Officials including athletic directors and school principals could face criminal penalties if they fail to report suspected child abuse.
That's the focus of a bill that will get a public hearing Wednesday afternoon before the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee.
State Rep. Gerald M. Fox III, co-chairman of the committee, said Tuesday that the bill is aimed at stopping the chain of administrative silence that led to the Penn State University sex scandal of 2011.
"This is to prevent people in supervisory roles to handle abuse claims privately rather than reporting to police," said Fox, D-Stamford, who introduced similar legislation last year. It's based on the sex-abuse case against Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who was found guilty last June of 45 charges of sex abuse.
Currently an athletic director or person in similar supervisory role can be fined no more than $2,500 for failing to report the abuse of children 16 and under.
Under the proposed bill, such neglect could result in a Class A misdemeanor, with penalties of a year in prison and a $1,000 fine.
Fox said that the penalty could be negotiated and possibly toughened before it reaches full votes in the House and Senate. He's looking forward to testimony in the public hearing to discuss the issues.
He said the point of the legislation is, hypothetically, not to punish a young public school teacher who misses signs of abuse, but rather the administrators who might try to dismiss cases or cover up cases that should be investigated by law enforcement.
"This would target people trying to protect their organizations or themselves, rather than staff," Fox said in a phone interview Tuesday.
The bill would amend current law on so-called mandated reporters, who under state law are required to observe children for signs of either physical or sexual abuse and report it.
The state Department of Children and Families is expected to testify in favor of the bill in the hearing, which starts at 2:30 p.m. in the Legislative Office Building.
Michael P. Lawlor, a former lawmaker who is under secretary for criminal justice policy in the state Office of Policy and Management, said Tuesday that the list of mandated reporters has expanded over the years, from teachers, doctors, and clergy, to coaches and those in authority at youth-oriented activities.
"There are people in the course of their professions who come across information on children who are being abused either physically or sexually," Lawlor said.
"They have been trained and should be under the obligation," he said. "People who run powerful institutions have a conflict of interest sometimes even though they have clear evidence of children being abused. That has to be stopped."
kdixon@ctpost.com; 860-549-4670; twitter.com/KenDixonCT; facebook.com/kendixonct.hearst; blog.ctnews.com/dixon
Read more: http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Bill-A-crime-to-not-report-child-abuse-4272739.php#ixzz2KkrhPP6m
EVERY SIGNATURE MATTERS - THIS BILL MUST PASS!
CLICK - GOAL - 100,000 NEW SIGNATURES! 75,000 SIGNATURES HAVE ALREADY BEEN SUBMITTED TO GOVERNOR CUOMO!
EFF Urges Court to Block Dragnet Subpoenas Targeting Online Commenters
CLICK! For the full motion to quash: http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/hersh_v_cohen/UOJ-motiontoquashmemo.pdf
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Monday, February 11, 2013
UK Jews React To Child Sex-Abuse Documentary!
Channel 4 documentary looking at how claims of child sexual abuse are dealt with in Britain's Orthodox Jewish community sparks off debate in kingdom
A documentary looking at how claims of child sexual abuse are dealt with in Britain's Orthodox Jewish community was recently featured on British television. It sparked off debate in the United Kingdom,but how has London and its Jewish community reacted to the documentary?
The documentary, "Britain's Hidden Child Abuse," featured on Channel 4 on January 30, secretly filmed Rabbi Ephraim Padwa, leader of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations.
"It's an investigation of the way the haredi community deals with allegations of child sexual abuse," says executive producer Tony Stark.
"What we've found is instead of rabbis advising people who come to them if they feel they've been sexually abused, to go to the police, they've been trying to deal with the issue themselves. They've been discouraging people from going to the police, and in some cases even forbidding them."
However, the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations has refuted all claims that they refuse to take allegations of child abuse seriously, stating they have a duty and responsibility to protect children.
Rabbi Barry Marcus of the Central Synagogue of London spoke to JN1 about his reaction to the documentary.
"The guidelines are pretty clear now as to how we need to protect, especially children, and the more vulnerable in our community. There was an incident with a teacher within the United Synagogue some years ago, and I think that spurred the United Synagogue to be proactive, rather than reactive, which seems to be what's going on now within the haredi community. That doesn't make them any more guilty."
The Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations has published the number of a telephone line to report instances of child abuse to Rabbis who have been specially trained.
Indeed the Union recognizes that there "are certain times when it is correct and necessary to call the social services and police."
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4343454,00.html
Saint Hilarious - One More Lie Before He Dies!
Last Pope to Resign Did So in Midst of Vatican Leadership Crisis
READ: http://www.snapnetwork.org/pope_resigns_snap_responds
Pope Benedict XVI’s announcement on Monday that he was stepping down because he was too elderly and infirm for the job was the first papal resignation in 598 years. It put Benedict among the small handful, out of the 265 recognized popes in history, who have stepped down as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. The circumstances behind the other departures generally had nothing to do with age or health, according to Vatican history experts and references.
The last pope to resign, Gregory XII, did so in 1415, 10 years into his tenure, in the midst of a leadership crisis in the church known as the Great Western Schism. Three rival popes had been selected by separate factions of the church, and a group of bishops called the Council of Constance were trying to heal the schism. In an interview with Vatican Radio, Donald S. Prudlo, a papal historian at Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Ala., said that Gregory XII offered to resign so that the council could choose a new pope that all factions would recognize. It took two years after Gregory XII’s departure to elect his successor, Martin V.
Other popes known to have resigned:
Pope Celestine V: A recluse who only reluctantly accepted his election in 1294, Celestine V resigned and fled the Vatican after just three months to wander in the mountains. According to a history timeline on Christianity.com, the bishop who became his successor, Boniface VIII, was intent on ensuring that Celestine V did not become an example for future popes, and ordered Celestine V seized and imprisoned as he was about to sail to Greece. He died in custody in 1296 at the age of 81, and was declared a saint in 1313.
Benedict IX: One of the youngest popes, he was elected at the age of 23 in 1035, and became notorious for licentious behavior and for selling the papacy to his godfather, Gregory VI, and then twice reclaiming the position; he finally resigned for good in 1045, at the age of 33.
Gregory VI: Considered a man of great reputation, Gregory VI had thought Benedict IX unworthy of the papacy, and essentially bribed him to resign. He was recognized as pope in Benedict’s stead, but when Benedict’s attempt at marriage failed and he wanted to return to the papacy, a power struggle ensued. A council of bishops called upon Gregory VI to resign after less than two years in office because he had obtained the papacy through bribery.
By contrast, the resignation of Benedict XVI after an eight-year tenure will essentially be a retirement at the age of 85, after the pope showed increasingly public signs of fatigue in recent months. His last day as pope will be Feb. 28, coincidentally the feast day of a revered fifth-century pope, Saint Hilarius.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/world/europe/last-pope-to-resign-did-so-in-midst-of-vatican-leadership-crisis.html?hp&_r=0
READ: http://www.snapnetwork.org/pope_resigns_snap_responds
Pope Benedict XVI’s announcement on Monday that he was stepping down because he was too elderly and infirm for the job was the first papal resignation in 598 years. It put Benedict among the small handful, out of the 265 recognized popes in history, who have stepped down as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. The circumstances behind the other departures generally had nothing to do with age or health, according to Vatican history experts and references.
The last pope to resign, Gregory XII, did so in 1415, 10 years into his tenure, in the midst of a leadership crisis in the church known as the Great Western Schism. Three rival popes had been selected by separate factions of the church, and a group of bishops called the Council of Constance were trying to heal the schism. In an interview with Vatican Radio, Donald S. Prudlo, a papal historian at Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Ala., said that Gregory XII offered to resign so that the council could choose a new pope that all factions would recognize. It took two years after Gregory XII’s departure to elect his successor, Martin V.
Other popes known to have resigned:
Pope Celestine V: A recluse who only reluctantly accepted his election in 1294, Celestine V resigned and fled the Vatican after just three months to wander in the mountains. According to a history timeline on Christianity.com, the bishop who became his successor, Boniface VIII, was intent on ensuring that Celestine V did not become an example for future popes, and ordered Celestine V seized and imprisoned as he was about to sail to Greece. He died in custody in 1296 at the age of 81, and was declared a saint in 1313.
Benedict IX: One of the youngest popes, he was elected at the age of 23 in 1035, and became notorious for licentious behavior and for selling the papacy to his godfather, Gregory VI, and then twice reclaiming the position; he finally resigned for good in 1045, at the age of 33.
Gregory VI: Considered a man of great reputation, Gregory VI had thought Benedict IX unworthy of the papacy, and essentially bribed him to resign. He was recognized as pope in Benedict’s stead, but when Benedict’s attempt at marriage failed and he wanted to return to the papacy, a power struggle ensued. A council of bishops called upon Gregory VI to resign after less than two years in office because he had obtained the papacy through bribery.
By contrast, the resignation of Benedict XVI after an eight-year tenure will essentially be a retirement at the age of 85, after the pope showed increasingly public signs of fatigue in recent months. His last day as pope will be Feb. 28, coincidentally the feast day of a revered fifth-century pope, Saint Hilarius.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/world/europe/last-pope-to-resign-did-so-in-midst-of-vatican-leadership-crisis.html?hp&_r=0
Sunday, February 10, 2013
“Did someone touch you at day care?”
Testimony from children can make or break sexual abuse case
If David Glenn Smith, the Des Moines man accused of sexually abusing children at his wife’s in-home day care over the span of four years, is tried in court, the nature of the case will pose unusual challenges for prosecutors.
There is no physical evidence in the case, police say. Prosecutors are relying solely on the testimony of the alleged victims and witnesses, who are all younger than age 10.
As investigators experienced in a recent Polk County case that was retried after an appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court, putting a child on the witness stand has inherent risks.
In an interview, Polk County Attorney John Sarcone said he could speak only in general about child abuse cases, and not specifically about Smith’s case.
“They’re not the easiest cases in the world, but they’re ones that need to be brought,” he said.
Some child abuse cases are resolved before a trial, but if that doesn’t happen, the alleged victim usually must testify. Preparing children to recount the abuse they endured and to face their alleged abusers in court is especially difficult, Sarcone said.
“You wouldn’t believe the damage that is done to some of them, and it takes a long time to recover from those things,” he said.
In certain circumstances, when appearing in the courtroom would inhibit a child’s ability to testify, children are allowed to provide their testimony by video. Even then, some children clam up, Sarcone said.
He cited the 2009 trial of Matthew Elliott, who was accused of killing a 7-month-old girl in 2007 in the West Des Moines home where he was staying. Prosecutors called on the 7-year-old uncle of the victim to testify.
The boy had originally told investigators he saw Elliott carrying the baby’s lifeless body, but in his videotaped interview before the court he balked, saying he did not remember what he told police.
Elliott was convicted anyway, but the Iowa Supreme Court in 2011 awarded him a new trial, out of concern that detectives’ testimony about what the 7-year-old originally reported amounted to hearsay without the boy’s testimony.
Elliott was convicted again and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
In the case against Smith, investigators interviewed more than 10 children who attended the day care. Some said they were touched by Smith. Others said they saw Smith touch other children.
According to Polk County court documents, Smith allegedly placed a 9-year-old girl on his lap, put his hands under her clothes and touched her inappropriately.
Smith is charged with second-degree sexual abuse, a felony with a potential 25-year prison sentence.
While Smith allegedly touched several other children, prosecutors decided to file one charge based on the abuse allegation they felt made the strongest case, said Des Moines Police Detective Terry Mitchell.
Some of the children interviewed were as young as 4, and prosecutors felt the 9-year-old could most accurately recount the alleged abuse, he said.
Additional charges are possible, Mitchell said.
Cases often lack physical evidence
A lack of physical evidence is common in child abuse cases, said Dr. Ken McCann, a child abuse medical examiner at the Regional Child Protection Center at Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines.
The child protection center is a neutral agency that conducts interviews and medical exams of children involved in physical and sexual abuse cases. There are five such centers around the state.
McCann said he conducts about 1,000 medical exams on children each year. About 95 percent of those children show no physical signs of abuse.
That doesn’t mean there was no abuse. Much of the evidence can heal within a week or 10 days, and abuse frequently is reported much later, he said.
Additionally, many types of abuse — like what Smith is accused of — leave no physical evidence, McCann said.
Mitchell said he is confident in the case against Smith.
The children’s stories corroborate one another, and it’s clear that Smith had the opportunity to commit the abuse, the detective said.
Children who attended the day care at different periods and have never met reported similar types of abuse, which Mitchell said showed the multiple abuse allegations were not a result of children repeating what they heard from others at the day care.
Smith worked nights at the Polk County Juvenile Detention Center, where, county officials say, he had no direct contact with children.
Smith helped his wife, Lisa Rae Smith, run the day care in the afternoon. He watched the school-age children in one part of the two-story east-side home, while she watched the younger ones elsewhere.
There’s no evidence that Lisa Smith knew of the abuse. Some of the children told interviewers that Smith would stop the alleged abuse when he heard her coming, Mitchell said.
Interviewers must use careful tactics
Keith Rigg, a Des Moines defense attorney not associated with Smith’s case, said prosecutors face a risk with relying solely on the testimony of children.
There have been numerous notable cases in which investigators and parents have used leading questions to bring a child to believe he or she was abused by a teacher or baby sitter, when in fact they were not, he said.
“The main pitfall that you have — and historically where these cases have gone very, very wrong — is that you can feed information to a kid, and they will take that information as their own,” he said.
One infamous case started in California in 1983, when a McMartin Preschool teacher was accused of sexually abusing a 2-year-old boy.
Police notified parents, and in time children were urged in interviews to divulge secrets about their school. They responded with allegations of rape, being photographed, secret passageways under the school, satanic rituals and even the sacrifice of a human baby.
After six years of criminal trials, all charges were dropped.
Interview practices have evolved in the decades since.
Locally, most interviews of child abuse victims are conducted by the Regional Child Protection Center.
Interviewing a child abuse victim is a meticulous, research-based process, said Tammera Bibbins, a forensic interviewer at the clinic.
She starts by showing the child the camera in the room and flips on the lights behind a one-way mirror so the child can see where investigators will watch.
Then they talk for a while to make sure the child can tell a coherent story.
The interviewer never uses the suspect’s name before the child does, or asks leading questions such as, “Did someone touch you at day care?” Bibbins said.
She tells the child to be honest, and that it’s OK to say “I don’t know.” Children must not feel they have to say what the adult wants to hear, she said.
“In the real world, the adult is the one with all the answers,” she said. “Sometimes kids go along with what they think adults want to hear. We try to turn that around and make them the ones with all the answers.”
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20130210/NEWS01/302100097/Testimony-from-children-can-make-or-break-sexual-abuse-case?News&nclick_check=1
If David Glenn Smith, the Des Moines man accused of sexually abusing children at his wife’s in-home day care over the span of four years, is tried in court, the nature of the case will pose unusual challenges for prosecutors.
There is no physical evidence in the case, police say. Prosecutors are relying solely on the testimony of the alleged victims and witnesses, who are all younger than age 10.
As investigators experienced in a recent Polk County case that was retried after an appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court, putting a child on the witness stand has inherent risks.
In an interview, Polk County Attorney John Sarcone said he could speak only in general about child abuse cases, and not specifically about Smith’s case.
“They’re not the easiest cases in the world, but they’re ones that need to be brought,” he said.
Some child abuse cases are resolved before a trial, but if that doesn’t happen, the alleged victim usually must testify. Preparing children to recount the abuse they endured and to face their alleged abusers in court is especially difficult, Sarcone said.
“You wouldn’t believe the damage that is done to some of them, and it takes a long time to recover from those things,” he said.
In certain circumstances, when appearing in the courtroom would inhibit a child’s ability to testify, children are allowed to provide their testimony by video. Even then, some children clam up, Sarcone said.
He cited the 2009 trial of Matthew Elliott, who was accused of killing a 7-month-old girl in 2007 in the West Des Moines home where he was staying. Prosecutors called on the 7-year-old uncle of the victim to testify.
The boy had originally told investigators he saw Elliott carrying the baby’s lifeless body, but in his videotaped interview before the court he balked, saying he did not remember what he told police.
Elliott was convicted anyway, but the Iowa Supreme Court in 2011 awarded him a new trial, out of concern that detectives’ testimony about what the 7-year-old originally reported amounted to hearsay without the boy’s testimony.
Elliott was convicted again and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
In the case against Smith, investigators interviewed more than 10 children who attended the day care. Some said they were touched by Smith. Others said they saw Smith touch other children.
According to Polk County court documents, Smith allegedly placed a 9-year-old girl on his lap, put his hands under her clothes and touched her inappropriately.
Smith is charged with second-degree sexual abuse, a felony with a potential 25-year prison sentence.
While Smith allegedly touched several other children, prosecutors decided to file one charge based on the abuse allegation they felt made the strongest case, said Des Moines Police Detective Terry Mitchell.
Some of the children interviewed were as young as 4, and prosecutors felt the 9-year-old could most accurately recount the alleged abuse, he said.
Additional charges are possible, Mitchell said.
