Issue 117 – July 2014

S.M.A.R.T
(Stop Mind control And Ritual abuse Today)
P. O Box 1295, Easthampton, MA 01027-1295 USA E-mail: SMARTNEWS@aol.com
Home page: http://ritualabuse.us/

Issue 117 – July 2014

The purpose of this newsletter is to help stop secretive organizations and groups from abusing others and to help those who allege they have been abused by such organizations and groups. This newsletter is not a substitute for other ways of recovering from ritual abuse. Readers should use caution while reading this newsletter. If necessary, make sure other support systems are available during and after reading this newsletter.

Important:
The resources mentioned in this newsletter are for educational value only. Reading the books cited may or may not help your recovery process, so use caution when reading any book or contacting any resource mentioned in this newsletter. Some may have a religious or other agenda that may be separate from your own recovery process. Others may have valuable information on the Masons and other organizations, but have triggers or be somewhat sympathetic to those organizations.  Unless explicitly stated otherwise, the views expressed in this newsletter constitute expressions of opinion, and readers are cautioned to form their own opinions and draw their own conclusions by consulting a variety of sources, including this newsletter. Resources listed, quoted and individual articles, etc. and their writers do not necessarily support all or any of the views mentioned in this newsletter. Also, the views, facts and opinions mentioned in this newsletter are solely the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily the opinions of this newsletter or its editor.
Copyright 2014 – All rights reserved.   No reproduction of any material without written permission from the editor and individual authors.

SMART wants to thank all those that have contributed resource information to the newsletter.

A conference to help survivors of severe child abuse (ritual abuse) and torture will be held on August 15  – 17, 2014, between 8 – 5 PM Saturday and Sunday at the DoubleTree Hotel near Bradley International Airport, 16 Ella Grasso Turnpike, Windsor Locks, CT 06096 (between Hartford, CT and Springfield, MA).  This conference will help educate survivors of this abuse and their helpers.  Pre-registration is preferred.  For information write  S.M.A.R.T., P. O Box 1295, Easthampton, MA 01027-1295  E-mail: smartnews@aol.com, conference information is at:  http://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/

Ritual Abuse And Extreme Abuse Clinician’s Conference August 15, 2014 – A one day conference preceding our regular conference will be open to licensed practitioners in related fields to discuss issues in working with clients suffering from ritual abuse and extreme abuse symptoms.  Students studying in related fields and retired licensed practitioners may write smartnews@aol.com by e-mail for more information. Internet conference information is available at: http://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/ritual-abuse-and-extreme-abuse-clinicians-conference-2014/
CEUs are available.

Smart-Talks Podcast Blog
This is a collection of talks given at the annual SMART conference in Connecticut. Speakers present to tell their stories of their experiences with ritual abuse and/or mind control, their experiences treating patients with such backgrounds, or to raise awareness of the various issues surrounding recovery from ritual abuse/mind control of efforts made to raise awareness with the general public of this issue.  http://smart-talkspodcastblog.blogspot.com/

This issue contains information on Penn State child-abuse probe, Jerry Sandusky, Matthew Sandusky, Jesse Friedman, Arnold Friedman, Capturing the Friedmans, William Vahey, pedophiles, Ex-LAUSD teacher, Robert Pimentel, border children crisis abuse probe, Immigrant Children, Pamela Anderson, childhood sexual abuse, Dark net, child porn epidemic, Internet Crimes Against Children, Ian Watkins, Mass grave up to 800 dead babies, Bon Secours sisters, Mother and Baby home, Norwich child abuse inquiry, Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, Sixties Scoop adoptions, Rolf Harris, Cyril Smith, Westminster paedophile network, Jimmy Savile, Paedophile Information Exchange, missing child abuse files, sex-trafficking crackdown,  Day care, Defence Abuse Response Taskforce, Mind Control, Ritual Abuse, Alison Miller, Survivorship Movie, non-state torture, Linda MacDonald, Jeanne Sarson,  Falmouth pagan Petrauske,  ritualistic sexual abuse, witches’ coven,  child voodoo victims, sex tourists, witchcraft rituals, religious rituals, ritual murder,  human sacrifices, witch doctors,  Satanic murder teens,  Black magic sex abuse trial, rape,  Valerie Sinason, Stoke Mandeville Hospital, satanic ritual abuse, The Devil’s Work, sex with corpses, brides of Christ, Victor Barnard, The Way International, Michael Ryan, devil worshipper, Gregory Hale,  Witchhunt Narrative, Day Care Abuse, Wendy Murphy, Ross Cheit,  Ray Buckey, McMartin case, sexual abuse by Catholic priests, moral panic,  UN panel criticizes Vatican on sex abuse, Woody Allen, Dylan Farrow, AnnaLynne McCord, Prevalence of Confirmed Maltreatment Among US Children, Research Ethics, Private Harms,  Nicole Taus Kluemper, Taus v. Loftus, life in India for women, gender imbalance, India’s Temple Slaves, Fight to Stop Rape as a Weapon of War, rape culture, college rape cases,  Justice Gap, Sexual Assault Cases, Amy and Vicky Child Pornography Victim Restitution Improvement Act of 2014, brain development, Family violence, genetic imprint, significantly shorter telomeres, Country Walk Case, Royal Commission report, dyslexia

