We must not turn away from a story about a criminal sexual act with an underage boy. This month we printed such an account on our front page.

Yes, it was difficult to write. And yes, it was difficult to read.

If we look away from crimes like these, if we don’t confront them and record them, they remain taboo. That makes it easier for predators to claim more victims.

A 2010 Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows 1.6 percent (sixteen out of one thousand) of children between the ages of 12 and 17 were victims of sexual assault.

Behind each statistic is a person, suffering.

And many, many more are suffering than report the crimes. “The prevalence of child sexual abuse is difficult to determine because it is often not reported; experts agree that the incidence is far greater than what is reported to authorities,” according to the National Center for Victims of Crime.

A Hilltown mother called us the day that Justin Dergosits was sentenced. “These are our boys,” she said. Six boys, from Berne and East Berne, were hurt by the 28-year-old Dergosits, she said.

Dergosits pleaded guilty to a felony charge of a criminal sexual act and a misdemeanor charge of endangering the welfare of a child; he was sentenced to three years in state prison.

The pain he inflicted will last longer than that. The father of one victim said in court that his son has “been scarred for the rest of his life.” Such crimes are particularly cruel at an age when a boy, not yet a man, is just discovering his sexuality.

The scarring extends to a person’s entire sense of well being.

“Nowadays I have to worry about who I trust,” a 13-year-old victim wrote in a statement his mother read in court. “I used to trust Justin. He used to be a good friend until he did what he did. Now everyone I meet, I worry is he or she going to be like Justin.”

The mother who called us said her own son had not, for two-and-a-half years, told her or his father that he had been propositioned by Dergosits.  He told his parents after others had stepped forward.

We commend those who were brave enough to speak out. We would like them, and anyone else harmed in this way, to know this: It is not your fault. The shame is not yours.

As a newspaper, we withhold the names of victims of sexual crimes because society will all too often judge the victims as guilty or tarnished. This is wrong.

The guilt lies with the perpetrator, not the victim. The mother who called us said she felt guilty, too.  The family had known Dergosits for three or four years, she said. “He picked us because of our son. I feel violated...I have a lot of guilt. I didn’t talk to my boys like I do to my daughter…I feel like I could cry,” she said, and she did.

With her words still reverberating in our head, we spoke this week to Michael Monteleone, chief deputy for the Albany County Sheriff’s Office, which handled the investigation and the arrest of Dergosits.

We wondered if some of the boys couldn’t have gotten help earlier if the Berne-Knox-Westerlo School District, where they are students, had been informed by the sheriff’s office.

Dergosits was arrested on Jan. 21, pleaded guilty on June 8, and was sentenced on Aug. 24. Those are many months of boys’ suffering.

“No one had been at school during these incidents or approached through the school,” said Monteleone. “It wasn’t that we were keeping it from the school. Even though the children were the victims, they felt somewhat ashamed. People were approaching them at school.”

We learned from Monteleone that the police are in the same bind that we, as journalists, are in; “We wouldn’t want to ID them for public exposure,” said Monteleone.

He went on about the shame or embarrassment the abused boys may feel, “It’s terrible they feel that way…This was an older person, portraying himself as someone cool, someone to look up to. His intent is to take advantage of them, to use them for his own purposes.”

There is also a practical aspect to the sheriff’s office policy. Identifying the victims could make it hard for someone to come forward, said Monteleone.

But couldn’t there be some way, not to publicly identify a victim, but to let a trusted school administrator know so that that a victim could be offered help if he wanted it?

Monteleone thought that was a “great idea,” and we hope the sheriff’s office considers it in dealing with similar cases. With the Dergosits case, a parent, not police, was the first to make the school aware of the situation.

Monteleone, who has worked in law enforcement for 22 years, said, “Sometimes in the past, we’ve tried to advocate through a parent or legal guardian to have a child receive services.” He also said that, with very young victims, “Sometimes the parents need counseling.”

Parents often ask the police, “Is this going to get out?” said Monteleone. “People say, ‘We don’t want this in the paper.’”

When police are investigating cases like the one against Dergosits, Monteleone said, when dealing with the victims, “We try to be supportive, to really listen. We take the interview at their own pace…Sometimes these interviews take a lot of time, to build rapport between the police and the victim. We work well with the district attorney’s office to minimize the recounting.” That way, a victim doesn’t have to repeat his story again and again.

Often the cases are resolved through a plea bargain, as the Dergosits case was, so that the victims don’t have to recount the incidents in open court.

Monteleone also urged, “Discussion at the family level has to be supportive.” This means letting the victim know it’s OK to talk about, and to tell him, “You’re not wrong.”

Monteleone went on, “People who engage in this behavior are predators. They make the child feel a party to it when they’re not. They draw them in, build rapport.”

In the end, Monteleone expressed the same feeling we have. We’re repeating his words, in the hopes that, coming from Albany County’s chief deputy, they’ll have resonance: “The biggest tragedy of the situation is somebody who, by all accounts, has a bright future and, through no fault of their own, feels devalued. It’s not their fault. There should be no guilt attributed to them.”

― Melissa Hale-Spencer