Cases often lack physical evidence
A lack of physical evidence is common in child abuse cases, said Dr. Ken McCann, a child abuse medical examiner at the Regional Child Protection Center at Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines.
The child protection center is a neutral agency that conducts interviews and medical exams of children involved in physical and sexual abuse cases. There are five such centers around the state.
McCann said he conducts about 1,000 medical exams on children each year. About 95 percent of those children show no physical signs of abuse.
That doesn’t mean there was no abuse. Much of the evidence can heal within a week or 10 days, and abuse frequently is reported much later, he said.
Additionally, many types of abuse — like what Smith is accused of — leave no physical evidence, McCann said.
Mitchell said he is confident in the case against Smith.
The children’s stories corroborate one another, and it’s clear that Smith had the opportunity to commit the abuse, the detective said.
Children who attended the day care at different periods and have never met reported similar types of abuse, which Mitchell said showed the multiple abuse allegations were not a result of children repeating what they heard from others at the day care.
Smith worked nights at the Polk County Juvenile Detention Center, where, county officials say, he had no direct contact with children.
Smith helped his wife, Lisa Rae Smith, run the day care in the afternoon. He watched the school-age children in one part of the two-story east-side home, while she watched the younger ones elsewhere.
There’s no evidence that Lisa Smith knew of the abuse. Some of the children told interviewers that Smith would stop the alleged abuse when he heard her coming, Mitchell said.
Interviewers must use careful tactics
Keith Rigg, a Des Moines defense attorney not associated with Smith’s case, said prosecutors face a risk with relying solely on the testimony of children.
There have been numerous notable cases in which investigators and parents have used leading questions to bring a child to believe he or she was abused by a teacher or baby sitter, when in fact they were not, he said.
“The main pitfall that you have — and historically where these cases have gone very, very wrong — is that you can feed information to a kid, and they will take that information as their own,” he said.
One infamous case started in California in 1983, when a McMartin Preschool teacher was accused of sexually abusing a 2-year-old boy.
Police notified parents, and in time children were urged in interviews to divulge secrets about their school. They responded with allegations of rape, being photographed, secret passageways under the school, satanic rituals and even the sacrifice of a human baby.
After six years of criminal trials, all charges were dropped.
Interview practices have evolved in the decades since.
Locally, most interviews of child abuse victims are conducted by the Regional Child Protection Center.
Interviewing a child abuse victim is a meticulous, research-based process, said Tammera Bibbins, a forensic interviewer at the clinic.
She starts by showing the child the camera in the room and flips on the lights behind a one-way mirror so the child can see where investigators will watch.
Then they talk for a while to make sure the child can tell a coherent story.
The interviewer never uses the suspect’s name before the child does, or asks leading questions such as, “Did someone touch you at day care?” Bibbins said.
She tells the child to be honest, and that it’s OK to say “I don’t know.” Children must not feel they have to say what the adult wants to hear, she said.
“In the real world, the adult is the one with all the answers,” she said. “Sometimes kids go along with what they think adults want to hear. We try to turn that around and make them the ones with all the answers.”
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20130210/NEWS01/302100097/Testimony-from-children-can-make-or-break-sexual-abuse-case?News&nclick_check=1
I Knew It - The Jews Own India!
India faulted for failing to curb child sex abuse
NEW DELHI—India's government has failed to curb rampant sexual abuse of children, especially in schools and state-run child care facilities, a rights group said Thursday.
The report from Human Rights Watch comes in the wake of the fatal gang-rape of a young woman on a New Delhi bus in December, an attack that shook the conscience of the nation and forced people to recognize the problem of sexual violence.
The report said child sexual abuse is disturbingly common and government responses fall short in protecting children and treating victims. It also said the inspections of state-run child facilities were inadequate, with many not even registered with the government as required by the law.
"Shockingly, the very institutions that should protect vulnerable children can place them at risk of horrific child sexual abuse," said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch.
The group called for strict implementation of laws on sexual violence and better monitoring of child-care facilities. It also demanded more sensitive treatment by police, including an end to internal medical exams that it says are traumatic and pointless.
There are no clear statistics on the number of child abuse cases in India, primarily because of the low reporting of such crimes. As a result, Human Rights Watch based its reports on hundreds of detailed case studies with victims and their relatives, child protection officials, independent experts, police, doctors and social workers.
India's 430 million children form a third of its 1.2 billion people and around one-fifth of the global child population.
Things are particularly bad in state-run or state-funded child care homes, activists said.
"The vulnerability of children to sexual abuse is very high, and it becomes worse because there is nobody monitoring these children's homes," said Anuja Gupta of the Recovering and Healing from Incest Foundation in New Delhi.
Abuse often is committed by the caregivers, she said.
"When the caretaker himself is the abuser, the situation is especially traumatic because then the child has nowhere to go," Gupta said.
Simply reporting sexual violence is a challenge, rights activists said!!! (Sounds like Mesira - Sanjay Kaminetzky)
In many cases, police or court officials refuse to accept that rape or incest has taken place, said Shantha Sinha, the head of India's National Commission for Protection of Child Rights.
"People have to be made aware of their rights, the procedures to be followed in registering a case in a police station, and insist that they get justice," Sinha said Thursday at a press briefing.
In India, child abuse is often aggravated by poorly trained police officers who refuse to register complaints or who encourage victims to seek settlements with their attackers. Convictions are rare and cases can languish in the country's sluggish court system for years, if not decades. Police officials insist their forces are getting more training to deal with sexual violence.
The outcry over the Delhi bus rape forced the government to rush through new laws to protect women. A government panel appointed after the attack to examine the country's treatment of women also shone a light on the high incidence of child sexual abuse and the failure of the government to ensure the implementation of child protection laws.
While the government passed a comprehensive law to protect children from sexual offenses in 2012, efforts to implement it were poor or nonexistent, activists say.
Government officials admit that a major handicap in putting the law into practice was the lack of resources to fund monitoring.
"Some states have lagged in providing the required infrastructure to ensure implementation of the law," said Vivek Joshi, a top official in India's ministry of women and child development.
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_22538826/india-faulted-failing-curb-child-sex-abuse
NEW DELHI—India's government has failed to curb rampant sexual abuse of children, especially in schools and state-run child care facilities, a rights group said Thursday.
The report from Human Rights Watch comes in the wake of the fatal gang-rape of a young woman on a New Delhi bus in December, an attack that shook the conscience of the nation and forced people to recognize the problem of sexual violence.
The report said child sexual abuse is disturbingly common and government responses fall short in protecting children and treating victims. It also said the inspections of state-run child facilities were inadequate, with many not even registered with the government as required by the law.
"Shockingly, the very institutions that should protect vulnerable children can place them at risk of horrific child sexual abuse," said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch.
The group called for strict implementation of laws on sexual violence and better monitoring of child-care facilities. It also demanded more sensitive treatment by police, including an end to internal medical exams that it says are traumatic and pointless.
There are no clear statistics on the number of child abuse cases in India, primarily because of the low reporting of such crimes. As a result, Human Rights Watch based its reports on hundreds of detailed case studies with victims and their relatives, child protection officials, independent experts, police, doctors and social workers.
India's 430 million children form a third of its 1.2 billion people and around one-fifth of the global child population.
Things are particularly bad in state-run or state-funded child care homes, activists said.
"The vulnerability of children to sexual abuse is very high, and it becomes worse because there is nobody monitoring these children's homes," said Anuja Gupta of the Recovering and Healing from Incest Foundation in New Delhi.
Abuse often is committed by the caregivers, she said.
"When the caretaker himself is the abuser, the situation is especially traumatic because then the child has nowhere to go," Gupta said.
Simply reporting sexual violence is a challenge, rights activists said!!! (Sounds like Mesira - Sanjay Kaminetzky)
In many cases, police or court officials refuse to accept that rape or incest has taken place, said Shantha Sinha, the head of India's National Commission for Protection of Child Rights.
"People have to be made aware of their rights, the procedures to be followed in registering a case in a police station, and insist that they get justice," Sinha said Thursday at a press briefing.
In India, child abuse is often aggravated by poorly trained police officers who refuse to register complaints or who encourage victims to seek settlements with their attackers. Convictions are rare and cases can languish in the country's sluggish court system for years, if not decades. Police officials insist their forces are getting more training to deal with sexual violence.
The outcry over the Delhi bus rape forced the government to rush through new laws to protect women. A government panel appointed after the attack to examine the country's treatment of women also shone a light on the high incidence of child sexual abuse and the failure of the government to ensure the implementation of child protection laws.
While the government passed a comprehensive law to protect children from sexual offenses in 2012, efforts to implement it were poor or nonexistent, activists say.
Government officials admit that a major handicap in putting the law into practice was the lack of resources to fund monitoring.
"Some states have lagged in providing the required infrastructure to ensure implementation of the law," said Vivek Joshi, a top official in India's ministry of women and child development.
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_22538826/india-faulted-failing-curb-child-sex-abuse
Thursday, February 07, 2013
Coming To The Comedy Club At 42 Broadway - " The Red & Black Yarmulke Files"
L.A. POLICE TO REVIEW NEW CLERGY ABUSE FILES
Detectives will review recently released clergy abuse files from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles to see if there’s evidence of criminal activity by church authorities, including failure to report child abuse to law enforcement, police officials said Tuesday.
Investigators will focus on the cases of about a dozen previously investigated priests and are auditing those past probes to make sure nothing was missed, said Cmdr. Andrew Smith. The department will also look at the files for all 122 priests that were made public Thursday by court order after the archdiocese fought for five years to keep them sealed, he said.
Thousands of pages of secret confidential files kept by the archdiocese on priests accused of molesting children show recently retired Cardinal Roger Mahony and other top archdiocese officials shielded priests to protect the church, thwarted police investigations and repeatedly did not report child sex abuse to the authorities.
The files of another 14 priests were published by the Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press last month and revealed a similar cover-up.
“Now what’s being alleged is a failure to report, those kinds of things, so there’s a new emphasis — it’s not just the person that’s accused of the behavior, but if it’s also if it was not properly reported,” said Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese, who heads the detective bureau.
“We’re taking a fresh look on cases we’ve already handled to make sure we don’t have reporting issues that got past,” he said.
Michael Hennigan, an archdiocese attorney, declined to comment Tuesday.
Mahony, who retired in 2011 as head of the nation’s largest diocese, was publicly rebuked Friday by his successor, Archbishop Jose Gomez.
The same day, Bishop Thomas Curry, a top Mahony aide who made critical decisions on abusive priests, requested to resign from his post as an auxiliary bishop in charge of the archdiocese’s Santa Barbara region. Curry was vicar for clergy in the mid-1980s, a position created to handle priestly discipline and other personnel issues.
Both Mahony and Curry have publicly apologized for their handling of pedophile priests.
The archdiocese is considering launching a $200 million fundraising campaign in the midst of the fallout from the clergy files, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday. A recent financial report indicates the archdiocese has a deficit of nearly $80 million.
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/feb/06/tp-la-police-to-review-new-clergy-abuse-files/
Detectives will review recently released clergy abuse files from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles to see if there’s evidence of criminal activity by church authorities, including failure to report child abuse to law enforcement, police officials said Tuesday.
Investigators will focus on the cases of about a dozen previously investigated priests and are auditing those past probes to make sure nothing was missed, said Cmdr. Andrew Smith. The department will also look at the files for all 122 priests that were made public Thursday by court order after the archdiocese fought for five years to keep them sealed, he said.
Thousands of pages of secret confidential files kept by the archdiocese on priests accused of molesting children show recently retired Cardinal Roger Mahony and other top archdiocese officials shielded priests to protect the church, thwarted police investigations and repeatedly did not report child sex abuse to the authorities.
The files of another 14 priests were published by the Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press last month and revealed a similar cover-up.
“Now what’s being alleged is a failure to report, those kinds of things, so there’s a new emphasis — it’s not just the person that’s accused of the behavior, but if it’s also if it was not properly reported,” said Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese, who heads the detective bureau.
“We’re taking a fresh look on cases we’ve already handled to make sure we don’t have reporting issues that got past,” he said.
Michael Hennigan, an archdiocese attorney, declined to comment Tuesday.
Mahony, who retired in 2011 as head of the nation’s largest diocese, was publicly rebuked Friday by his successor, Archbishop Jose Gomez.
The same day, Bishop Thomas Curry, a top Mahony aide who made critical decisions on abusive priests, requested to resign from his post as an auxiliary bishop in charge of the archdiocese’s Santa Barbara region. Curry was vicar for clergy in the mid-1980s, a position created to handle priestly discipline and other personnel issues.
Both Mahony and Curry have publicly apologized for their handling of pedophile priests.
The archdiocese is considering launching a $200 million fundraising campaign in the midst of the fallout from the clergy files, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday. A recent financial report indicates the archdiocese has a deficit of nearly $80 million.
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/feb/06/tp-la-police-to-review-new-clergy-abuse-files/
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
What's The Difference Between This Muslim And Many Ultra-Orthodox Jews? - NOT MUCH!
* Muslim abuser who 'didn't know' that sex with a girl of 13 was illegal is spared jail..
* Adil Rashid admitted travelling to Nottingham and having sex with the girl
* He met the 13-year-old on Facebook and they communicated by texts and phone for two months before they met
* He was educated in a madrassa and 'had little experience of women'
* Said he had been taught 'women are no more worthy than a lollipop that has been dropped on the ground'
* Added he was reluctant to have sex but that he was 'tempted by [the girl]'
* A muslim who raped a 13-year-old girl he groomed on Facebook has been spared a prison sentence after a judge heard he went to an Islamic faith school where he was taught that women are worthless.
* Adil Rashid, 18, claimed he was not aware that it was illegal for him to have sex with the girl because his education left him ignorant of British law.
* Yesterday Judge Michael Stokes handed Rashid a suspended sentence, saying: ‘Although chronologically 18, it is quite clear from the reports that you are very naive and immature when it comes to sexual matters.’
Earlier Nottingham Crown Court heard that such crimes usually result in a four to seven-year prison sentence.
But the judge said that because Rashid was ‘passive’ and ‘lacking assertiveness’, sending him to jail might cause him ‘more damage than good’.
Rashid, from Birmingham, admitted he had sex with the girl, saying he had been ‘tempted by her’ after they met online.
They initially exchanged messages on Facebook before sending texts and chatting on the phone over a two-month period.
They then met up in Nottingham, where Rashid had booked a room at a Premier Inn.
The girl told police they stayed at the hotel for two hours and had sex after Rashid went to the bathroom and emerged wearing a condom.
More...Mother of dying 15-month-old girl carried into hospital by 'sadistic' paedophile who had fatally abused her sees him jailed for 25 years
Paedophile, 25, had sex with girl, 12, as he hid in her bedroom for TWO DAYS while her unknowing parents sat downstairs
Rashid then returned home and went straight to a mosque to pray.
He was arrested the following week after the girl confessed what had happened to a school friend, who informed one of her teachers.
He told police he knew the girl was 13 but said he was initially reluctant to have sex before relenting after being seduced.
Encounter: Rashid and the girl had met randomly on Facebook and had also communicated by phone and text messages for two months before they met
Earlier the court heard how Rashid had ‘little experience of women’ due to his education at an Islamic school in the UK, which cannot be named for legal reasons.
After his arrest, he told a psychologist that he did not know having sex with a 13-year-old was against the law. The court heard he found it was illegal only when he was informed by a family member.
In other interviews with psychologists, Rashid claimed he had been taught in his school that ‘women are no more worthy than a lollipop that has been dropped on the ground’.
When Judge Stokes said Rashid ‘must have known it was illegal, unless he was going round with his eyes shut’, defence lawyer Laban Leake said reports suggested Rashid had a ‘degree of sexual naivety’.
‘The school he attended, it is not going too far to say, can be described as a closed community and on this occasion this was perpetuated by his home life.
Rashid had pre-booked a family room at the Premier Hotel in Goldsmith Street, Nottingham where he took his victim
Sentenced: Rashid admitted at Nottingham Crown Court (pictured) that he had sex with a 13-year-old after she 'tempted' him
‘It is not too far to say that he may not have known that having sex with a 13-year-old girl was illegal.’ Judge Stokes sentenced Rashid to nine months youth custody, suspended for two years, along with a two-year probation supervision order.
Describing Rashid, the judge said: ‘He’s had an unusual education, certainly in terms of the sexual education provided. Comparing women to lollipops is a very curious way of teaching young men about sex.’
But he said that Rashid knew what he was doing was wrong.
‘It was made clear to you at the school you attended that having sexual relations with a woman before marriage was contrary to the precepts of Islam,’ he said.
Addressing Rashid, the judge said: ‘I accept this was a case where the girl was quite willing to have sexual activity with you. But the law is there to protect young girls, even though they are perfectly happy to engage in sexual activity.’