Resources and Information           
Please note: Listing of these resources does not necessarily constitute our endorsement of them. They are for educational value only and some may be heavy for survivors to read. Some of the conferences listed may not necessarily be safe for all survivors. S.M.A.R.T. recommends always bringing a support person to all conferences. If you are a survivor of mind control and/or ritual abuse, S.M.A.R.T. recommends that you try to bring a support person that is familiar with mind control techniques.
    
Review of Penn State child-abuse probe to be issued on Monday
Reuters  6/20/14 (Reuters) – A long-awaited probe into the investigation of former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing children, will be released early next week, Pennsylvania authorities said on Friday.
Sandusky, the once-legendary assistant football coach, was convicted in 2012 of abusing 10 boys from 1994 to 2009, some in the Penn State showers, and is serving 30 to 60 years in prison. In 2013, the school agreed to pay $59.7 million to the victims.
The report, prepared by former federal prosecutor H. Geoffrey Moulton Jr. at the request of state Attorney General Kathleen Kane, will be released at a news conference on Monday, the attorney general’s office said in a statement….
http://news.yahoo.com/review-penn-state-child-abuse-probe-issued-monday-171146715–spt.html

Jerry Sandusky’s adopted son to detail sexual abuse in Oprah interview     Matthew Sandusky previously told investigators that he suffered seven years of sexual abuse at the hands of his adopted father    On Thursday, he will speak out in his first TV interview since Jerry Sandusky was convicted and sentenced to 30-60 years in 2012 By Lydia Warren 8 July 2014
‘At bedtime, his ritual began,’ he says in a 30-second preview clip for the show. Ahead of the show’s airing, OWN explained that Matthew would be sharing ‘a deeply personal account of the grooming, methodical control and manipulation he faced as a child’….
Sandusky, who retired in June 30, 1999 as Penn State’s defensive coordinator, was convicted in 2012 of molesting 10 boys over 15 years, some in the football team’s showers on campus. The 70-year-old is now serving a 30- to 60-year state prison sentence….
The interview comes two weeks after Pennsylvania’s attorney general released a review of the prosecution but found no evidence of political interference by then Governor Tom Corbett. The report, however, did reveal three years of ‘inexplicable delays’ to prosecute the former Penn State football coach on child abuse charges. The pedophile’s home was not searched and the report notes that it took a full year, from March 2009 until March 2010, for the office to recommend charging Sandusky when ‘Victim 1’ came forward…. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2685127/Jerry-Sanduskys-adopted-son-sexual-abuse-Oprah-interview.html

Report: Politics had no role in Sandusky probe By MARK SCOLFORO Associated Press June 23, 2014
HARRISBURG — A report released Monday detailing the handling of the Jerry Sandusky child molestation case faults police and prosecutors for long delays in bringing charges but found no evidence that politics affected the investigation. The report, commissioned by Democratic Attorney General Kathleen Kane and written by former federal prosecutor Geoff Moulton, blamed a three-year time lapse in filing charges on communication problems, an expungement of a 1998 complaint about the former Penn State coach and a failure to take certain investigative steps early on.
“The facts show an inexcusable lack of urgency in charging and stopping a serial sexual predator,” said Kane, who had vowed to conduct a review of the investigation while running for office. “The report documents that more investigative work took place in just one month in 2011 than in all of either 2009 or 2010.” Moulton said his review, including internal emails by state prosecutors, “revealed no direct evidence that electoral politics influenced any important decision made in the Sandusky investigation.”….
Sandusky was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing 10 boys and is serving a long prison sentence…. http://www.tribune-democrat.com/latestnews/x1396897838/Report-Politics-had-no-role-in-Sandusky-probe

