Pastor Gets 15 Years For Sexually Abusing Child

[Ian David]

Black Collar Cime
(WJZ) ELLICOTT CITY, Md. A sentence was handed down for a local pastor after being convicted of molesting a teenage parishioner.

Peggy Lee reports dozens of parishioners came out to support the pastor. When the judge handed down the sentence of 15 years in prison, they erupted in hysterics.

Somber-faced parishioners from the Redemption Christian Fellowship Church in Baltimore County filed out of the Howard County Circuit Court moments after learning their pastor's fate.

<snip>

Griffith, known as the 'Apostle' to his followers, was arrested by Baltimore County police in November 2005 after five young church members say Griffith molested them during counseling sessions at the Woodlawn church. He was convicted this May in Howard County for also abusing one of those youths, a teenage boy, at hotels in Columbia in 2004 and 2005.

<snip>

Griffith's victim told the judge, "Griffith was a holy man, a man I looked up to, a man who told me he would be a father figure and then manipulated me."


More:
http://wjz.com/topstories/local_story_207161007.html

[sybylla]

1. You know, these sentences never seem long enough for me

Children, no matter what age they are assaulted ("molested" is to assuage the guilty), suffer their entire lives with consequences of it. It affects how they see themselves, it affects how they trust others, it affects marriages, it affects their relationships with their own children. I've seen it over and over again in people who have been sexually abused. At best, they learn to cope with it, though few really ever do, but it never goes away.

And the bastards who caused it get slaps on the wrist by comparison. Fifteen years is one of the longer ones I've seen, but it still doesn't feel like enough compensation for a life's worth of grief and multiple generations worth of coping with the psychological effects.