Read more:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2268395/Adil-Rashid-Paedophile-claimed-Muslim-upbringing-meant-didnt-know-illegal-sex-girl-13.html#axzz2K9fAsqiS
* Adil Rashid admitted travelling to Nottingham and having sex with the girl
* He met the 13-year-old on Facebook and they communicated by texts and phone for two months before they met
* He was educated in a madrassa and 'had little experience of women'
* Said he had been taught 'women are no more worthy than a lollipop that has been dropped on the ground'
* Added he was reluctant to have sex but that he was 'tempted by [the girl]'
* A muslim who raped a 13-year-old girl he groomed on Facebook has been spared a prison sentence after a judge heard he went to an Islamic faith school where he was taught that women are worthless.
* Adil Rashid, 18, claimed he was not aware that it was illegal for him to have sex with the girl because his education left him ignorant of British law.
* Yesterday Judge Michael Stokes handed Rashid a suspended sentence, saying: ‘Although chronologically 18, it is quite clear from the reports that you are very naive and immature when it comes to sexual matters.’
Earlier Nottingham Crown Court heard that such crimes usually result in a four to seven-year prison sentence.
But the judge said that because Rashid was ‘passive’ and ‘lacking assertiveness’, sending him to jail might cause him ‘more damage than good’.
Rashid, from Birmingham, admitted he had sex with the girl, saying he had been ‘tempted by her’ after they met online.
They initially exchanged messages on Facebook before sending texts and chatting on the phone over a two-month period.
They then met up in Nottingham, where Rashid had booked a room at a Premier Inn.
The girl told police they stayed at the hotel for two hours and had sex after Rashid went to the bathroom and emerged wearing a condom.
More...Mother of dying 15-month-old girl carried into hospital by 'sadistic' paedophile who had fatally abused her sees him jailed for 25 years
Paedophile, 25, had sex with girl, 12, as he hid in her bedroom for TWO DAYS while her unknowing parents sat downstairs
Rashid then returned home and went straight to a mosque to pray.
He was arrested the following week after the girl confessed what had happened to a school friend, who informed one of her teachers.
He told police he knew the girl was 13 but said he was initially reluctant to have sex before relenting after being seduced.
Encounter: Rashid and the girl had met randomly on Facebook and had also communicated by phone and text messages for two months before they met
Earlier the court heard how Rashid had ‘little experience of women’ due to his education at an Islamic school in the UK, which cannot be named for legal reasons.
After his arrest, he told a psychologist that he did not know having sex with a 13-year-old was against the law. The court heard he found it was illegal only when he was informed by a family member.
In other interviews with psychologists, Rashid claimed he had been taught in his school that ‘women are no more worthy than a lollipop that has been dropped on the ground’.
When Judge Stokes said Rashid ‘must have known it was illegal, unless he was going round with his eyes shut’, defence lawyer Laban Leake said reports suggested Rashid had a ‘degree of sexual naivety’.
‘The school he attended, it is not going too far to say, can be described as a closed community and on this occasion this was perpetuated by his home life.
Rashid had pre-booked a family room at the Premier Hotel in Goldsmith Street, Nottingham where he took his victim
Sentenced: Rashid admitted at Nottingham Crown Court (pictured) that he had sex with a 13-year-old after she 'tempted' him
‘It is not too far to say that he may not have known that having sex with a 13-year-old girl was illegal.’ Judge Stokes sentenced Rashid to nine months youth custody, suspended for two years, along with a two-year probation supervision order.
Describing Rashid, the judge said: ‘He’s had an unusual education, certainly in terms of the sexual education provided. Comparing women to lollipops is a very curious way of teaching young men about sex.’
But he said that Rashid knew what he was doing was wrong.
‘It was made clear to you at the school you attended that having sexual relations with a woman before marriage was contrary to the precepts of Islam,’ he said.
Addressing Rashid, the judge said: ‘I accept this was a case where the girl was quite willing to have sexual activity with you. But the law is there to protect young girls, even though they are perfectly happy to engage in sexual activity.’
Read more:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2268395/Adil-Rashid-Paedophile-claimed-Muslim-upbringing-meant-didnt-know-illegal-sex-girl-13.html#axzz2K9fAsqiS
"We the parents demand that our children be protected from lewd acts"
Outraged parents staged a protest Monday at the southern California elementary school where one teacher allegedly fondled second-graders and another allegedly spoon-fed students his semen.
It doesn't appear the two teachers conspired together, authorities said, but both were arrested last week on suspicion of sex abuse — sending shock waves through the community of Miramonte Elementary School in South Los Angeles.
The protesting parents carried a large banner that read "We the parents demand that our children be protected from lewd acts," KNBC reported.
"I want the principal out here to give us an explanation, an answer," one parent told the news station. "I think they should shut down the school to start with. Shut it down, temporarily, until they find a way to let us know that our children are protected."
District officials said the school will be closed Tuesday and Wednesday as investigators continue to probe what staffers might have known about the two teachers: Mark Berndt and Martin Singer.
Berndt, 61, allegedly bound and blindfolded dozens of students and subjected them to lewd acts for his sexual kicks between 2005 and 2010, authorities claim.
He photographed them with a giant live cockroach crawling on their faces and a blue plastic spoon allegedly filled with his semen up to their mouths, authorities said.
Berndt allegedly told the kids they were playing a "tasting game," a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department source told the Daily News.
Springer, 49, was arrested Friday on suspicion of fondling two girls inside his classroom sometime in the last three years.
District officials originally said they were not aware of any complaints against the teachers, but prior accusations have since surfaced.
On Saturday, authorities revealed that a female student may have been the victim of both teachers.
The girl and her parents complained to school officials in 2008 when she was a student in Berndt's second-grade class and brought home strange pictures, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Officials dismissed the complaints, and the girl was transferred to Springer's class, where he allegedly touched her on the leg and thigh during the school day, sources told The Times.
Last Thursday, authorities acknowledged that 18 years ago, a 10-year-old girl claimed Berndt tried to fondle her. The case was investigated by the Sheriff's Department, but the District Attorney declined to prosecute saying the 1993 case lacked sufficient evidence, officials said.
Superintendent John Deasy has said he is "sickened and appalled" by the allegations.
District officials plan to meet with parents at a local high school Monday night.
Berndt was removed from his classroom last year after a pharmacy photo technician printed the disturbing images and alerted local police.
ndillon@nydailynews.com
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/parents-protest-california-school-teacher-child-molestation-horror-article-1.1017982#ixzz2K5BGnXr7
It doesn't appear the two teachers conspired together, authorities said, but both were arrested last week on suspicion of sex abuse — sending shock waves through the community of Miramonte Elementary School in South Los Angeles.
The protesting parents carried a large banner that read "We the parents demand that our children be protected from lewd acts," KNBC reported.
"I want the principal out here to give us an explanation, an answer," one parent told the news station. "I think they should shut down the school to start with. Shut it down, temporarily, until they find a way to let us know that our children are protected."
District officials said the school will be closed Tuesday and Wednesday as investigators continue to probe what staffers might have known about the two teachers: Mark Berndt and Martin Singer.
Berndt, 61, allegedly bound and blindfolded dozens of students and subjected them to lewd acts for his sexual kicks between 2005 and 2010, authorities claim.
He photographed them with a giant live cockroach crawling on their faces and a blue plastic spoon allegedly filled with his semen up to their mouths, authorities said.
Berndt allegedly told the kids they were playing a "tasting game," a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department source told the Daily News.
Springer, 49, was arrested Friday on suspicion of fondling two girls inside his classroom sometime in the last three years.
District officials originally said they were not aware of any complaints against the teachers, but prior accusations have since surfaced.
On Saturday, authorities revealed that a female student may have been the victim of both teachers.
The girl and her parents complained to school officials in 2008 when she was a student in Berndt's second-grade class and brought home strange pictures, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Officials dismissed the complaints, and the girl was transferred to Springer's class, where he allegedly touched her on the leg and thigh during the school day, sources told The Times.
Last Thursday, authorities acknowledged that 18 years ago, a 10-year-old girl claimed Berndt tried to fondle her. The case was investigated by the Sheriff's Department, but the District Attorney declined to prosecute saying the 1993 case lacked sufficient evidence, officials said.
Superintendent John Deasy has said he is "sickened and appalled" by the allegations.
District officials plan to meet with parents at a local high school Monday night.
Berndt was removed from his classroom last year after a pharmacy photo technician printed the disturbing images and alerted local police.
ndillon@nydailynews.com
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/parents-protest-california-school-teacher-child-molestation-horror-article-1.1017982#ixzz2K5BGnXr7
Tuesday, February 05, 2013
The Facade Of Holiness
...“Nothing in my own background or education equipped me to deal with this grave problem,” Mahony wrote. In studying for his master’s degree in social work, he said, no lecture or textbook ever referred to the sexual abuse of children.
There is, of course, some truth to the “we didn’t know” defense. Few knew, years ago, the seriousness of the disease borne by those who molest children. Much of it remains a mystery today.
But the “we didn’t know” defense quickly wears thin against the details contained in the 12,000 pages of documents recently released by the court in Los Angeles . . .The documents put the lie to the “we didn’t know” defense.
. . .They knew enough to understand they had to hide the crimes and the behavior if they didn’t want to besmirch the good name of the clergy culture. Consideration of what was happening to the abused children and their families was incidental, at best.
What Mahony and others. . . really didn’t understand was the degree to which their moral compasses had been distorted by the strong magnetic pull of the clergy culture. In their fierce allegiance to that exclusive club at all costs, in their willingness to preserve the façade of holiness and the faithful’s high notion of ordination, they lost sight of simple human decency and the most fundamental demands of the Gospel.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/theanchoress/2013/02/04/abuse-cover-ups-about-more-than-a-clergy-culture/
There is, of course, some truth to the “we didn’t know” defense. Few knew, years ago, the seriousness of the disease borne by those who molest children. Much of it remains a mystery today.
But the “we didn’t know” defense quickly wears thin against the details contained in the 12,000 pages of documents recently released by the court in Los Angeles . . .The documents put the lie to the “we didn’t know” defense.
. . .They knew enough to understand they had to hide the crimes and the behavior if they didn’t want to besmirch the good name of the clergy culture. Consideration of what was happening to the abused children and their families was incidental, at best.
What Mahony and others. . . really didn’t understand was the degree to which their moral compasses had been distorted by the strong magnetic pull of the clergy culture. In their fierce allegiance to that exclusive club at all costs, in their willingness to preserve the façade of holiness and the faithful’s high notion of ordination, they lost sight of simple human decency and the most fundamental demands of the Gospel.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/theanchoress/2013/02/04/abuse-cover-ups-about-more-than-a-clergy-culture/
Monday, February 04, 2013
Why Disclose? "Naming of the monster can only take place in an environment where they feel comfortable talking about what happened to them... "
Rosenblum's Hard Right 180!
Monday, January 28, 2013 The sentencing of a Williamsburg - Brooklyn, New York resident to over 100 years in prison last week has once again brought the issue of child abuse in our communities to the fore. Many of us do not want to believe that child abuse in any form is found in the Torah community. Or we imagine that if it does exist, it is confined to obviously deranged and marginal individuals. At the very least, we wish that somehow matters could be worked out in private, in a way not pointing a bright searchlight on our community and forcing us to confront difficult realities.
Alas, there is no possibility of quiet resolution — at least not if we want to protect our children’s bodies and souls. A community that attempts to deal with abuse issues quietly, in ways that protect our peace of mind, is a community that emboldens predators into thinking that they can get away with it — that sympathy for their families, or the instinctive recoil from admitting that such things can happen in our world, too, or communal shame at being exposed before the secular world, will serve to protect them.
Every predator will take steps to ensure that his victims remain silent. He will warn them of dire consequences if they tell, or try to convince them that no one will believe them if they report what has happened to them. If children’s complaints are routinely suppressed or discounted, the perpetrator’s warning, “No one will believe you,” gains credence and make it less likely that the victims will report. Experts in the field estimate that only one out of ten victims reports what happened to him or her to an adult in a position to help them.
The feeling that they will not be caught emboldens predators. And by the same token, the assurance that they will be caught and prosecuted is the most effective way to stop abuse.
To understand why reporting to authorities when there is solid cause for suspicion of abuse is so crucial, we must first understand the impact of abuse on the victims and how crucial validation of their suffering is to the healing process. (I’m drawing primarily on a chapter by Dr. David Pelcowitz, “Treatment of Victims of Childhood Abuse,” in a volume entitled Breaking the Silence.)
Victims of abuse understandably suffer a loss of trust and security. When the perpetrator is someone to whom they look for security or someone representing authority within their community, that loss of trust is greatly magnified. How can they place their trust in a community that has failed so dramatically to protect them? Mrs. Debbie Fox, who established an abuse prevention program in Los Angeles Torah schools that is now being widely emulated nationwide under her direction, writes in Breaking the Silence that victims often express greater anger towards those who failed to protect them than with the perpetrator himself.
A community that cannot provide security and betrays the natural trust of our young and helpless will not command their allegiance. When family members do not believe the victims or are unwilling or unable to take steps to protect them, writes Dr. Pelcowitz, “a generalized lack of trust in friends, family, and community develops.”
Victims may experience not only rage against the community, or the “system,” in general, but also against Hashem for not running His world with justice. That is one reason victimhood correlates so highly with being “at-risk.”
Victims frequently experience general feelings of worthlessness and blame themselves for what happened to them. It is crucial that when they report being victimized that they hear a clear and unambiguous message that they have been wronged and are not to blame for what happened to them. According to Dr. Pelcowitz, however, it is relatively common for parents or others who receive indications of abuse to downplay the significance of that abuse. And when the response of the community does not actively and unambiguously support the child by validating their feelings [of being horribly wronged] and ensuring that they feel safe, feelings of guilt and worthlessness can be significantly exacerbated, concludes Dr. Pelcowitz.
Many victims of abuse adopt a pattern of hopeless passivity. When adults act upon their complaints and take them seriously, they counteract those feelings of helplessness and passivity. Other victims engage in dissociation — i.e., enter a state of dreamlike numbness to avoid the pain inflicted upon them. Before they can heal, they need to be able “to name the monster.” But that naming of the monster can only take place in an environment where they feel comfortable talking about what happened to them and they are taken seriously.
So important is validation as a first step in healing that one social worker with whom I spoke actually took a young victim to file a police complaint against a perpetrator who had died in the interim. Dr. Pelcowitz concludes that “one of the best predictors of recovery is the level of support offered once the abuse is disclosed.”
And conversely, even adults who were victimized as children experience a reopening of their childhood traumas when they see new victims denied communal support and protection. That is something that those who ask, “Why can’t they just get on with their lives and leave the past behind?” can’t understand. The past is often still with them, especially if they did not receive the support they needed.
http://www.mishpacha.com/Browse/Article/2903/Why-Disclose
Monday, January 28, 2013 The sentencing of a Williamsburg - Brooklyn, New York resident to over 100 years in prison last week has once again brought the issue of child abuse in our communities to the fore. Many of us do not want to believe that child abuse in any form is found in the Torah community. Or we imagine that if it does exist, it is confined to obviously deranged and marginal individuals. At the very least, we wish that somehow matters could be worked out in private, in a way not pointing a bright searchlight on our community and forcing us to confront difficult realities.
Alas, there is no possibility of quiet resolution — at least not if we want to protect our children’s bodies and souls. A community that attempts to deal with abuse issues quietly, in ways that protect our peace of mind, is a community that emboldens predators into thinking that they can get away with it — that sympathy for their families, or the instinctive recoil from admitting that such things can happen in our world, too, or communal shame at being exposed before the secular world, will serve to protect them.
Every predator will take steps to ensure that his victims remain silent. He will warn them of dire consequences if they tell, or try to convince them that no one will believe them if they report what has happened to them. If children’s complaints are routinely suppressed or discounted, the perpetrator’s warning, “No one will believe you,” gains credence and make it less likely that the victims will report. Experts in the field estimate that only one out of ten victims reports what happened to him or her to an adult in a position to help them.
The feeling that they will not be caught emboldens predators. And by the same token, the assurance that they will be caught and prosecuted is the most effective way to stop abuse.
To understand why reporting to authorities when there is solid cause for suspicion of abuse is so crucial, we must first understand the impact of abuse on the victims and how crucial validation of their suffering is to the healing process. (I’m drawing primarily on a chapter by Dr. David Pelcowitz, “Treatment of Victims of Childhood Abuse,” in a volume entitled Breaking the Silence.)
Victims of abuse understandably suffer a loss of trust and security. When the perpetrator is someone to whom they look for security or someone representing authority within their community, that loss of trust is greatly magnified. How can they place their trust in a community that has failed so dramatically to protect them? Mrs. Debbie Fox, who established an abuse prevention program in Los Angeles Torah schools that is now being widely emulated nationwide under her direction, writes in Breaking the Silence that victims often express greater anger towards those who failed to protect them than with the perpetrator himself.
A community that cannot provide security and betrays the natural trust of our young and helpless will not command their allegiance. When family members do not believe the victims or are unwilling or unable to take steps to protect them, writes Dr. Pelcowitz, “a generalized lack of trust in friends, family, and community develops.”
Victims may experience not only rage against the community, or the “system,” in general, but also against Hashem for not running His world with justice. That is one reason victimhood correlates so highly with being “at-risk.”