Jesse Friedman, Who Pleaded Guilty To Child Abuse In 1988, Fights For Exoneration June 24, 2014
MINEOLA, N.Y. (CBSNewYork/AP) – A man portrayed in an Oscar-nominated documentary about a notorious 1988 sex abuse case has launched another attempt to clear his name.
Jesse Friedman and his attorney filed a motion Tuesday in Nassau County Court. They want a judge to hold a hearing to review evidence in the case.
Friedman and his father, Arnold Friedman, pleaded guilty in 1988 to abusing 13 children during a computer class that the elder Friedman taught at their Great Neck home. But Jesse Friedman has maintained that he was coerced into confessing….
Last year, Rice determined that Friedman was properly convicted.
“By any impartial analysis, the re-investigation process prompted by Jesse Friedman, his advocates and the 2nd Circuit, has only increased confidence in the integrity of Jesse Friedman’s guilty plea and adjudication as a sex offender,” Rice’s report  stated.
About a half-dozen prosecutors, supplemented by an independent review team that included noted defense attorney Barry Scheck, investigated claims that police used flawed interview techniques, employed hypnotism to elicit victims’ memories and took advantage of a moral panic that was sweeping the country in the late 1980s.
It also examined whether Friedman had caved to pressure from a county court judge and prosecutors to plead guilty, and methodically addressed that and all the other criticisms.
The report said during the first two weeks of the investigation, at least 35 children were interviewed by a team of 12 detectives working in two-person teams. No single detective dominated the investigation and different teams obtained incriminating statements from different victims, the report said.
The review team also said it found no credible evidence that hypnosis was used by investigators on any child….
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/06/24/jesse-friedman-who-pleaded-guilty-to-child-abuse-in-1988-fights-for-exoneration/

Rice: No Reason To Overturn Friedman Sex Abuse Conviction
Friedman Claims There’s ‘Nothing But Lies In The Report’ June 24, 2013
MINEOLA, N.Y. (CBSNewYork/AP) – There is no reason to overturn the conviction of a man in a notorious 1980s sex abuse scandal, New York prosecutors announced Monday after a three-year review….
But Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice released a 168-page report Monday that concluded there was strong reason to investigate and prosecute both Friedman and his father, Arnold, when the scandal erupted in 1987. The new inquiry also concluded that the two abused young boys taking computer classes in the basement of their Great Neck home….
Friedman, speaking at a news conference on Monday, said he’s disappointed in the DA’s report but added he’ll continue his battle to clear his name….
“By any impartial analysis, the re-investigation process prompted by Jesse Friedman, his advocates and the 2nd Circuit, has only increased confidence in the integrity of Jesse Friedman’s guilty plea and adjudication as a sex offender,” the report stated….
The panel also noted that after his guilty plea, Friedman went on “The Geraldo Rivera Show” against his attorney’s advice and re-affirmed his guilt and discussed the abuse he and his father inflicted on the children.
The panel also re-interviewed parents of some of the victims and found none “have any reason today to disbelieve that their sons were victims of the Friedmans.”
The parents described their children having emotional problems, including bed wetting, defecating in their clothing, sleeplessness, nightmares, stuttering, a decline in school performance, separation anxiety and an overwhelming sense of fear….
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/06/24/rice-no-reason-to-overturn-friedman-sex-abuse-conviction/

Capturing the Friedmans
http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/ctf/1.html

Deconstructing the Myths Advanced by the Film “CApturing the Friedmans”
http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/ctf/myths.html

In Their Own Words:  Jesse’s Victims Speak Out
http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/ctf/vict.html

