presumably to their Church-imposed vow of celibacy), has been a running "joke" for years. The current wave of cases certainly can't come as any surprise to most people, except for its sheer size. It's astory that plays well due to the utter revulsion most people feel when considering what happened, and the apparent collusion of people (let's be specific: men) in very high positions of authority. (It's a completely fair question as to whether either the original crimes would have committed in such numbers by priests, or whether the crimes would have been treated so cavalierly by the Church hierarchy, if both the priesthood and the hierarchy were not boys-only clubs.)

Pedophilia, in general, is a crime that inspires revulsion, in our society and in most others; even within prisons, sex offenders are notoriously despised. But for a commercial media that generally likes to sensationalize and personalize crime stories, to the point where most Americans believe there is far more and more violent crime in this country than there actually is, it's notable how little the unique awfulness of these crimes has been examined (let alone harped on), and how few victims' stories have been told. Here we have children (mostly teens, but including pre-teens) being violated not just by any adult, not even just by an authority figure, not even just by a representative of one's faith, but by -- given the doctrine of the Catholic faith -- a direct representative of God Himself. Moreover, when one has inappropriate sexual conduct with that representative of God, the faith is also unique in its capacity to inflict guilt on the victim -- the child is then saddled with the rather heavy knowledge of not just having sinned in the eyes of God, but having caused "God" to "sin," too. And of having an even greater likelihood than usual of not being believed, or being punished, shunned, or worse, should the child tell anyone else what happened. And of having an abuser with more power than usual to threaten his victim should the victim tell. Most abusers can threaten violence, but few have not only the capacity to promise an eternity in Hell, but an apparent ability to personally and literally deliver on the promise.

Victims of incest and pedophilia, especially ones either trapped in an abusive situation or forced to live for years with their "special secret," commit (or try to commit) suicide at a rate much higher than average. They also tend more often to act out in a number of other self-abusive or sociopathic ways. We'll never know what the human toll of the epidemic of abuse now being described in our newscasts and daily papers actually amounts to -- the lives lost or ruined -- because only the most healed, least damaged, and most courageous (and alive) are now coming forth, even years later.

But even among those folks, unquestionably there are many compelling, harrowing stories that would help the public to understand the depth of the crimes committed by not just a small, sick minority of priests, but by the Church hierarchy that shielded them -- and, by extension, the more "normal" crimes of child abuse committed daily in our society.

Because of its they said/they said nature, the seriousness with which sexual child abuse accusations are treated tends to swing rather wildly over time in America. A decade ago, it was fashionable to talk, without evidence, of Satanic rituals and repressed memory, and a lot of adults were unjustly accused. More recently, we got the pseudo-medical-sounding "false memory syndrome" and many victims' stories were unjustly dismissed. This scandal is likely to help swing the pendulum again, and it's important to remember that accusations, for any given crime, are by themselves no guarantee that the crime actually happened. But in many cases, they did, and the real story here is not the response of people like Archbishop Law or the Pope. The story is the people who were abused and silenced when they were young, and who now, in many ways, are being silenced by media accounts all over again.