Victims frequently experience general feelings of worthlessness and blame themselves for what happened to them. It is crucial that when they report being victimized that they hear a clear and unambiguous message that they have been wronged and are not to blame for what happened to them. According to Dr. Pelcowitz, however, it is relatively common for parents or others who receive indications of abuse to downplay the significance of that abuse. And when the response of the community does not actively and unambiguously support the child by validating their feelings [of being horribly wronged] and ensuring that they feel safe, feelings of guilt and worthlessness can be significantly exacerbated, concludes Dr. Pelcowitz.
Many victims of abuse adopt a pattern of hopeless passivity. When adults act upon their complaints and take them seriously, they counteract those feelings of helplessness and passivity. Other victims engage in dissociation — i.e., enter a state of dreamlike numbness to avoid the pain inflicted upon them. Before they can heal, they need to be able “to name the monster.” But that naming of the monster can only take place in an environment where they feel comfortable talking about what happened to them and they are taken seriously.
So important is validation as a first step in healing that one social worker with whom I spoke actually took a young victim to file a police complaint against a perpetrator who had died in the interim. Dr. Pelcowitz concludes that “one of the best predictors of recovery is the level of support offered once the abuse is disclosed.”
And conversely, even adults who were victimized as children experience a reopening of their childhood traumas when they see new victims denied communal support and protection. That is something that those who ask, “Why can’t they just get on with their lives and leave the past behind?” can’t understand. The past is often still with them, especially if they did not receive the support they needed.
http://www.mishpacha.com/Browse/Article/2903/Why-Disclose
Friday, February 01, 2013
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Not Even Discussed In Private Rooms: Childhood Sexual Abuse and Abuse Survivors
There is a health crisis in this country (as well as worldwide) that adversely affects one-fifth of the US population. Consequences of this crisis manifest in a wide variety of serious disease conditions. Physically it can exhibit as cancer and/or as any number of equally severe mental illnesses. Socially the disease is, in a word, criminality. Costs are estimated at over $100 billion per year, or similar to the annual expense of the war in Afghanistan. Investment in its prevention is estimated at a nickel on every $100 in research, compared to $2 for cancer. (See Note 1)
Despite considerable attention drawn to this issue this past year — the Surgeon General termed it an “epidemic” well over a decade ago — the crisis was not discussed during the presidential campaign. It remains largely ignored by the Congress (though just prior to adjourning sine die an innocuous bill to evaluate child welfare systems was passed), was unaddressed by the Affordable Care Act, and has been ignored as well to date by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. “The leading journal of health policy thought and research,” Health Affairs, has never published on the topic.
The health crisis is child sexual abuse, which adversely affects the health status of 50 million survivors.
Beyond the Catholic Church’s continuing inability to address, or indifference to, abuse by thousands of priests over the past fifty years, this year we learned about the cover-up at Penn State. Added to the reality of Jerry Sandusky’s conviction on 45 counts of abuse between 1994 and 2009 is the worry that he may have been abusing boys since the 1970s. We learned of the multi-decade cover-up of abuse at the New York City’s private Horace Mann School. We also learned the Boy Scouts of America secretly held “perversion files” for nearly a century that record sexual abuse accusations against thousands of scout leaders. In October it was revealed a long-time BBC program host, Jerry Savile (now deceased), had engaged in widespread pedophilia involving an estimated 500 children over six decades including children in 14 hospitals and a children’s hospice.
What Can Be Done?
Improving reporting and data collection. Despite all this and more, the issue is not discussed in Washington. Unlike Australia’s recent decision to create a royal commission to examine childhood sexual abuse, there is no national dialogue in the United States. One way to start a dialogue would be to realize there is no accurate reporting and data collection concerning child abuse. Child Protective Services investigate a substantial number of maltreated children, but far from all, because of interagency disputes over definitions and jurisdiction. Reporting responsibility, and to whom, is also confused if and when professionals in community institutions — for example day care centers and schools — are involved.
Added to this are inadequacies in data collection. The Uniform Crime Reports does not provide sufficient details beyond arrests; the National Crime Victimization Survey does not measure crime against children younger than age 12. As for the National Incident Based Reporting System, not all law enforcement agencies and/or states participate.
Beyond all this, keep in mind an estimated 90 percent of sexual abuses are never reported.
Strengthening research. Equally underwhelming is research to treat adult survivors of childhood abuse. Anyone familiar with the 1990s ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study is well aware of the long-term health impact of trauma over a person’s lifespan. Because of the prevalence of abuse, there have been calls over the years for the creation of a dedicated NIH Institute named, for example, the Institute of Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence. Notwithstanding, there is little systematic research in the dissociative disorders. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) or Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (DDNOS) are some of the most severe mental disorders survivors suffer. These diagnoses are associated with high levels of impairment, high rates of treatment utilization and costs, and can affect as many as 20 percent of psychiatric hospital patients. (See Note 2) That these patients are understudied is explained in part by exclusion criteria used in PTSD treatment studies.
Studies are also lacking or undermined because the diagnosis and treatment of DID have been under attack over the past twenty years by the highly controversial False Memory Syndrome Foundation. FMSF has been successful despite the fact there is no peer-reviewed clinical literature concerning “false memory syndrome” and that the “syndrome” is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in the DSM-IV. Multiple Personality Disorder was recognized in the DMS-III in 1980 and renamed DID in the 1994 DMS-IV.
Bolstering legal protections for survivors. Thirdly, due in part to the fact psychiatric disability is the most stigmatizing of all disabilities (one poll by the National Organization on Disability showed only 19 percent of Americans are comfortable with people with mental illness), many adult survivors find it difficult if not possible to secure health benefits if and when their mental health disorder becomes known to their employer. Studies show workers with mental health conditions are half as likely to receive accommodations as those with other disabilities, even though accommodations for psychiatric disorders cost very little or nothing in contrast to technological or architectural changes required for other disabilities.
The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act required employers to make reasonable accommodations for disabled employees. Subsequent to the law’s passage, the intent of the legislation became narrowed or undermined through several court decisions. The Congress in 2008 again stepped in and enacted the ADA Amendments Act that reinstated or reaffirmed the broad scope of disability protections available under the ADA. Even with the renewed mandate, employees with a mental health diagnosis have a very difficult time being afforded reasonable accommodation, or worse, as numerous EEOC case filings show, lose their job (and of course their health benefits) when their diagnosis becomes known to their employer.
Where there is a dialogue or an effort to address the crisis is in the realm of window laws for survivors. In most states, abuse victims have a limited period of time, a statute of limitations, to file a civil claim against their predator. For example, in New York a victim would have five years after turning 18 to file for a first degree offense. Other states have recently liberalized these civil laws. For example, in Pennsylvania the age limit for filing child sex abuse cases is 30 for civil cases. Other states, California then Delaware and recently Hawaii, have also created windows of time for victims who had timed out from filing civil claims.
Some states like New Jersey are considering completely eliminating the time period. In New York, despite a fairly well-publicized effort to extend the statute of limitations, the proposal failed this past year. New York’s failure and the failures in other states have been due largely to efforts by the Catholic Church, as well as ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders. Though the church did support extending the statute to age 28 in New York, bishops claimed generally the legislation “targeted” the church and would undermine its ability to provide social services. Window legislation has also been proposed but defeated in Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, and Washington, DC. (See Note 3)
Child abuse and its effects on survivors remains our largest public health crisis.
Some say it may be the country’s last great civil rights issue. The ACE study mentioned above (and still ongoing) found survivors of childhood abuse suffer a long list of illnesses and disabilities. They include excessive rates of alcoholism, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, depression and other psychiatric disorders, heart and liver disease, illicit drug use, obesity, poor school/work performance, poverty, risky sex and suicide. However, possibly worst of all is the inter-generational transmission of childhood abuse. That there is no national dialogue about any of this is unconscionable. We ignore the crisis at our collective peril.
NOTES
Note 1. Regarding the prevalence of sexual abuse see the CDC page. For costs see, for example, the work done by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. See “Mental Health, A Report of the Surgeon General.” (1999) For investment in research see for example F. W. Putnam, in The Cost of Child Maltreatment: Who Pays? K. Franey, et al., eds. (Family Violence and Sexual Assault Institute, San Diego) pgs. 185-198.
Note 2. B. L. Brand, et al. “A Naturalistic Study of Dissociative Identity Disorder and Dissociative Disorder Not Specified Patients Treated by Community Clinicians,” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Policy and Practice,” (2012): 153-171.
Note 3. “The Children Deserve Justice“, editorial, The New York Times, June 16, 2012 and Laurie Goodstein and Erik Eckholm, “Church Battles Efforts to Ease Sex Abuse Suits,” The New York Times, June 14, 2012.
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2013/01/30/not-even-discussed-in-private-rooms-childhood-sexual-abuse-and-abuse-survivors/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=not-even-discussed-in-private-rooms-childhood-sexual-abuse-and-abuse-survivors
Despite considerable attention drawn to this issue this past year — the Surgeon General termed it an “epidemic” well over a decade ago — the crisis was not discussed during the presidential campaign. It remains largely ignored by the Congress (though just prior to adjourning sine die an innocuous bill to evaluate child welfare systems was passed), was unaddressed by the Affordable Care Act, and has been ignored as well to date by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. “The leading journal of health policy thought and research,” Health Affairs, has never published on the topic.
The health crisis is child sexual abuse, which adversely affects the health status of 50 million survivors.
Beyond the Catholic Church’s continuing inability to address, or indifference to, abuse by thousands of priests over the past fifty years, this year we learned about the cover-up at Penn State. Added to the reality of Jerry Sandusky’s conviction on 45 counts of abuse between 1994 and 2009 is the worry that he may have been abusing boys since the 1970s. We learned of the multi-decade cover-up of abuse at the New York City’s private Horace Mann School. We also learned the Boy Scouts of America secretly held “perversion files” for nearly a century that record sexual abuse accusations against thousands of scout leaders. In October it was revealed a long-time BBC program host, Jerry Savile (now deceased), had engaged in widespread pedophilia involving an estimated 500 children over six decades including children in 14 hospitals and a children’s hospice.
What Can Be Done?
Improving reporting and data collection. Despite all this and more, the issue is not discussed in Washington. Unlike Australia’s recent decision to create a royal commission to examine childhood sexual abuse, there is no national dialogue in the United States. One way to start a dialogue would be to realize there is no accurate reporting and data collection concerning child abuse. Child Protective Services investigate a substantial number of maltreated children, but far from all, because of interagency disputes over definitions and jurisdiction. Reporting responsibility, and to whom, is also confused if and when professionals in community institutions — for example day care centers and schools — are involved.
Added to this are inadequacies in data collection. The Uniform Crime Reports does not provide sufficient details beyond arrests; the National Crime Victimization Survey does not measure crime against children younger than age 12. As for the National Incident Based Reporting System, not all law enforcement agencies and/or states participate.
Beyond all this, keep in mind an estimated 90 percent of sexual abuses are never reported.
Strengthening research. Equally underwhelming is research to treat adult survivors of childhood abuse. Anyone familiar with the 1990s ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study is well aware of the long-term health impact of trauma over a person’s lifespan. Because of the prevalence of abuse, there have been calls over the years for the creation of a dedicated NIH Institute named, for example, the Institute of Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence. Notwithstanding, there is little systematic research in the dissociative disorders. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) or Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (DDNOS) are some of the most severe mental disorders survivors suffer. These diagnoses are associated with high levels of impairment, high rates of treatment utilization and costs, and can affect as many as 20 percent of psychiatric hospital patients. (See Note 2) That these patients are understudied is explained in part by exclusion criteria used in PTSD treatment studies.
Studies are also lacking or undermined because the diagnosis and treatment of DID have been under attack over the past twenty years by the highly controversial False Memory Syndrome Foundation. FMSF has been successful despite the fact there is no peer-reviewed clinical literature concerning “false memory syndrome” and that the “syndrome” is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in the DSM-IV. Multiple Personality Disorder was recognized in the DMS-III in 1980 and renamed DID in the 1994 DMS-IV.
Bolstering legal protections for survivors. Thirdly, due in part to the fact psychiatric disability is the most stigmatizing of all disabilities (one poll by the National Organization on Disability showed only 19 percent of Americans are comfortable with people with mental illness), many adult survivors find it difficult if not possible to secure health benefits if and when their mental health disorder becomes known to their employer. Studies show workers with mental health conditions are half as likely to receive accommodations as those with other disabilities, even though accommodations for psychiatric disorders cost very little or nothing in contrast to technological or architectural changes required for other disabilities.
The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act required employers to make reasonable accommodations for disabled employees. Subsequent to the law’s passage, the intent of the legislation became narrowed or undermined through several court decisions. The Congress in 2008 again stepped in and enacted the ADA Amendments Act that reinstated or reaffirmed the broad scope of disability protections available under the ADA. Even with the renewed mandate, employees with a mental health diagnosis have a very difficult time being afforded reasonable accommodation, or worse, as numerous EEOC case filings show, lose their job (and of course their health benefits) when their diagnosis becomes known to their employer.
Where there is a dialogue or an effort to address the crisis is in the realm of window laws for survivors. In most states, abuse victims have a limited period of time, a statute of limitations, to file a civil claim against their predator. For example, in New York a victim would have five years after turning 18 to file for a first degree offense. Other states have recently liberalized these civil laws. For example, in Pennsylvania the age limit for filing child sex abuse cases is 30 for civil cases. Other states, California then Delaware and recently Hawaii, have also created windows of time for victims who had timed out from filing civil claims.
Some states like New Jersey are considering completely eliminating the time period. In New York, despite a fairly well-publicized effort to extend the statute of limitations, the proposal failed this past year. New York’s failure and the failures in other states have been due largely to efforts by the Catholic Church, as well as ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders. Though the church did support extending the statute to age 28 in New York, bishops claimed generally the legislation “targeted” the church and would undermine its ability to provide social services. Window legislation has also been proposed but defeated in Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, and Washington, DC. (See Note 3)
Child abuse and its effects on survivors remains our largest public health crisis.
Some say it may be the country’s last great civil rights issue. The ACE study mentioned above (and still ongoing) found survivors of childhood abuse suffer a long list of illnesses and disabilities. They include excessive rates of alcoholism, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, depression and other psychiatric disorders, heart and liver disease, illicit drug use, obesity, poor school/work performance, poverty, risky sex and suicide. However, possibly worst of all is the inter-generational transmission of childhood abuse. That there is no national dialogue about any of this is unconscionable. We ignore the crisis at our collective peril.
NOTES
Note 1. Regarding the prevalence of sexual abuse see the CDC page. For costs see, for example, the work done by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. See “Mental Health, A Report of the Surgeon General.” (1999) For investment in research see for example F. W. Putnam, in The Cost of Child Maltreatment: Who Pays? K. Franey, et al., eds. (Family Violence and Sexual Assault Institute, San Diego) pgs. 185-198.
Note 2. B. L. Brand, et al. “A Naturalistic Study of Dissociative Identity Disorder and Dissociative Disorder Not Specified Patients Treated by Community Clinicians,” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Policy and Practice,” (2012): 153-171.
Note 3. “The Children Deserve Justice“, editorial, The New York Times, June 16, 2012 and Laurie Goodstein and Erik Eckholm, “Church Battles Efforts to Ease Sex Abuse Suits,” The New York Times, June 14, 2012.
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2013/01/30/not-even-discussed-in-private-rooms-childhood-sexual-abuse-and-abuse-survivors/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=not-even-discussed-in-private-rooms-childhood-sexual-abuse-and-abuse-survivors
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Silence common in child sex abuse cases
* Advocate pitches 'Erin's Law' on sex-abuse education.
* Erin Merryn says it's important for kids to know that it's OK to expose the abuse.
* Victim of childhood sexual abuse says other victims need to know it's OK to speak out.
* She wants schools to teach kids about sex abuse as they do drug abuse, tornado drills.
* Five states have passed versions of Erin's Law.
JACKSON, Miss. — A woman who was sexually abused as a child is on a 50-state mission to urge lawmakers to make education about child sex abuse part of schools' curriculum.
For 2½ years beginning at age 6, a neighbor raped Erin Merryn, now 27, of Schaumburg, Ill. A teenage cousin started molesting her when she was 11. Now, she's the force behind "Erin's Law" legislation, which her home state enacted earlier this month.
"I never had to run out of a burning building and I knew how to say no to drugs when I was approached in high school, but when two men were molesting and raping me I didn't know what to do so I stayed silent," Merryn said last week. "I don't want another child to face years of rape and abuse like I did. I want them to be able to have a voice and know to tell and not keep it a secret."
Her abusers threatened her if she told the secret — said that they would come get her, said that she would be destroying her family. She now says it is her life's mission to spread the word that it's important to tell and have legislation enacted in all 50 states.
Merryn is lobbying Mississippi lawmakers Monday and Tuesday.
Five states have passed Erin's Law — Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Michigan and Missouri. And such legislation is pending in other states, including Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, New York and Pennsylvania, according to Merryn's website.
Mississippi Rep. Tom Miles, a Democrat from Forest, Miss., who has filed an Erin's Law bill in the state House said sexual abuse figures are staggering — 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys. Republican Sen. Nancy Collins of Tupelo, Miss., has filed companion legislation in the state Senate.