Pedophile teacher abused dozens as clues missed Michael Weissenstein and Tami Abdollah, Associated Press May 13, 2014 FBI regards William Vahey as one of the most prolific pedophiles in memory.
He was one of the most beloved teachers in the world of international schools that serve the children of diplomats, well-off Americans and local elites. He was often the first to arrive in the morning, and last to leave. He led student trips to exotic places and gave out cookies and milk at bedtime.
That was the public persona of William Vahey until a maid stole a memory drive from him in November. On it was evidence that Vahey had molested scores of adolescent boys, possibly more.
The discovery of a man the FBI regards as one of the most prolific pedophiles in memory has set off a crisis in the community of international schools, where parents are being told their children may have been victims, and administrators are scurrying to close loopholes exposed by Vahey’s abuses.
Apparently, not even Vahey’s victims knew they had been molested. The double-cream Oreos that he handed out were laced with sleeping pills — enough to leave the boys unconscious as he touched them and posed them for nude photographs….
There were decades of missed opportunities to expose Vahey. An early California sex-abuse conviction didn’t prevent him taking a series of jobs exposing him to children. Colleagues and supervisors failed to question why he was so often with boys overnight. And at least twice, boys fell mysteriously ill while under his care, and there was no investigation of Vahey’s role.
In 1969, Vahey was arrested on child sexual abuse charges after police said he pinched the penises of eight boys, ages 7 to 9, at an Orange County, California, high school where he taught swimming. Vahey, then 20, told authorities he had started touching boys without their consent at age 14.
He pleaded guilty to a single charge of lewd and lascivious behavior. He received a 90-day jail sentence and five years’ probation. After two, he was allowed to leave the country unsupervised in January 1972.
Vahey was required to register as a sex offender and update his address whenever he moved, but he never updated his information after the first time he registered and authorities didn’t pursue the matter. When the state registry was put online in 2004, his name wasn’t included because authorities discovered he was no longer living in California….
In early March, the maid handed the USB drive to school director Gloria Doll. On it, she found photos of unconscious boys, many blonde or red-headed and between the ages of 12 and 14, often being touched by Vahey.
Doll confronted Vahey, who told her, according to an FBI affidavit, that he had given the boys sleeping pills, adding: “I was molested as a boy, that is why I do this. I have been doing this my whole life.” http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/13/pedophile-teacher-vahey/9026405/

Ex-LAUSD teacher pleads no contest to molesting students, relative  by Jeremiah Dobruck  May 29, 2014 A 58-year-old former Los Angeles Unified school teacher pleaded no contest Thursday to accusations that he molested students and a relative. Robert Pimentel, who worked at George De La Torre Jr. Elementary School in Wilmington, sexually abused four girls between 2002 and 2012, according to the Los Angeles district attorney’s office. As part of an agreement with prosecutors, Pimentel pleaded no contest to one felony count of continuous sexual abuse and three felony counts of lewd acts on a child. He’s expected to be sentenced to 12 years in state prison, is required to register as a sex offender and is banned from approaching his victims for 10 years…. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-wilmington-teacher-pleads-no-contest-20140529-story.html
    
US response to border children crisis now includes abuse probe (+video)
Advocates for immigrants this week filed at least 100 complaints alleging mistreatment of migrant children by border agents. DHS chief says an investigation will ensue, as border patrol commissioner defends agents. By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer June 13, 2014  Hundreds of undocumented children who crossed the border into the United States on their own are being sent to Southern California. The recent crush of migrant children trying to cross the US border has now led the Department of Homeland Security to open a probe into long-running complaints of poor treatment of innocents at the hands of US border patrol agents. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson’s announcement that his department will investigate claims of abuse comes amid an unprecedented surge of “unaccompanied alien children” streaming across the Rio Grande Valley sector and into south Texas. Children fleeing violence and drawn by vague promises of asylum in the US, now being apprehended at the rate of more than 250 a week, has overwhelmed both the border patrol and the Department of Health and Human Services, which manages guardian-less child refugees….
Allegations include children becoming ill from eating moldy food and having to drink water from toilet tanks, and being called liars for begging for medications….
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2014/0613/US-response-to-border-children-crisis-now-includes-abuse-probe-video

“Welcome to Hell:” The Border Patrol’s Repeated Abuse of Children 06/24/2014  James Lyall Staff Lawyer, ACLU Border Litigation Project   Detainees wrested from sleep every 30 minutes, the lights in their frigid cells never turned off. One detainee told by officials, don’t lie or you’ll be raped. Another detainee sexually abused by guards. Detainees forced to stand in stress positions. Others denied adequate food, water, and medical treatment and held in dehumanizing conditions. “Welcome to hell,” one guard told a detainee, a good metaphor for what occurs across these sites of torment.
These incidents don’t come from military prisons in Iraq or Afghanistan or CIA black sites. This has been happening for years along the Southwest border in U.S. government facilities run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and its Border Patrol. The victims: children, some as young as infants, as documented in a recent complaint filed by a group of immigrant rights advocates who interviewed 116 unaccompanied children previously held in CBP custody.
Just as appalling, government agencies have known about these abuses for a long time, but failed to take action. Now, more children are vulnerable to harm in Border Patrol custody than ever before. Since October, 47,000 children have left their homes in Central America, mainly in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, for the United States. They flee destabilizing violence and crime fomented by criminal syndicates and gangs, more often than not without a loved one leading the way….
One in four detained children reported physical abuse at the hands of CBP, including sexual assaults and beatings. More than half reported verbal abuse, including racist and sexist insults and even death threats, as well as the denial of urgent medical care. In one instance, a 14-year-old girl’s asthma medication was confiscated. She subsequently suffered multiple asthma attacks. After the first attack, CBP officials threatened her, telling her she better not be faking or else.
Seven out of ten interviewed reported detentions lasting longer than the 72-hour period mandated by law. Three out of ten children reported that their belongings were confiscated and never returned. Many others reported being shackled during transport, the metal restraints excruciatingly digging into their wrists and ankles. Eighty percent reported CBP personnel denied them adequate food and water.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-lyall/welcome-to-hell-the-borde_b_5527967.html

Systemic Abuse of Unaccompanied Immigrant Children by U.S. Customs and Border Protection
http://www.acluaz.org/sites/default/files/documents/DHS%20Complaint%20re%20CBP%20Abuse%20of%20UICs.pdf

Prestigious Indonesian School Fights to Regain Trust After Child-Abuse Charges Jakarta International School Administrators Move After Arrests of Outside Contractors By Richard C. Paddock June 13, 2014
JAKARTA—One of Asia’s leading international schools has become embroiled in a child-abuse scandal that has resulted in the arrest of six janitors provided by an outside contractor, one apparent suicide and a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the school.
Police investigations have spread to some teachers and staff at the Jakarta International School, who deny any wrongdoing. School administrators, who say they were caught off guard when an allegation first surfaced two months ago, are now trying to restore the school’s reputation….
http://online.wsj.com/articles/prestigious-indonesian-school-fights-to-regain-trust-after-child-abuse-charges-1402685384

Pamela Anderson reveals childhood sexual abuse, launches charity May 19, 2014
The “Baywatch” star turned animal and environmental activist says she was sexually abused as a child and as a teen. Pamela Anderson made the revelations at a Cannes Film Festival event, where she launched her namesake foundation. Christie D’Zurilla    Pamela Anderson has revealed a history of sexual assault, ticking off instances of molestation, rape and gang rape. Her revelations occurred at a charity event held on a luxury yacht at the Cannes Film Festival. The “Baywatch” star and activist, 46, chose the occasion, which she co-hosted with Vivienne Westwood, to launch the Pamela Anderson Foundation, dedicated to “human, animal and environmental rights.”….
“I did not have an easy childhood,” Anderson said. “Despite loving parents, I was molested from age 6 to 10 by my female babysitter.”….
“I went to a friend’s boyfriend’s house,” she continued. “While she was busy, the boyfriend’s older brother decided he would teach me backgammon, which led into a back massage, which led into rape — my first heterosexual experience. He was 25 years old, I was 12.”….
“My first boyfriend in grade 9 decided it would be funny to gang rape me, with six of his friends. Needless to say, I had a hard time trusting humans. I just wanted off this Earth.”
Anderson said she couldn’t tell her mother, whom she saw as already carrying too heavy of a burden, but instead turned toward animals and nature….
She told the Cannes audience that since finding her “voice” after “Baywatch,” she’d helped change animal-welfare laws in more than 20 countries.  “I’ve spoken to press, parliament, presidents, kings, queens … I know what I’m good at: I’m brilliant at connecting people — communicating.” She also thanked Rick Salomon, her third and fourth husband, for his support, calling him the “only man” she trusts, other than her sons. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/gossip/la-et-mg-pamela-anderson-sexual-abuse-rape-20140519-story.html
Police: Woman found 10 years after kidnapping  By GILLIAN FLACCUS of Associated Press 5/21/14 SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — A woman who disappeared as a teenager a decade ago was reunited with her family after she went to police and told them her mother’s ex-boyfriend drugged and kidnapped her in 2004, forced her to marry him and fathered her child.
Isidro Garcia, 41, of Bell Gardens, was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping for rape, lewd acts with a minor and false imprisonment, the Santa Ana Police Department police said.
Police described a decade during which the victim — abused mentally, physically and sexually by her captor — was moved at least four times and given multiple fake identities to hide her from family and authorities.
Garcia allegedly told her that her family had stopped trying to find her, and that if she tried to contact them they would be deported.
“Even with the opportunity to escape, after years of physical and mental abuse, the victim saw no way out of her situation and lived a life with Garcia under sustained physical and mental abuse,” police said in a written statement.
Neighbors were stunned, describing them as a seemingly happy couple who doted on their young daughter and liked to host parties at their apartment in the working-class community of Bell Gardens, about 20 miles from where she originally disappeared….
http://news.msn.com/crime-justice/california-kidnapping-sexual-assault-victim-found-alive-after-10-years-captor-arrested
        