"This happens all the time and is often pushed under the rug," Miles said. "We believe bringing this law to Mississippi will not only educate the children what to do if this were to happen to them but let them know it is OK to speak out about it."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/01/28/erins-law-lobbying/1870965/
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Nearly two dozen ultra-Orthodox Jews were arrested and charged after police uncovered a pedophile ring that targeted ultra-Orthodox Jewish children in Jerusalem
Court convicts leader of Jerusalem ultra-Orthodox Jewish pedophile ring
Nearly two dozen ultra-Orthodox Jews were arrested and charged after police uncovered a pedophile ring that targeted ultra-Orthodox Jewish children in Jerusalem.
Now, the Jerusalem District Court convicted the first man to stand trial among several defendants accused of sexually abusing children in the Nahlaot neighborhood of Jerusalem, a case police initially called the largest case of pedophilia in the state's history.
The court sentenced **, who was the first of the 18 men who were arrested in the case that came to light two years ago. Two other men are now on trial and 15 others were released in the case that sent shock waves through the neighborhood where many ultra-Orthodox Jews live.
The judges found the man guilty, but canceled his confession to police after they determined that it had been obtained through unfair psychological pressure. The man was acquitted of one of the counts in the indictment.
The three judges of the District Court determined that the man, whom they described as having an irregular personality with childhood issues, invited neighborhood children to his house and played with them that involved inappropriate touching and indecent acts. He also sodomized children with an object. He was also convicted of threatening children, telling them he was going to burn down their house if they told anyone about his actions.
http://www.yourjewishnews.com/Pages/25409.aspx
Nearly two dozen ultra-Orthodox Jews were arrested and charged after police uncovered a pedophile ring that targeted ultra-Orthodox Jewish children in Jerusalem.
Now, the Jerusalem District Court convicted the first man to stand trial among several defendants accused of sexually abusing children in the Nahlaot neighborhood of Jerusalem, a case police initially called the largest case of pedophilia in the state's history.
The court sentenced **, who was the first of the 18 men who were arrested in the case that came to light two years ago. Two other men are now on trial and 15 others were released in the case that sent shock waves through the neighborhood where many ultra-Orthodox Jews live.
The judges found the man guilty, but canceled his confession to police after they determined that it had been obtained through unfair psychological pressure. The man was acquitted of one of the counts in the indictment.
The three judges of the District Court determined that the man, whom they described as having an irregular personality with childhood issues, invited neighborhood children to his house and played with them that involved inappropriate touching and indecent acts. He also sodomized children with an object. He was also convicted of threatening children, telling them he was going to burn down their house if they told anyone about his actions.
http://www.yourjewishnews.com/Pages/25409.aspx
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Another Rotten Anti-Semite Judge!
Sentence in sex abuse of children case: *** Prison Forever!!! ***
Michael Louis McIntosh stood next to his attorney with his head down as Judge Howard Maltz told him Friday morning that he would spend the rest of his life in prison.
“The testimony that came out during trial revealed that your conduct was nothing short of despicable,” Maltz told him. “By your actions, you’ve sentenced the victims in this case to a life sentence of emotional turmoil that can’t be undone.
“Your conduct has demonstrated that you do not deserve to walk this earth as a free man. With my sentence today, I’m going to assure that that’s the case.”
In all, McIntosh, 32, of St. Augustine, received seven life sentences, three of which were to be served consecutively. He was found guilty Thursday of eight felony counts of sexual misconduct with children.
After the judge pronounced the sentences, McIntosh’s parents, siblings and other family members erupted into tears. The victims and their families also were crying, with one of the victims shaking as a relative consoled him.
The prosecution and the defense each brought forth witnesses to speak before the sentencing.
The two victims, who had testified Wednesday that McIntosh performed sexual acts on them when they were as young as 6 years old, spoke to the judge again Friday, each pausing several times throughout their statements, their voices warbling with emotion.
One victim told the judge that McIntosh had made death threats to warn against telling of the abuse. That victim said the conviction was a relief, adding that, “Now I can rest in peace. I feel free now.”
The St. Augustine Record does not publish the names of victims of sex crimes.
One victim’s grandmother also told the judge that she was disheartened that her grandchild’s religious faith had been shaken by the actions of the defendant, whom she said “will have to answer to God for what he did.”
When it came time for the defense witnesses to speak, Maltz listened as McIntosh’s closest family members — his father, brother, two sisters and a nephew — spoke lovingly of him, saying that the Michael McIntosh they knew was incapable of those crimes.
McIntosh’s father, Donald McIntosh, told the judge that his son, as well as his family, had been “truly hurt by the outcome of this trial.”
“We know in our hearts that our son is not the man portrayed in our judicial system,” Donald McIntosh said. “We can hug our son, and feel no shame.”
Michael McIntosh fought back tears for most of the proceeding, eventually breaking down during testimony by his elder brother, James McIntosh, who was also crying and concluded by saying, “I am still proud of my baby brother and always will be.”
When defense attorney Jason Porter called McIntosh to speak to the judge, McIntosh shuffled slowly, head down, as he made his way to the podium. The sobbing that had been near constant throughout the proceeding — from both the defendant’s and the victims’ sides of the courtroom — stopped as all waited to hear what he would say.
But McIntosh, who had been struggling to contain tears through much of the testimony, was too distraught to speak, so he had his attorney read his statement. McIntosh recalled growing up in a close, loving family, “where help was just down the hallway,” and thanked them for standing behind him.
“(My family) taught me that no one was disposable, that happens to one member of the family affects the rest,” he wrote. “I can’t possibly list all the ways you all have supported me, but my gratitude is infinite. All your letters and cards, phone calls and visits, just to name a few, it helped to make these times more bearable.”
Of eight guilty verdicts, he was given seven life sentences, three of which will be served consecutively. He was also sentenced to 15 years on one of the convictions. McIntosh has 30 days to appeal the judgments and sentences.
http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2013-01-25/sentence-sex-abuse-children-case-prison-forever
Michael Louis McIntosh stood next to his attorney with his head down as Judge Howard Maltz told him Friday morning that he would spend the rest of his life in prison.
“The testimony that came out during trial revealed that your conduct was nothing short of despicable,” Maltz told him. “By your actions, you’ve sentenced the victims in this case to a life sentence of emotional turmoil that can’t be undone.
“Your conduct has demonstrated that you do not deserve to walk this earth as a free man. With my sentence today, I’m going to assure that that’s the case.”
In all, McIntosh, 32, of St. Augustine, received seven life sentences, three of which were to be served consecutively. He was found guilty Thursday of eight felony counts of sexual misconduct with children.
After the judge pronounced the sentences, McIntosh’s parents, siblings and other family members erupted into tears. The victims and their families also were crying, with one of the victims shaking as a relative consoled him.
The prosecution and the defense each brought forth witnesses to speak before the sentencing.
The two victims, who had testified Wednesday that McIntosh performed sexual acts on them when they were as young as 6 years old, spoke to the judge again Friday, each pausing several times throughout their statements, their voices warbling with emotion.
One victim told the judge that McIntosh had made death threats to warn against telling of the abuse. That victim said the conviction was a relief, adding that, “Now I can rest in peace. I feel free now.”
The St. Augustine Record does not publish the names of victims of sex crimes.
One victim’s grandmother also told the judge that she was disheartened that her grandchild’s religious faith had been shaken by the actions of the defendant, whom she said “will have to answer to God for what he did.”
When it came time for the defense witnesses to speak, Maltz listened as McIntosh’s closest family members — his father, brother, two sisters and a nephew — spoke lovingly of him, saying that the Michael McIntosh they knew was incapable of those crimes.
McIntosh’s father, Donald McIntosh, told the judge that his son, as well as his family, had been “truly hurt by the outcome of this trial.”
“We know in our hearts that our son is not the man portrayed in our judicial system,” Donald McIntosh said. “We can hug our son, and feel no shame.”
Michael McIntosh fought back tears for most of the proceeding, eventually breaking down during testimony by his elder brother, James McIntosh, who was also crying and concluded by saying, “I am still proud of my baby brother and always will be.”
When defense attorney Jason Porter called McIntosh to speak to the judge, McIntosh shuffled slowly, head down, as he made his way to the podium. The sobbing that had been near constant throughout the proceeding — from both the defendant’s and the victims’ sides of the courtroom — stopped as all waited to hear what he would say.
But McIntosh, who had been struggling to contain tears through much of the testimony, was too distraught to speak, so he had his attorney read his statement. McIntosh recalled growing up in a close, loving family, “where help was just down the hallway,” and thanked them for standing behind him.
“(My family) taught me that no one was disposable, that happens to one member of the family affects the rest,” he wrote. “I can’t possibly list all the ways you all have supported me, but my gratitude is infinite. All your letters and cards, phone calls and visits, just to name a few, it helped to make these times more bearable.”
Of eight guilty verdicts, he was given seven life sentences, three of which will be served consecutively. He was also sentenced to 15 years on one of the convictions. McIntosh has 30 days to appeal the judgments and sentences.
http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2013-01-25/sentence-sex-abuse-children-case-prison-forever
The Curse & Case Of The Costumed Frauds! On Saturday The Clergy Shtupped Little Kids - On Sunday The Cover-Ups Began
Catholicism’s Curse - Judaism, And The Whole Shmear Of Them:
...They’re inventions of the mortals who took charge of the faith.... “It can’t admit to error, the church hierarchy,” Wills told me on the phone on Thursday. “Any challenge to their prerogative is, in their eyes, a challenge to God. You can’t be any more arrogant than that.”
“I HAVE nothing against priests,” writes Garry Wills in his provocative new book, “Why Priests? A Failed Tradition,” and I’d like at the outset to say the same. During a career that has included no small number of formal interviews and informal conversations with them, I’ve met many I admire, men of genuine compassion and remarkable altruism, more dedicated to humanity than to any dogma or selective tradition.
But while I have nothing against priests, I have quite a lot against an institution that has done a disservice to them and to the parishioners in whose interests they should toil. I refer to the Roman Catholic Church, specifically to its modern incarnation and current leaders, who have tucked priests into a cosseted caste above the flock, wrapped them in mysticism and prioritized their protection and reputations over the needs and sometimes even the anguish of the people in the pews. I have a problem, in other words, with the church’s arrogance, a thread that runs through Wills’s book, to be published next month; through fresh revelations of how assiduously a cardinal in Los Angeles worked to cover up child sexual abuse; and through the church’s attempts to silence dissenters, including an outspoken clergyman in Ireland who was recently back in the news.
LET’S start with Los Angeles. Last week, as a result of lawsuits filed against the archdiocese of Los Angeles by hundreds of victims of sexual abuse by priests, internal church personnel files were made public. They showed that Cardinal Roger M. Mahony’s impulse, when confronted with priests who had molested children, was to hush it up and keep law enforcement officials at bay. While responses like this by Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals have been extensively chronicled and are no longer shocking, they remain infuriating. At one point Cardinal Mahony instructed a priest whom he’d dispatched to New Mexico for counseling not to return to California, lest he risk being criminally prosecuted. That sort of shielding of priests from accountability allowed them, in many cases across the United States, to continue their abusive behavior and claim more young victims.
Cardinal Mahony, who led the Los Angeles archdiocese from 1985 to 2011, released a statement last week in which he said that until 2006, when he began to meet with dozens of victims, he didn’t grasp “the full and lasting impact these horrible acts would have” on the children subjected to them. I find that assertion incredible and appalling. It takes no particular sophistication about matters of mental health to intuit that a child molested by an adult — in these cases, by an adult who is supposed to be a moral exemplar and tutor, even a conduit to the divine — would be grievously damaged. The failure to recognize that and to make sure that abusive priests’ access to children was eliminated, even if that meant trials and jail sentences, suggests a greater concern for the stature of clergymen than for the souls of children.
Church officials and defenders note that Cardinal Mahony’s gravest misdeeds occurred in the 1980s, before church leaders were properly educated about recidivism among pedophiles and before the dimensions of the child sexual abuse crisis in the church became clear. They point out that the church’s response improved over time. That’s true, but what hasn’t changed is the church’s hubris. This hubris abetted the crisis: the particular sway that abusers held over their victims and the special trust they received from those children’s parents were tied into the church’s presentation of priests as paragons.
And this hubris also survives the crisis, manifest in the way that the Vatican, a gilded enclave so far removed and so frequently out of step with the rest of the world, clamps down on Catholics who challenge its rituals and rules. Much of what these dissenters raise questions about — the all-male priesthood, for example, or the commitment to celibacy that priests are required to make — aren’t indisputable edicts from God. They’re inventions of the mortals who took charge of the faith....
READ EVERY WORD OF THIS:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/opinion/sunday/bruni-catholicisms-curse.html?pagewanted=1&hp
C.D. Zwiebel Should Be Prosecuted For Stupidity:
.....Other close observers of the Satmar community worry about the outcome of the Weberman trial. Dovid Zwiebel, vice president of Agudath Israel America, a group that works closely with Brooklyn's Satmar population, said the case should have been handled more "delicately."
"Many people felt it wasn't as if Mr. Weberman was on trial, it was as if the community was on trial," he said. Mr. Zwiebel, who said he applauded the crackdown on abuse, worried that a 103-year sentence might suggest "the system is rigged against Hasidic Jews.""The reaction I've heard from many is maybe we shouldn't be cooperating with law-enforcement authorities," he added.....
WHAT??? HUH??? UTALKIN2ME??? CMECD2SMACKU!!!
READ EVERY WORD OF THIS:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323539804578264091839493584.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_newyork
...They’re inventions of the mortals who took charge of the faith.... “It can’t admit to error, the church hierarchy,” Wills told me on the phone on Thursday. “Any challenge to their prerogative is, in their eyes, a challenge to God. You can’t be any more arrogant than that.”
“I HAVE nothing against priests,” writes Garry Wills in his provocative new book, “Why Priests? A Failed Tradition,” and I’d like at the outset to say the same. During a career that has included no small number of formal interviews and informal conversations with them, I’ve met many I admire, men of genuine compassion and remarkable altruism, more dedicated to humanity than to any dogma or selective tradition.
But while I have nothing against priests, I have quite a lot against an institution that has done a disservice to them and to the parishioners in whose interests they should toil. I refer to the Roman Catholic Church, specifically to its modern incarnation and current leaders, who have tucked priests into a cosseted caste above the flock, wrapped them in mysticism and prioritized their protection and reputations over the needs and sometimes even the anguish of the people in the pews. I have a problem, in other words, with the church’s arrogance, a thread that runs through Wills’s book, to be published next month; through fresh revelations of how assiduously a cardinal in Los Angeles worked to cover up child sexual abuse; and through the church’s attempts to silence dissenters, including an outspoken clergyman in Ireland who was recently back in the news.
LET’S start with Los Angeles. Last week, as a result of lawsuits filed against the archdiocese of Los Angeles by hundreds of victims of sexual abuse by priests, internal church personnel files were made public. They showed that Cardinal Roger M. Mahony’s impulse, when confronted with priests who had molested children, was to hush it up and keep law enforcement officials at bay. While responses like this by Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals have been extensively chronicled and are no longer shocking, they remain infuriating. At one point Cardinal Mahony instructed a priest whom he’d dispatched to New Mexico for counseling not to return to California, lest he risk being criminally prosecuted. That sort of shielding of priests from accountability allowed them, in many cases across the United States, to continue their abusive behavior and claim more young victims.
Cardinal Mahony, who led the Los Angeles archdiocese from 1985 to 2011, released a statement last week in which he said that until 2006, when he began to meet with dozens of victims, he didn’t grasp “the full and lasting impact these horrible acts would have” on the children subjected to them. I find that assertion incredible and appalling. It takes no particular sophistication about matters of mental health to intuit that a child molested by an adult — in these cases, by an adult who is supposed to be a moral exemplar and tutor, even a conduit to the divine — would be grievously damaged. The failure to recognize that and to make sure that abusive priests’ access to children was eliminated, even if that meant trials and jail sentences, suggests a greater concern for the stature of clergymen than for the souls of children.
Church officials and defenders note that Cardinal Mahony’s gravest misdeeds occurred in the 1980s, before church leaders were properly educated about recidivism among pedophiles and before the dimensions of the child sexual abuse crisis in the church became clear. They point out that the church’s response improved over time. That’s true, but what hasn’t changed is the church’s hubris. This hubris abetted the crisis: the particular sway that abusers held over their victims and the special trust they received from those children’s parents were tied into the church’s presentation of priests as paragons.
And this hubris also survives the crisis, manifest in the way that the Vatican, a gilded enclave so far removed and so frequently out of step with the rest of the world, clamps down on Catholics who challenge its rituals and rules. Much of what these dissenters raise questions about — the all-male priesthood, for example, or the commitment to celibacy that priests are required to make — aren’t indisputable edicts from God. They’re inventions of the mortals who took charge of the faith....
READ EVERY WORD OF THIS:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/opinion/sunday/bruni-catholicisms-curse.html?pagewanted=1&hp
C.D. Zwiebel Should Be Prosecuted For Stupidity:
.....Other close observers of the Satmar community worry about the outcome of the Weberman trial. Dovid Zwiebel, vice president of Agudath Israel America, a group that works closely with Brooklyn's Satmar population, said the case should have been handled more "delicately."
"Many people felt it wasn't as if Mr. Weberman was on trial, it was as if the community was on trial," he said. Mr. Zwiebel, who said he applauded the crackdown on abuse, worried that a 103-year sentence might suggest "the system is rigged against Hasidic Jews.""The reaction I've heard from many is maybe we shouldn't be cooperating with law-enforcement authorities," he added.....
WHAT??? HUH??? UTALKIN2ME??? CMECD2SMACKU!!!
READ EVERY WORD OF THIS:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323539804578264091839493584.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_newyork
Friday, January 25, 2013
The Price of a Stolen Childhood
For 30 years, the victims’-rights movement has fought for a larger role for victims in criminal prosecutions. Victims have gained the right to make statements in court about the impact a crime has had on them, which judges can take into account in determining punishment....
"Alan Hesketh, a former vice-president of Pfizer, was charged with trading nearly 2,000 child-pornography photos online."
"Study after study links child sexual abuse to psychological trauma, addiction and violent relationships in adulthood. There is almost no research, however, that deals with the specifics of Amy and Nicole’s experiences: What additional harm comes from knowing that pictures of your childhood exploitation are circulating widely?
The Supreme Court actually addressed this question in its 1982 decision upholding child-pornography bans. “ ‘Pornography poses an even greater threat to the child victim than does sexual abuse or prostitution,’ ” Justice Byron White wrote, quoting from a book about abused children. “ ‘Because the child’s actions are reduced to a recording, the pornography may haunt him in future years, long after the original misdeed took place.’ ”
When Nicole was a child, her father took pornographic pictures of her that still circulate on the Internet.
The detective spread out the photographs on the kitchen table, in front of Nicole, on a December morning in 2006. She was 17, but in the pictures, she saw the face of her 10-year-old self, a half-grown girl wearing make-up. The bodies in the images were broken up by pixelation, but Nicole could see the outline of her father, forcing himself on her. Her mother, sitting next to her, burst into sobs.
The detective spoke gently, but he had brutal news: the pictures had been downloaded onto thousands of computers via file-sharing services around the world. They were among the most widely circulated child pornography on the Internet. Also online were video clips, similarly notorious, in which Nicole spoke words her father had scripted for her, sometimes at the behest of other men. For years, investigators in the United States, Canada and Europe had been trying to identify the girl in the images.
Nicole’s parents split up when she was a toddler, and she grew up living with her mother and stepfather and visiting her father, a former policeman, every other weekend at his apartment in a suburban town in the Pacific Northwest. He started showing her child pornography when she was about 9, telling her that it was normal for fathers and daughters to “play games” like in the pictures. Soon after, he started forcing her to perform oral sex and raping her, dressing her in tight clothes and sometimes binding her with ropes. When she turned 12, she told him to stop, but he used threats and intimidation to continue the abuse for about a year. He said that if she told anyone what he’d done, everyone would hate her for letting him. He said that her mother would no longer love her.
Nicole (who asked me to use her middle name to protect her privacy) knew her father had a tripod set up in his bedroom. She asked if he’d ever shown the pictures to anyone. He said no, and she believed him. “It was all so hidden,” she told me. “And he knew how to lie. He taught me to do it. He said: ‘You look them straight in the eye. You make your shoulders square. You breathe normally.’ ”
When she was 16, Nicole told her mother, in a burst of tears, what had been going on at her father’s house. Her father was arrested for child rape. The police asked Nicole whether he took pictures. She said yes, but that she didn’t think he showed them to anyone. A few months later, while her father was out on bail, Nicole was using a computer he gave her to work on a presentation for Spanish class when she came across a file with a vulgar name that she couldn’t open. She showed it to her mother and stepfather, and they brought the computer to the police.
A search detected five deleted video files of child pornography, two of them showing Nicole and her father. In the spring of 2006, he was charged with a new crime — producing the videos — and he fled the country. At this point, the police didn’t realize that Nicole’s father had also distributed the images.
Months later, the police said they had no leads on her father, so Nicole went on television to ask the public for any tips that might help them find him. A police officer in Toronto involved in tracking child pornography around the world saw the broadcast and recognized Nicole as an older version of the girl in the notorious videos. The Toronto officer set off an alert that reached the police in Nicole’s hometown, informing them that she was the victim in a major pornography-distribution case.
The alert brought the local detective to Nicole’s house on that December day, to confirm that she was in fact the girl in the pictures that circulated around the globe. “It was the worst moment of my life,” Nicole said of seeing the pictures of herself. “In a way, I didn’t remember it being that bad with my father — and then I saw that it was. Knowing that other people, all over, had seen me like that, I just froze. I could hear my mother crying, but I couldn’t cry.”
Nicole’s appearance on TV produced a tip that eventually led the police to arrest her father in Hong Kong. But by going public, she had inadvertently exposed her identity to thousands of men who for years had collected her images. On one Web site with an American flag design, on a thread that continued for four years, commenters described in detail the acts of rape and bondage Nicole had experienced. One called the videos “legendary.” Another called her “an eager participant” because her father instructed her to smile and talk in the videos. “The fact remains that she is the most searched for, sought after and downloaded ever,” a third commenter wrote. “There are hours of video out there. It’s just too bad there are not more willing like her.”
For Nicole, knowing that so many men have witnessed and taken pleasure from her abuse has been excruciating. “You have an image of yourself as a person, but here is this other image,” she told me. “You know it’s not true, but all those other people will believe that it’s you — that this is who you really are.”
Until the 1970s, magazines with titles like Lolita were rife with sexual images of minors and routinely sold alongside adult pornography at red-light bookstores. In 1978, Congress made child pornography illegal, and four years later, the Supreme Court upheld a state law banning its sale. The court’s decision changed the market along with the law. “The commercial distributors started to go out of business,” said Kenneth Lanning, a retired F.B.I. agent who consulted on child pornography cases for decades. For a time, distribution and production plummeted. But then came the Internet. By the mid- to late 1990s, Lanning said, “there was a way for people seeking it to find each other and send images.”
A decade later, the Justice Department interviewed veteran experts like Lanning for a 2010 report, and concluded that “the market — in terms of numbers of offenders, images and victims” — was growing to a degree described as “overwhelming” and “exponential.” In the early-Web year of 1994, only 61 defendants were sentenced in federal court for child-pornography offenses; in 2011, 1,880 were, a 30-fold increase. The federal definition of child pornography extends to young people up to age 18, but the 2010 report noted that it had become more common for images to involve young children, as well as violence and sadism.
Precise numbers of child-pornography viewers are hard to come by. Unicef estimates that there are at least hundreds of thousands of Web sites with child pornography worldwide. Child-pornography consumers are even more likely to swap with one another via hidden networks. Using a tool developed at the University of Massachusetts, in 2009, police have logged close to 22 million public I.P.addresses offering child-pornography pictures or videos via peer-to-peer file sharing, which allows users to download content from one computer to another; almost 10 million of the I.P. addresses were located in the United States. Many of the users shared only a single illegal image, perhaps downloaded inadvertently, but others offered collections of hundreds or thousands of pictures....
READ ENTIRE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE ARTICLE AND THE COMMENTS:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/magazine/how-much-can-restitution-help-victims-of-child-pornography.html?hpw
"Alan Hesketh, a former vice-president of Pfizer, was charged with trading nearly 2,000 child-pornography photos online."
"Study after study links child sexual abuse to psychological trauma, addiction and violent relationships in adulthood. There is almost no research, however, that deals with the specifics of Amy and Nicole’s experiences: What additional harm comes from knowing that pictures of your childhood exploitation are circulating widely?
The Supreme Court actually addressed this question in its 1982 decision upholding child-pornography bans. “ ‘Pornography poses an even greater threat to the child victim than does sexual abuse or prostitution,’ ” Justice Byron White wrote, quoting from a book about abused children. “ ‘Because the child’s actions are reduced to a recording, the pornography may haunt him in future years, long after the original misdeed took place.’ ”
When Nicole was a child, her father took pornographic pictures of her that still circulate on the Internet.
The detective spread out the photographs on the kitchen table, in front of Nicole, on a December morning in 2006. She was 17, but in the pictures, she saw the face of her 10-year-old self, a half-grown girl wearing make-up. The bodies in the images were broken up by pixelation, but Nicole could see the outline of her father, forcing himself on her. Her mother, sitting next to her, burst into sobs.
The detective spoke gently, but he had brutal news: the pictures had been downloaded onto thousands of computers via file-sharing services around the world. They were among the most widely circulated child pornography on the Internet. Also online were video clips, similarly notorious, in which Nicole spoke words her father had scripted for her, sometimes at the behest of other men. For years, investigators in the United States, Canada and Europe had been trying to identify the girl in the images.
Nicole’s parents split up when she was a toddler, and she grew up living with her mother and stepfather and visiting her father, a former policeman, every other weekend at his apartment in a suburban town in the Pacific Northwest. He started showing her child pornography when she was about 9, telling her that it was normal for fathers and daughters to “play games” like in the pictures. Soon after, he started forcing her to perform oral sex and raping her, dressing her in tight clothes and sometimes binding her with ropes. When she turned 12, she told him to stop, but he used threats and intimidation to continue the abuse for about a year. He said that if she told anyone what he’d done, everyone would hate her for letting him. He said that her mother would no longer love her.
Nicole (who asked me to use her middle name to protect her privacy) knew her father had a tripod set up in his bedroom. She asked if he’d ever shown the pictures to anyone. He said no, and she believed him. “It was all so hidden,” she told me. “And he knew how to lie. He taught me to do it. He said: ‘You look them straight in the eye. You make your shoulders square. You breathe normally.’ ”
When she was 16, Nicole told her mother, in a burst of tears, what had been going on at her father’s house. Her father was arrested for child rape. The police asked Nicole whether he took pictures. She said yes, but that she didn’t think he showed them to anyone. A few months later, while her father was out on bail, Nicole was using a computer he gave her to work on a presentation for Spanish class when she came across a file with a vulgar name that she couldn’t open. She showed it to her mother and stepfather, and they brought the computer to the police.
A search detected five deleted video files of child pornography, two of them showing Nicole and her father. In the spring of 2006, he was charged with a new crime — producing the videos — and he fled the country. At this point, the police didn’t realize that Nicole’s father had also distributed the images.
Months later, the police said they had no leads on her father, so Nicole went on television to ask the public for any tips that might help them find him. A police officer in Toronto involved in tracking child pornography around the world saw the broadcast and recognized Nicole as an older version of the girl in the notorious videos. The Toronto officer set off an alert that reached the police in Nicole’s hometown, informing them that she was the victim in a major pornography-distribution case.
The alert brought the local detective to Nicole’s house on that December day, to confirm that she was in fact the girl in the pictures that circulated around the globe. “It was the worst moment of my life,” Nicole said of seeing the pictures of herself. “In a way, I didn’t remember it being that bad with my father — and then I saw that it was. Knowing that other people, all over, had seen me like that, I just froze. I could hear my mother crying, but I couldn’t cry.”
Nicole’s appearance on TV produced a tip that eventually led the police to arrest her father in Hong Kong. But by going public, she had inadvertently exposed her identity to thousands of men who for years had collected her images. On one Web site with an American flag design, on a thread that continued for four years, commenters described in detail the acts of rape and bondage Nicole had experienced. One called the videos “legendary.” Another called her “an eager participant” because her father instructed her to smile and talk in the videos. “The fact remains that she is the most searched for, sought after and downloaded ever,” a third commenter wrote. “There are hours of video out there. It’s just too bad there are not more willing like her.”
For Nicole, knowing that so many men have witnessed and taken pleasure from her abuse has been excruciating. “You have an image of yourself as a person, but here is this other image,” she told me. “You know it’s not true, but all those other people will believe that it’s you — that this is who you really are.”
Until the 1970s, magazines with titles like Lolita were rife with sexual images of minors and routinely sold alongside adult pornography at red-light bookstores. In 1978, Congress made child pornography illegal, and four years later, the Supreme Court upheld a state law banning its sale. The court’s decision changed the market along with the law. “The commercial distributors started to go out of business,” said Kenneth Lanning, a retired F.B.I. agent who consulted on child pornography cases for decades. For a time, distribution and production plummeted. But then came the Internet. By the mid- to late 1990s, Lanning said, “there was a way for people seeking it to find each other and send images.”
A decade later, the Justice Department interviewed veteran experts like Lanning for a 2010 report, and concluded that “the market — in terms of numbers of offenders, images and victims” — was growing to a degree described as “overwhelming” and “exponential.” In the early-Web year of 1994, only 61 defendants were sentenced in federal court for child-pornography offenses; in 2011, 1,880 were, a 30-fold increase. The federal definition of child pornography extends to young people up to age 18, but the 2010 report noted that it had become more common for images to involve young children, as well as violence and sadism.
Precise numbers of child-pornography viewers are hard to come by. Unicef estimates that there are at least hundreds of thousands of Web sites with child pornography worldwide. Child-pornography consumers are even more likely to swap with one another via hidden networks. Using a tool developed at the University of Massachusetts, in 2009, police have logged close to 22 million public I.P.addresses offering child-pornography pictures or videos via peer-to-peer file sharing, which allows users to download content from one computer to another; almost 10 million of the I.P. addresses were located in the United States. Many of the users shared only a single illegal image, perhaps downloaded inadvertently, but others offered collections of hundreds or thousands of pictures....
READ ENTIRE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE ARTICLE AND THE COMMENTS:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/magazine/how-much-can-restitution-help-victims-of-child-pornography.html?hpw
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Isolated Victims, From Williamsburg, Brooklyn to Notre Dame
What goes through the mind of someone who tries to bully a woman who says she has been sexually assaulted into staying quiet? What about adults who turn on a child who says that he or she has been hurt? Have they really persuaded themselves that the attacker is innocent, sometimes even as they try to shut down the most preliminary investigation? Do they believe fully that something happened, and would even concede that it was bad—just not worth punishing or embarrassing or even inconveniencing the perpetrator? Is the problem that doing so would disrupt the order of their own world, their office or family gatherings, their place of worship or locker rooms? Even then, why do they get angry at the victim, rather than at the perpetrator?
That is the great remaining question in a case in Brooklyn that concluded on Tuesday. Nechemya Weberman, who had been found guilty of fifty-nine counts of child sexual abuse, was sentenced to a hundred and three years in prison. The victim and her family, like Weberman, are members of the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg—which came together to lash out at her, not to protect her. The girl, who is now eighteen, testified in open court, even as Weberman’s supporters took photographs of her on the stand (for which they are now facing contempt charges). She described how she was abused for three years, starting when she was twelve, in what were supposed to be therapy sessions required by her school. With the door closed, Weberman forced her to perform oral sex on him and act out pornography. When she went to a different school and talked to its therapist, the story came out. Although Weberman’s trial is over, four other men have been charged with witness-tampering after they were, according to prosecutors, recorded alternately threatening and trying to bribe the young man to whom she is now married. Among other things, they allegedly said that they’d arrange for the café he managed to lose its kosher certification, and pushed the couple to leave the country. (They have pleaded not guilty.)
But the shakedown visits were only part of it. Almost more confounding than what some of Weberman’s associates are charged with doing in a private room is what the girl’s neighbors had no hesitation about doing in public. Her family was openly scorned. Thousands of people showed up at a local wedding hall to raise money for Weberman. According to the Times, “To promote the fund-raiser, his supporters hung posters on lampposts and brick walls around the neighborhood, accusing the young woman, in Yiddish, of libel.”
The real accusation seems to have been that she pursued charges rather than, say, talk to a rabbi. The Weberman trial came at a juncture when the failure of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office to prosecute child-sexual-abuse cases in the Orthodox community had become conspicuous. This was made clear by a two-part series last spring, in the Times, which drew on years of reporting by Jewish community papers and efforts by victims to be heard. The belief of rabbinical authorities that they, and not the civil system, should handle (or, too often, cover up) such cases was central, but the enforcement mechanism was the pressure of neighbors and colleagues, which could be frank in its cruelty.
In the Weberman case, prosecutors reportedly know of more alleged victims who were too afraid to come forward. The D.A.’s office had, for years, treated the fear of victims as an out, rather than as an impetus for their own action. In that sense, the witness-tampering case now pending might be as significant as that of Weberman himself.
This isn’t just about the Hasidic community, or even just closed religious communities more generally. Along with the news about the Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o—that his supposed girlfriend, a car-crash and leukemia victim, was a hoax—were reminders of the actual death of a real young woman, Elizabeth Seeberg. She said that a Notre Dame player had assaulted her; she was answered with texts telling her, “Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea,” and foot-dragging from the campus police. They only interviewed the player after she had killed herself. Victims remember what happens to victims—one reason that isolation can be an enemy of justice. Melinda Henneberger, who has reported extensively on the Notre Dame case, described an incident a few months after Seeberg’s death, in which a freshman told her R.A., who then drove her to the hospital, that she had been raped by a football player:
I also spoke to the R.A.’s parents, who met the young woman that same night, when their daughter brought her to their home after leaving the hospital. They said they saw—and reported to athletic officials—a hailstorm of texts from other players, warning the young woman not to report what had happened: “They were trying to silence this girl,” the R.A.’s father told me. And did; no criminal complaint was ever filed.