Dark net ‘used by tens of thousands of paedophiles’ By Angus Crawford BBC News 19 June 2014  Tens of thousands of paedophiles are using the so-called dark net to trade images of sexual abuse, an investigation by BBC News indicates.
One site receives as many as 500 page views per second, its founder says.
Figures from another site suggest Brits are heavily involved in producing and distributing illegal obscene images.
Britain’s National Crime Agency warned in its 2014 threat assessment that abusers were turning to anonymous sites and encryption technology.
The dark net is the term used to refer to parts of the internet that are hidden and can be hard to access without special software.
One of the most popular products used to access such areas is called the TorBrowser…. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27885502

Paedophile use of dark net increases for child abuse images  By Barclay Ballard 6/20/14
Tens of thousands of paedophiles are using the dark net to circulate images of sexual abuse, according to a report by the BBC.
The National Crime Agency said that abusers were increasingly turning to encryption software to maintain anonymity. The dark net is a hidden part of the Internet which can only be accessed by special software, one of the most popular of which is the TorBrowser.
This enables people to use Tor, an “onion-routing” system, which bounces encrypted data through several randomly selected servers on the network, making a PC’s net address untraceable….
During the BBC investigation, the broadcaster contacted an active paedophile who ran one of the illegal chat rooms, until it closed in May 2014.
“We had over 40,000 user accounts on the site. We used to get sometimes 500 page views per second. My own collection is 12 gigabytes”, he said….

Paedophile use of dark net increases for child abuse images

Anti-paedophile police fight child porn ‘epidemic’ By Angus Crawford BBC News 18 June 2014  The internet trade in images that show child sex abuse is now “an epidemic”, according to the head of the global initiative to combat the problem. Police officers from around the world serve on the Virtual Global Taskforce.
Its chairman, Ian Quinn, tells the BBC there has been an “explosion” in cases handled by US authorities. The US alone has 61 Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) units, each made up of state, local police and federal agents….
Online images accumulate
In 2002 the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reviewed and confirmed 45,055 examples of obscene images of children found online (some of these were duplicates)
In 2013 the figure had grown to 23,881,197
As of May 2014, the centre had reviewed 112 million files containing images of child sexual abuse….
Predator detentions
In 2003, 339 arrests were made worldwide in connection with Operation Predator
In 2013, the number had grown to 2,099
To date, the total number of arrests linked to the operation totals 10,608….
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27872401

Dozens charged in New York City child porn case  By TOM HAYS of Associated Press 5/21/14 NEW YORK (AP) — A police officer, a paramedic, a rabbi, a nurse and a Boy Scout leader were among at least 70 people arrested in the New York City area in recent weeks as part of a sweeping investigation into the anonymous trading of child porn over the Internet.
The five were among at least 70 men and one woman charged in a five-week operation by the Homeland Security Investigations arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Federal officials, who planned to announce the arrests a news conference later Wednesday, call it one of the largest local roundups ever of people who collect images of children having sex — and a stark reminder that they come from all segments of society.
Consuming child porn “is not something that is just done by unemployed drifters who live in their parent’s basement,” said James Hayes, of ICE’s New York office. “If this operation does anything, it puts the lie to the belief that the people who do this are not productive members of society.”
Authorities say an alarming number of the defendants had access to young children, though there were no reports of abuse. The Boy Scout leader also coached a youth baseball team. The rabbi home-schooled his children and others. Another person had hidden cameras used to secretly film his children’s friends.
One defendant was already on bail following his arrest last year on charges he used the Internet to direct women to record sex acts with young children. Court papers allege he “indicated the last video he had downloaded and viewed depicted a mother sexually abusing her 3- or 4-year-old child.”….
http://news.msn.com/crime-justice/dozens-charged-in-new-york-city-child-porn-case