The freshman told the R.A. that she’d thought of what had happened to Seeberg. It is worth considering that “hailstorm of texts from other players” alongside the team’s participation regarding Manti Te’o. As Gail Collins of the Times noted, the original narrative of Te’o’s relationship glorified the image of “a girlfriend so lacking in neediness that you don’t even have to visit her in the hospital while she’s in a coma followed by leukemia”—or miss a practice to attend her funeral. Concurrent with that is the way even friends can turn on a woman who needs—and deserves—help. But there is something far more profound at stake than the choice between a person you’ve decided makes your life more complicated and one who, you think, makes it easier or just leaves it unchanged. The attraction of smooth surfaces—complicity disguised as politeness—can be the most corrupting thing of all, leaving one in dark and distorted place.
Why is the victim treated as the troublemaker? There is moral laziness, and a deferral to privilege, to tradition, or to one’s own interests, that disguises itself as loyalty, from Williamsburg to South Bend. And there is the illusion that being community-minded means protecting the strongest, rather than the most vulnerable members of a community.
Read More:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/01/isolated-victims-from-williamsburg-to-notre-dame.html#ixzz2IuZvzDUU
That is the great remaining question in a case in Brooklyn that concluded on Tuesday. Nechemya Weberman, who had been found guilty of fifty-nine counts of child sexual abuse, was sentenced to a hundred and three years in prison. The victim and her family, like Weberman, are members of the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg—which came together to lash out at her, not to protect her. The girl, who is now eighteen, testified in open court, even as Weberman’s supporters took photographs of her on the stand (for which they are now facing contempt charges). She described how she was abused for three years, starting when she was twelve, in what were supposed to be therapy sessions required by her school. With the door closed, Weberman forced her to perform oral sex on him and act out pornography. When she went to a different school and talked to its therapist, the story came out. Although Weberman’s trial is over, four other men have been charged with witness-tampering after they were, according to prosecutors, recorded alternately threatening and trying to bribe the young man to whom she is now married. Among other things, they allegedly said that they’d arrange for the café he managed to lose its kosher certification, and pushed the couple to leave the country. (They have pleaded not guilty.)
But the shakedown visits were only part of it. Almost more confounding than what some of Weberman’s associates are charged with doing in a private room is what the girl’s neighbors had no hesitation about doing in public. Her family was openly scorned. Thousands of people showed up at a local wedding hall to raise money for Weberman. According to the Times, “To promote the fund-raiser, his supporters hung posters on lampposts and brick walls around the neighborhood, accusing the young woman, in Yiddish, of libel.”
The real accusation seems to have been that she pursued charges rather than, say, talk to a rabbi. The Weberman trial came at a juncture when the failure of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office to prosecute child-sexual-abuse cases in the Orthodox community had become conspicuous. This was made clear by a two-part series last spring, in the Times, which drew on years of reporting by Jewish community papers and efforts by victims to be heard. The belief of rabbinical authorities that they, and not the civil system, should handle (or, too often, cover up) such cases was central, but the enforcement mechanism was the pressure of neighbors and colleagues, which could be frank in its cruelty.
In the Weberman case, prosecutors reportedly know of more alleged victims who were too afraid to come forward. The D.A.’s office had, for years, treated the fear of victims as an out, rather than as an impetus for their own action. In that sense, the witness-tampering case now pending might be as significant as that of Weberman himself.
This isn’t just about the Hasidic community, or even just closed religious communities more generally. Along with the news about the Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o—that his supposed girlfriend, a car-crash and leukemia victim, was a hoax—were reminders of the actual death of a real young woman, Elizabeth Seeberg. She said that a Notre Dame player had assaulted her; she was answered with texts telling her, “Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea,” and foot-dragging from the campus police. They only interviewed the player after she had killed herself. Victims remember what happens to victims—one reason that isolation can be an enemy of justice. Melinda Henneberger, who has reported extensively on the Notre Dame case, described an incident a few months after Seeberg’s death, in which a freshman told her R.A., who then drove her to the hospital, that she had been raped by a football player:
I also spoke to the R.A.’s parents, who met the young woman that same night, when their daughter brought her to their home after leaving the hospital. They said they saw—and reported to athletic officials—a hailstorm of texts from other players, warning the young woman not to report what had happened: “They were trying to silence this girl,” the R.A.’s father told me. And did; no criminal complaint was ever filed.
The freshman told the R.A. that she’d thought of what had happened to Seeberg. It is worth considering that “hailstorm of texts from other players” alongside the team’s participation regarding Manti Te’o. As Gail Collins of the Times noted, the original narrative of Te’o’s relationship glorified the image of “a girlfriend so lacking in neediness that you don’t even have to visit her in the hospital while she’s in a coma followed by leukemia”—or miss a practice to attend her funeral. Concurrent with that is the way even friends can turn on a woman who needs—and deserves—help. But there is something far more profound at stake than the choice between a person you’ve decided makes your life more complicated and one who, you think, makes it easier or just leaves it unchanged. The attraction of smooth surfaces—complicity disguised as politeness—can be the most corrupting thing of all, leaving one in dark and distorted place.
Why is the victim treated as the troublemaker? There is moral laziness, and a deferral to privilege, to tradition, or to one’s own interests, that disguises itself as loyalty, from Williamsburg to South Bend. And there is the illusion that being community-minded means protecting the strongest, rather than the most vulnerable members of a community.
Read More:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/01/isolated-victims-from-williamsburg-to-notre-dame.html#ixzz2IuZvzDUU
Jehovah’s Witnesses, Boy Scouts of America, Big Brothers Big Sisters, the Hassidic Jewish community, this is not restricted to any one religion or one’s creed, one’s race, one’s gender, one’s location.
Bill would end time limit on child sex charges
HARRISBURG — A group of state lawmakers announced plans Wednesday to reintroduce a bill that would remove the statute of limitations in cases of child sexual abuse.
Another bill would open a two-year window after a statute of limitations has expired for victims of child sex abuse to file civil lawsuits, said Reps. Mike McGeehan, D-173, and Louise Bishop, D-192.
The lawmakers have been frustrated that the Penn State/Jerry Sandusky and the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandals were not enough to move legislation out of committee last year.
“It is time to put victims first,” said Bishop, who said she was 12 when her stepfather began to sexually abuse her.
“I didn’t know how to handle it,” she said. “I knew if I told my mother it would hurt her. I knew if I told my sisters and brothers I (would be) talking about their father and they wouldn’t like it and I would be even more isolated than I was. And if I told my grandfather, he would take his legal shotgun and would have blown his head off.”
Because other victims of child sexual abuse experience those same fears, the Philadelphia lawmaker said state legislators must finally do something to stop child predators.
House Bill 237 would abolish the statute of limitations on criminal charges and civil lawsuits in cases of child sexual abuse, while House Bill 238 would suspend any expired statute of limitations for two years in child sex abuse cases.
McGeehan and Bishop introduced both measures in the last legislative session and even employed rarely used discharge petitions last summer to get the bills out of the House Judiciary Committee. But the legislation died when the session ended in December.
Marci Hamilton, an attorney known for her expertise in church and state law and the author of a book on how the country can better protect children from predators, said the legislation is “the only way to get to the truth.” She said California and Delaware have had success with similar new laws in their prosecutions of Roman Catholic priests.
“The only way the truth will come out is if this Legislature has the guts to look at the Catholic conference and say, ‘We want the truth and we’re not playing your game of secrecy anymore’,” Hamilton said.
Rep. Steve Santarsiero, D-31, also challenged state lawmakers to consider the bills.
“Shame on us that we can’t even get these bills to a hearing, let alone a vote,” the Bucks County lawmaker said. “Let us have a public discussion. What are they afraid of?”
More than 3,000 civil lawsuits have been filed in the United States in which victims of child sexual abuse have said their perpetrator was a Roman Catholic priest, according to a website that documents the church’s abuse cases, bishopaccountability.org.
Former Penn State football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky is serving a 30- to 60-year sentence in Greene County state prison after being convicted on charges he had sex with 10 boys over a 15-year period.
At the press conference Wednesday, former Philadelphia district attorney Lynne Abraham called the priest child sexual abuse scandal “almost an epidemic,” but said it’s important for people to remember that all people can become victims of the crime.
“Jehovah’s Witnesses, Boy Scouts of America, Big Brothers Big Sisters, the Hassidic Jewish community, this is not restricted to any one religion or one’s creed, one’s race, one’s gender, one’s location. This is a national problem, which … has to be, finally, grappled with by the Legislature,” Abraham said.
Mark Shade: mshade@calkins-media.com or 267-326-3129
HARRISBURG — A group of state lawmakers announced plans Wednesday to reintroduce a bill that would remove the statute of limitations in cases of child sexual abuse.
Another bill would open a two-year window after a statute of limitations has expired for victims of child sex abuse to file civil lawsuits, said Reps. Mike McGeehan, D-173, and Louise Bishop, D-192.
The lawmakers have been frustrated that the Penn State/Jerry Sandusky and the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandals were not enough to move legislation out of committee last year.
“It is time to put victims first,” said Bishop, who said she was 12 when her stepfather began to sexually abuse her.
“I didn’t know how to handle it,” she said. “I knew if I told my mother it would hurt her. I knew if I told my sisters and brothers I (would be) talking about their father and they wouldn’t like it and I would be even more isolated than I was. And if I told my grandfather, he would take his legal shotgun and would have blown his head off.”
Because other victims of child sexual abuse experience those same fears, the Philadelphia lawmaker said state legislators must finally do something to stop child predators.
House Bill 237 would abolish the statute of limitations on criminal charges and civil lawsuits in cases of child sexual abuse, while House Bill 238 would suspend any expired statute of limitations for two years in child sex abuse cases.
McGeehan and Bishop introduced both measures in the last legislative session and even employed rarely used discharge petitions last summer to get the bills out of the House Judiciary Committee. But the legislation died when the session ended in December.
Marci Hamilton, an attorney known for her expertise in church and state law and the author of a book on how the country can better protect children from predators, said the legislation is “the only way to get to the truth.” She said California and Delaware have had success with similar new laws in their prosecutions of Roman Catholic priests.
“The only way the truth will come out is if this Legislature has the guts to look at the Catholic conference and say, ‘We want the truth and we’re not playing your game of secrecy anymore’,” Hamilton said.
Rep. Steve Santarsiero, D-31, also challenged state lawmakers to consider the bills.
“Shame on us that we can’t even get these bills to a hearing, let alone a vote,” the Bucks County lawmaker said. “Let us have a public discussion. What are they afraid of?”
More than 3,000 civil lawsuits have been filed in the United States in which victims of child sexual abuse have said their perpetrator was a Roman Catholic priest, according to a website that documents the church’s abuse cases, bishopaccountability.org.
Former Penn State football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky is serving a 30- to 60-year sentence in Greene County state prison after being convicted on charges he had sex with 10 boys over a 15-year period.
At the press conference Wednesday, former Philadelphia district attorney Lynne Abraham called the priest child sexual abuse scandal “almost an epidemic,” but said it’s important for people to remember that all people can become victims of the crime.
“Jehovah’s Witnesses, Boy Scouts of America, Big Brothers Big Sisters, the Hassidic Jewish community, this is not restricted to any one religion or one’s creed, one’s race, one’s gender, one’s location. This is a national problem, which … has to be, finally, grappled with by the Legislature,” Abraham said.
Mark Shade: mshade@calkins-media.com or 267-326-3129
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
You Hurt A Child - You Rot In Jail Until You Die - Count On It!
Hero teen faced down evil for the rest of us
Some things are worse even than dying.
The shy, pretty victim, now all of 18, summoned enough courage into her 100-pound body to stand up and face her tormentor yesterday in Brooklyn Supreme Court. For unrepentant monster Nechemya Weberman stole this young lady’s youth, her purity, her very identity.
And he wouldn’t dare look her in the face.
Weberman, the sadistic Satmar freak, savagely sexually abused the young girl for three years, burning her flesh with lighters and telling her she was human garbage. Yesterday, he slumped his gigantic girth into a courtroom chair, looking slightly annoyed, as a Brooklyn judge sentenced him to 103 years in prison.
He’ll likely die there, in the close company of his fellow scum of the earth.
It’s not enough.
His victim’s torment will never end.
She walked into the courtroom, petite and blonde, and spoke in a small voice. But her message rang out into the cheap seats, loud and clear.
She said, heartbreakingly, that the abuse she suffered at the hands of the ghoulish Weberman, 54, which began at age 12, was worse than cold-blooded murder.
For murder victims, the torment, mercifully, ends.
“Personally, I feel that the outcome of abuse is, in a way, far worse than murder,’’ she said, dissolving into tears.
“With murder, the person is dead and it is final. By abuse, the victim experiences death over and over. Again and again.’’
He stared at the table, at his hands, straight ahead. He wouldn’t look at her.
This young lady survived her near-destruction. “I would cover up the burn marks inflicted on my body he used to serve his sadistic pleasures,’’ she recounted.
In fact, she thrived — getting married and attending college classes, her husband said after court.
She had to make it. If only to make sure that this never happens again to another child.
As she spoke, the painfully young woman sounded wiser than her years, as she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. She pressed on.
She pointed an accusing finger at her own Satmar community, whose leaders she told me last month resembled the “Jewish Taliban.’’
Her neighbors betrayed her, shunned her, threatened her. And now that she has left a home she loved, the harassment persists.
In a way, the abuse of strangers was even more brutal than that inflicted by the sick and twisted Weberman.
Because the Satmars knew she was a victim of torture by Weberman, who was sent to counsel the girl by her school after she questioned her religion.
And her people — my people — didn’t care about her.
To some in the Satmar realm, keeping Weberman happy, burying his dirty laundry, maiming a child, was easier than finding justice.
This young lady never set out to be a hero. Only to survive. But now, she has to keep going to help other abused children stand up to reprehensible perverts like Weberman.
“I really hope (and pray) that this case sets a precedent and will tell other victims: You have a voice, even if you think no one will believe you and even when you’re scared of being chased and crushed by your community.’’
To the very end, Weberman was defiant.
He declined to speak in his own defense. He didn’t apologize. He refused to as much as glance at his accuser. And his lawyer, George Farkas, continued spinning the fiction that Weberman was the victim of a made-up story.
As Weberman was taken away in handcuffs, one thing became clear. He won’t be out there, getting his hands on young ladies.
For that, we have to thank one young victim who dared cry out in pain.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/hero_teen_faced_down_evil_for_the_5ljcLG5pYiWso1nbPMZkBO
Some things are worse even than dying.
The shy, pretty victim, now all of 18, summoned enough courage into her 100-pound body to stand up and face her tormentor yesterday in Brooklyn Supreme Court. For unrepentant monster Nechemya Weberman stole this young lady’s youth, her purity, her very identity.
And he wouldn’t dare look her in the face.
Weberman, the sadistic Satmar freak, savagely sexually abused the young girl for three years, burning her flesh with lighters and telling her she was human garbage. Yesterday, he slumped his gigantic girth into a courtroom chair, looking slightly annoyed, as a Brooklyn judge sentenced him to 103 years in prison.
He’ll likely die there, in the close company of his fellow scum of the earth.
It’s not enough.
His victim’s torment will never end.
She walked into the courtroom, petite and blonde, and spoke in a small voice. But her message rang out into the cheap seats, loud and clear.
She said, heartbreakingly, that the abuse she suffered at the hands of the ghoulish Weberman, 54, which began at age 12, was worse than cold-blooded murder.
For murder victims, the torment, mercifully, ends.
“Personally, I feel that the outcome of abuse is, in a way, far worse than murder,’’ she said, dissolving into tears.
“With murder, the person is dead and it is final. By abuse, the victim experiences death over and over. Again and again.’’
He stared at the table, at his hands, straight ahead. He wouldn’t look at her.
This young lady survived her near-destruction. “I would cover up the burn marks inflicted on my body he used to serve his sadistic pleasures,’’ she recounted.
In fact, she thrived — getting married and attending college classes, her husband said after court.
She had to make it. If only to make sure that this never happens again to another child.
As she spoke, the painfully young woman sounded wiser than her years, as she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. She pressed on.
She pointed an accusing finger at her own Satmar community, whose leaders she told me last month resembled the “Jewish Taliban.’’
Her neighbors betrayed her, shunned her, threatened her. And now that she has left a home she loved, the harassment persists.
In a way, the abuse of strangers was even more brutal than that inflicted by the sick and twisted Weberman.
Because the Satmars knew she was a victim of torture by Weberman, who was sent to counsel the girl by her school after she questioned her religion.
And her people — my people — didn’t care about her.
To some in the Satmar realm, keeping Weberman happy, burying his dirty laundry, maiming a child, was easier than finding justice.
This young lady never set out to be a hero. Only to survive. But now, she has to keep going to help other abused children stand up to reprehensible perverts like Weberman.
“I really hope (and pray) that this case sets a precedent and will tell other victims: You have a voice, even if you think no one will believe you and even when you’re scared of being chased and crushed by your community.’’
To the very end, Weberman was defiant.
He declined to speak in his own defense. He didn’t apologize. He refused to as much as glance at his accuser. And his lawyer, George Farkas, continued spinning the fiction that Weberman was the victim of a made-up story.
As Weberman was taken away in handcuffs, one thing became clear. He won’t be out there, getting his hands on young ladies.
For that, we have to thank one young victim who dared cry out in pain.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/hero_teen_faced_down_evil_for_the_5ljcLG5pYiWso1nbPMZkBO
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
103-Year Sentence in Sex Abuse Case That Shook Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn
BREAKING NEWS - Tuesday, January 22, 2013 12:20 PM EST
103-Year Sentence in Sex Abuse Case That Shook Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn
An unlicensed therapist who was a prominent member of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn was sentenced on Tuesday to 103 years in prison for repeatedly sexually abusing a young woman, beginning the attacks when she was 12.
Nechemya Weberman, 54, a member of the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg, did not react as the judge sentenced him. The victim, now 18, who delivered an impassioned statement asking for maximum sentence to be imposed, dabbed away tears.
“The message should go out to all victims of sexual abuse that your cries will be heard and justice will be done,” said State Supreme Court Justice John G. Ingram before imposing the sentence, close to the longest permissible to him by law. He praised the young victim’s “courage and bravery in coming forward.”
READ MORE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/23/nyregion/nechemya-weberman-sentenced-to-103-years-in-prison.html?emc=na
103-Year Sentence in Sex Abuse Case That Shook Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn
An unlicensed therapist who was a prominent member of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn was sentenced on Tuesday to 103 years in prison for repeatedly sexually abusing a young woman, beginning the attacks when she was 12.
Nechemya Weberman, 54, a member of the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg, did not react as the judge sentenced him. The victim, now 18, who delivered an impassioned statement asking for maximum sentence to be imposed, dabbed away tears.
“The message should go out to all victims of sexual abuse that your cries will be heard and justice will be done,” said State Supreme Court Justice John G. Ingram before imposing the sentence, close to the longest permissible to him by law. He praised the young victim’s “courage and bravery in coming forward.”
READ MORE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/23/nyregion/nechemya-weberman-sentenced-to-103-years-in-prison.html?emc=na
Why All Clergy Must Never Be Trusted Ever On Child Sex Abuse - Perhaps Never At All!
"True evil lies not in the depraved act of the one, but in the silence of the many." MLK Jr.
Files Show How LA Church Leaders Controlled Damage
"We've stepped back 20 years and are being driven by the need to cover-up and to keep the presbyteriate & public happily ignorant rather than the need to protect children," Loomis wrote.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Retired Cardinal Roger Mahony and other top Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles officials maneuvered behind the scenes to shield molester priests, provide damage control for the church and keep parishioners in the dark, according to church personnel files.
The confidential records filed in a lawsuit against the archdiocese disclose how the church handled abuse allegations for decades and also reveal dissent from a top Mahony aide who criticized his superiors for covering up allegations of abuse rather than protecting children.
Notes inked by Mahony demonstrate he was disturbed about abuse and sent problem priests for treatment, but there also were lengthy delays or oversights in some cases. Mahony received psychological reports on some priests that mentioned the possibility of many other victims, for example, but there is no indication that he or other church leaders investigated further.
"This is all intolerable and unacceptable to me," Mahony wrote in 1991 on a file of the Rev. Lynn Caffoe, a priest suspected of locking boys in his room, videotaping their crotches and running up a $100 phone sex bill while with a boy. Caffoe was sent for therapy and removed from ministry, but Mahony didn't move to defrock him until 2004, a decade after the archdiocese lost track of him.
"He is a fugitive from justice," Mahony wrote to the Vatican's Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI. "A check of the Social Security index discloses no report of his demise, so presumably he is alive somewhere."
Caffoe died in 2009, six years after a newspaper reporter found him working at a homeless mission two blocks from a Salinas elementary school.
Mahony was out of town but issued a statement Monday apologizing for his mistakes and saying he had been "naive" about the lasting impacts of abuse. He has since met with 90 abuse victims privately and keeps an index card with each victim's name in his private chapel, where he prays for them daily, he said. The card also includes the name of the molesting priest "lest I forget that real priests created this appalling harm."
"It remains my daily and fervent prayer that God's grace will flood the heart and soul of each victim, and that their life journey continues forward with ever greater healing," Mahony wrote. "I am sorry."
The church's sex abuse policy was evolving and Mahony inherited some of the worst cases from his predecessor when he took over in 1985, J. Michael Hennigan, an archdiocese attorney, said in a separate series of emails. Priests were sent out of state for psychological treatment because they revealed more when their therapists were not required to report child abuse to law enforcement, as they were in California, he said.
At the time, clergy were not mandated sex abuse reporters and the church let the victims' families decide whether to contact police, he added.
In at least one case, a priest victimized the children of illegal immigrants and threatened to have them deported if they told, the files show.
The files are attached to a motion seeking punitive damages in a case involving a Mexican priest sent to Los Angeles in 1987 after he was brutally beaten in his parish south of Mexico City.
When parents complained the Rev. Nicholas Aguilar Rivera molested in LA, church officials told the priest but waited two days to call police — allowing him to flee to Mexico, court papers allege. At least 26 children told police they were abused during his 10 months in Los Angeles. The now-defrocked priest is believed to be in Mexico and remains a fugitive.
The personnel files of 13 other clerics were attached to the motion to show a cover-up pattern, said attorney Anthony De Marco, who represents the 35-year-old plaintiff. In one instance, a memo to Mahony discusses sending a cleric to a therapist who also is an attorney so any incriminating evidence is protected from authorities by lawyer-client privilege. In another instance, archdiocese officials paid a secret salary to a priest exiled to the Philippines after he and six other clerics were accused of having sex with a teen and impregnating her.
READ MORE:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/01/21/us/ap-us-california-church-abuse.html?hp
MAHONY'S LIES:
The archdiocese's failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement had been known previously. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese's chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation's largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders' own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being abused.
In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.
READ MORE:http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2013/01/cardinal-mahony-priest-abuse-details.html
Files Show How LA Church Leaders Controlled Damage
"We've stepped back 20 years and are being driven by the need to cover-up and to keep the presbyteriate & public happily ignorant rather than the need to protect children," Loomis wrote.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Retired Cardinal Roger Mahony and other top Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles officials maneuvered behind the scenes to shield molester priests, provide damage control for the church and keep parishioners in the dark, according to church personnel files.
The confidential records filed in a lawsuit against the archdiocese disclose how the church handled abuse allegations for decades and also reveal dissent from a top Mahony aide who criticized his superiors for covering up allegations of abuse rather than protecting children.
Notes inked by Mahony demonstrate he was disturbed about abuse and sent problem priests for treatment, but there also were lengthy delays or oversights in some cases. Mahony received psychological reports on some priests that mentioned the possibility of many other victims, for example, but there is no indication that he or other church leaders investigated further.
"This is all intolerable and unacceptable to me," Mahony wrote in 1991 on a file of the Rev. Lynn Caffoe, a priest suspected of locking boys in his room, videotaping their crotches and running up a $100 phone sex bill while with a boy. Caffoe was sent for therapy and removed from ministry, but Mahony didn't move to defrock him until 2004, a decade after the archdiocese lost track of him.
"He is a fugitive from justice," Mahony wrote to the Vatican's Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI. "A check of the Social Security index discloses no report of his demise, so presumably he is alive somewhere."
Caffoe died in 2009, six years after a newspaper reporter found him working at a homeless mission two blocks from a Salinas elementary school.
Mahony was out of town but issued a statement Monday apologizing for his mistakes and saying he had been "naive" about the lasting impacts of abuse. He has since met with 90 abuse victims privately and keeps an index card with each victim's name in his private chapel, where he prays for them daily, he said. The card also includes the name of the molesting priest "lest I forget that real priests created this appalling harm."
"It remains my daily and fervent prayer that God's grace will flood the heart and soul of each victim, and that their life journey continues forward with ever greater healing," Mahony wrote. "I am sorry."
The church's sex abuse policy was evolving and Mahony inherited some of the worst cases from his predecessor when he took over in 1985, J. Michael Hennigan, an archdiocese attorney, said in a separate series of emails. Priests were sent out of state for psychological treatment because they revealed more when their therapists were not required to report child abuse to law enforcement, as they were in California, he said.
At the time, clergy were not mandated sex abuse reporters and the church let the victims' families decide whether to contact police, he added.
In at least one case, a priest victimized the children of illegal immigrants and threatened to have them deported if they told, the files show.
The files are attached to a motion seeking punitive damages in a case involving a Mexican priest sent to Los Angeles in 1987 after he was brutally beaten in his parish south of Mexico City.
When parents complained the Rev. Nicholas Aguilar Rivera molested in LA, church officials told the priest but waited two days to call police — allowing him to flee to Mexico, court papers allege. At least 26 children told police they were abused during his 10 months in Los Angeles. The now-defrocked priest is believed to be in Mexico and remains a fugitive.
The personnel files of 13 other clerics were attached to the motion to show a cover-up pattern, said attorney Anthony De Marco, who represents the 35-year-old plaintiff. In one instance, a memo to Mahony discusses sending a cleric to a therapist who also is an attorney so any incriminating evidence is protected from authorities by lawyer-client privilege. In another instance, archdiocese officials paid a secret salary to a priest exiled to the Philippines after he and six other clerics were accused of having sex with a teen and impregnating her.
READ MORE:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/01/21/us/ap-us-california-church-abuse.html?hp
MAHONY'S LIES:
The archdiocese's failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement had been known previously. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese's chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation's largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders' own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being abused.
In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.
READ MORE:http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2013/01/cardinal-mahony-priest-abuse-details.html
Monday, January 21, 2013
“Abuse is something that is lifelong. The abuser creates a tragedy as soon as it happens. The whole family is abused".
Iceberg, Goldberg - What's the difference?
More McCort students may come forward, advocate says
JOHNSTOWN — As many as 15 former Bishop McCort students are alleging they were sexually abused more than a decade ago by a former instructor and sports trainer – and it may only be “the tip of the iceberg,” a victims’ advocate says.
Robert M. Hoatson, co-founder and president of a nonprofit charity that has been advocating for the alleged sexual abuse victims of Brother Stephen P. Baker in Ohio and Johnstown, held a press conference Saturday across from Bishop McCort Catholic High School on Osborne Street in the city’s 8th Ward.
“I think there are probably around 15 (victims) at Bishop McCort, and there could be as many as a dozen more who have not come forward,” Hoatson said. “We suspect it’s the tip of the iceberg. The attorneys are getting calls from the west, south and middle part of the country.”
Hoatson said victims from Bishop McCort became known after they called the two attorneys involved with the case, Michael Parrish in Johnstown and Mitchell Garabedian in Boston.
Parrish said he has spoken to men who claim they were victimized by Baker at McCort as recently as 2002. The former students say Baker abused them when he was supposed to be treating them for sports-related injuries.
Baker was employed at Bishop McCort from 1992 into the early 2000s.
Hoatson said he doesn’t see sexual abuse cases until the victims are in their 30s or 40s because they can’t come forward due to the shame and embarrassment.
“Catholics are taught deference to clergy,” Hoatson said. “Abuse is something that is lifelong. The abuser creates a tragedy as soon as it happens. The whole family is abused. When the victim’s children reach the same age they were when they were abused, they’re hyper-vigilant.”
Hoatson, who heads Road to Recovery Inc. based in Livingston, N.J., said he suffered similar sexual abuse when he was a teen. He founded the organization as therapy for himself.
“My therapist told me the best thing I could do is help other sexual abuse victims,” Hoatson said. “My salvation has been getting involved. I get so excited and energized because it takes amazing courage for them to talk about it in front of thousands through the media.”
Michael Munno of Lorain, Ohio, accompanied Hoatson on his trip to Johnstown.
For Munno, the trip is therapeutic. He is one of the 11 men from the Diocese of Youngstown who came forward to report alleged sexual abuse by Baker. The accused friar now resides at the Motherhouse of St. Bernardine Monastery of the Franciscan Friars Third Order Regular outside Hollidaysburg.
Munno, now 40, attended John F. Kennedy High School in Warren, Ohio, from 1986 to 1990, when Baker was an athletic trainer, coach and teacher there.
“I wouldn’t be able to do this without a support group,” Munno said.
Road to Recovery Inc. counsels sexual abuse victims and helps them through media sessions and press conferences.
“The attorneys do the legal stuff, but there’s so much more to recovery,” Hoatson said. “We help them pay for therapy, medications, food and shelter. The mantra I hear from sexual abuse victims is ‘I thought I was the only one.’”
Hoatson held another conference near JFK High School on Wednesday with two of the original 11 victims present.
At the conference, the settlement between the Diocese of Youngstown, the Franciscan Friars and JFK High School was revealed for the first time.
“It was made in October 2012,” Hoatson said. “There was no release of the amount the victims got, but it was in the high five figures.”
Hoatson said one of the Ohio victims is contemplating filing criminal charges because he was younger than the other victims at the time.
Road to Recovery requests that all alleged sexual abuse victims of Baker come forward confidentially to begin healing and receive support.
The organization will call on the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown to reveal what it knows and when it knew about Baker and accusations of sexual abuse against him from students and alumni of Bishop McCort.
Information: 862-268-2800.
Ruth Rice
rrice@tribdem.com - The Tribune-Democrat
More McCort students may come forward, advocate says
JOHNSTOWN — As many as 15 former Bishop McCort students are alleging they were sexually abused more than a decade ago by a former instructor and sports trainer – and it may only be “the tip of the iceberg,” a victims’ advocate says.
Robert M. Hoatson, co-founder and president of a nonprofit charity that has been advocating for the alleged sexual abuse victims of Brother Stephen P. Baker in Ohio and Johnstown, held a press conference Saturday across from Bishop McCort Catholic High School on Osborne Street in the city’s 8th Ward.
“I think there are probably around 15 (victims) at Bishop McCort, and there could be as many as a dozen more who have not come forward,” Hoatson said. “We suspect it’s the tip of the iceberg. The attorneys are getting calls from the west, south and middle part of the country.”
Hoatson said victims from Bishop McCort became known after they called the two attorneys involved with the case, Michael Parrish in Johnstown and Mitchell Garabedian in Boston.
Parrish said he has spoken to men who claim they were victimized by Baker at McCort as recently as 2002. The former students say Baker abused them when he was supposed to be treating them for sports-related injuries.
Baker was employed at Bishop McCort from 1992 into the early 2000s.
Hoatson said he doesn’t see sexual abuse cases until the victims are in their 30s or 40s because they can’t come forward due to the shame and embarrassment.
“Catholics are taught deference to clergy,” Hoatson said. “Abuse is something that is lifelong. The abuser creates a tragedy as soon as it happens. The whole family is abused. When the victim’s children reach the same age they were when they were abused, they’re hyper-vigilant.”
Hoatson, who heads Road to Recovery Inc. based in Livingston, N.J., said he suffered similar sexual abuse when he was a teen. He founded the organization as therapy for himself.
“My therapist told me the best thing I could do is help other sexual abuse victims,” Hoatson said. “My salvation has been getting involved. I get so excited and energized because it takes amazing courage for them to talk about it in front of thousands through the media.”
Michael Munno of Lorain, Ohio, accompanied Hoatson on his trip to Johnstown.
For Munno, the trip is therapeutic. He is one of the 11 men from the Diocese of Youngstown who came forward to report alleged sexual abuse by Baker. The accused friar now resides at the Motherhouse of St. Bernardine Monastery of the Franciscan Friars Third Order Regular outside Hollidaysburg.
Munno, now 40, attended John F. Kennedy High School in Warren, Ohio, from 1986 to 1990, when Baker was an athletic trainer, coach and teacher there.
“I wouldn’t be able to do this without a support group,” Munno said.
Road to Recovery Inc. counsels sexual abuse victims and helps them through media sessions and press conferences.
“The attorneys do the legal stuff, but there’s so much more to recovery,” Hoatson said. “We help them pay for therapy, medications, food and shelter. The mantra I hear from sexual abuse victims is ‘I thought I was the only one.’”
Hoatson held another conference near JFK High School on Wednesday with two of the original 11 victims present.
At the conference, the settlement between the Diocese of Youngstown, the Franciscan Friars and JFK High School was revealed for the first time.
“It was made in October 2012,” Hoatson said. “There was no release of the amount the victims got, but it was in the high five figures.”
Hoatson said one of the Ohio victims is contemplating filing criminal charges because he was younger than the other victims at the time.
Road to Recovery requests that all alleged sexual abuse victims of Baker come forward confidentially to begin healing and receive support.
The organization will call on the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown to reveal what it knows and when it knew about Baker and accusations of sexual abuse against him from students and alumni of Bishop McCort.
Information: 862-268-2800.
Ruth Rice
rrice@tribdem.com - The Tribune-Democrat
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