DA’s child abuse detectives, police conduct countywide child pornography sweep in Berks Liz Kilmer, Reporter Jun 19 2014  READING, Pa. – A respected brain surgeon was among the group of 12 men and one teenager arrested Thursday in a child pornography sweep across Berks County. “Possessing images of child sexual abuse is a heinous crime and will not be tolerated in Berks County,” said District Attorney John Adams. ….All 13 individuals were charged with sexual abuse of children (dissemination of photographs, videotapes, computer depictions and films) and sexual abuse of children (possession of child pornography). http://www.wfmz.com/news/news-regional-berks/das-child-abuse-detectives-police-conduct-countywide-child-pornography-sweep-in-berks/26567598

Atlanta elementary school principal indicted in sex sting  By Reuters  5/9/14 ATLANTA (Reuters) — A suburban Atlanta elementary school principal has been indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly trying to entice a minor female to have sex with him, court records showed on Friday.
John McGill, 56, was arrested in March in a Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) sting operation called Operation Broken Heart. The investigation was aimed at people who meet children online and then travel to meet them for sex, according to the GBI.
McGill was one of 14 people arrested in the operation, the GBI said. He was suspended after the arrest, the school system announced….
http://news.msn.com/crime-justice/atlanta-elementary-school-principal-indicted-in-sex-sting

Ian Watkins: Six police officers accused of ‘gross misconduct’ over investigations into paedophile singer May 21, 2014 By Cathy Owen One officer from South Wales Police, three from South Yorkshire Police and two from Bedfordshire Police have been served with the notices   The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has served gross misconduct notices on three South Yorkshire Police officers, two Bedfordshire Police officers and a South Wales police officer as part of its ongoing investigations into the handling of allegations against Ian Watkins, it was announced today….
The IPCC is also investigating Bedfordshire Police’s handling of information from a member of the public who reported an allegation of child abuse against Watkins to the force in October 2012. A sergeant and a constable have been served with notices advising them their conduct is under investigation…. http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/ian-watkins-six-police-officers-7150665
    
Mass grave of up to 800 dead babies exposed in County Galway Cahir O’Doherty May 26,2014
According to a report in the Irish Mail on Sunday, a mass grave has been located beside a former home for unmarried mothers and babies in County Galway. The grave is believed to contain the bodies of up to eight hundred babies, buried on the former grounds of the institution known locally as “The Home” in Tuam, north of Galway city, between 1925 and 1961 Run by the Bon Secours nuns, “The Home” housed thousands of unmarried mothers and their “illegitimate” children over those years.  According to Irish Mail on Sunday the causes of death listed for “as many as 796 children” included “malnutrition, measles, convulsions, tuberculosis, gastroenteritis and pneumonia.” The babies were usually buried without a coffin in a plot that had once housed “a water tank,” the report claims. No memorials were erected, the site was left unmarked and unmourned. The staggering mortality rate of “The Home” was apparently replicated elsewhere in Ireland…. http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/Mass-grave-of-up-to-800-dead-babies-exposed-in-County-Galway-.html

Galway historian reveals truth behind 800 orphans in mass grave Cahir O’Doherty June 01,2014
There is a growing international scandal around the history of The Home, a grim 1840’s workhouse in Tuam in Galway built on seven acres that was taken over in 1925 by the Bon Secours sisters, who turned it into a Mother and Baby home for “fallen women.” The long abandoned site made headlines around the world this week when it was revealed that a nearby septic tank contained the bodies of up to eight hundred infants and children, secretly buried without coffins or headstones on unconsecrated ground between 1925 and 1961. Now a local historian has stepped forward to outline the terrible circumstances around so many lost little lives. Catherine Corless, the local historian and genealogist, remembers the Home Babies well. “They were always segregated to the side of regular classrooms,” Corless tells IrishCentral. “By doing this the nuns telegraphed the message that they were different and that we should keep away from them….
Surrounded by an eight-foot high wall, Tuam, County Galway locals say that they saw little to nothing of the daily life of The Home or of the pregnant young mothers who arrived and left it without a word over the decades….
A local health board inspection report from April 1944 recorded 271 children and 61 single mothers in residence, a total of 333 in a building that had a capacity for 243.
The report described the children as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.” The report noted that 31 children in the “sun room and balcony” were “poor, emaciated and not thriving.” The effects of long term neglect and malnutrition were observed repeatedly.  Children died at The Home at the rate of one a fortnight for almost 40 years, one report claims. Another appears to claim that 300 children died between 1943 and 1946, which would mean two deaths a week in the isolated institution….
http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/Galway-historian-reveals-truth-behind-800-orphans-in-mass-grave.html

Manslaughter claim in deaths of 800 children in Galway Home (VIDEO) Cahir O’Doherty June 05,2014
An Irish politician has called what happened with the deaths of 800 children at a religious-run unmarried mothers home in Tuam in Galway between 1925 and 1961 “manslaughter.”
Hildegarde Naughton, a Fine Gael Senator from Galway, claimed in the Irish Senate that what had occurred at the mothers and babies home was in fact criminal.
The shocking revelation that 796 babies died and were buried in an unmarked grave in a septic tank in the mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway continues to reverberate.
Calls for a full historical inquiry have now reached the higher echelons of the church.
Archbishop of Tuam Michael Neary said the order of the Bon Secours sisters needed to address the issue, stating the archdiocese had nothing to do with the home when it was open….
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Manslaughter-claim-in-deaths-of-800-children-in-Galway-unwed-mothers-Home-VIDEO.html

Neglect and death of 800 kids in Galway happened in plain sight  Sheila Langan June 04,2014
The 796 infants and children buried in an unmarked mass grave in the septic tank behind St. Mary’s Mother and Baby home in Tuam, Co. Galway made headlines around the world after their shocking story broke last week. But this is not the first time the Home and the ‘Home babies,’ as locals call them, have been in the news. Following early reports on the research of Tuam historian Catherine Corless, who brought the story to light, Liam Hogan, a Limerick-based historian and librarian, began uncovering a trail of damning news clips dating from before the Home’s founding in 1925 to after its closure in 1961.
The articles show that the Home was very much a matter of both public and governmental knowledge. And the way in which they discuss the Home’s occupants (or “inmates” as they are more often referred to) makes clear the totally normalized disdain with which all the “illegitimate children” and “fallen women” were held.
The Tuam Children’s Home, it turns out, is a scandal that emerged from an even earlier scandal – The Glenamaddy Children’s Home, less than 20 miles away.
A June 1, 1924 article from the Connacht Tribune speaks of the ‘dire conditions’ at the Glenamaddy Home, a former workhouse that began housing orphans and unwed mothers in 1921, under the supervision of the Bon Secours nuns….
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/The-Home-babies-in-the-news-A-timeline-of-neglect-in-plain-sight.html

Bodies of 800 Babies Reportedly Found in Sewer Tank in Ireland  Thursday, Jun 5, 2014
New research suggests that some 796 children were secretly buried in the sewage tank of a home run by nuns in Tuam, Ireland, where unmarried pregnant women were sent to give birth in an attempt to preserve the country’s devout Catholic image, NBC News reported. People who lived near the home– run by nuns from the Bon Secours Sisters congregation between 1925 and 1961 — said they have known about the unmarked mass grave for decades, but a fresh investigation was sparked this week after research by a local historian purportedly showed that of the hundreds of children who died at the home, only one was buried at a cemetery.  http://4.nbcny.com/gMYUR35

Mass grave at Galway home not the only one, says Irish leader Kenny  Sheila Langan June 06,2014
The mass grave of 796 children at a former home for unwed mothers and children in Tuam, Co. Galway is likely not the only one of its kind in Ireland, Prime Minister Enda Kenny has said.
A government investigation launched in wake of the shocking discovery will focus on all of the former so-called ‘mother and baby homes’ in Ireland, it was announced yesterday.
Minister for Children Charlie Flanagan is organizing a group of senior officials who will advise the government on the scope of investigation required and the best course of action at the end of the month.
Speaking from the US, where he is currently on a trade mission, Kenny said that Flanagan and his committee would determine “whether this is an isolated [incident] or whether there are others around the country that need to be looked at” and to “decide what is the best thing to do in the interests of dealing with another element of our country’s past.”….
Many other homes for unwed mothers, their “illegitimate” children and other orphans operated in Ireland throughout the 1900s. There was Bessborough in Co. Cork, Sean Ross in Tipperary (where Philomena Lee had her son), and Castlepollard in Westmeath – all run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. The mortality rates at these homes were far higher than the national average, the Irish Examiner recently reported, ranging from 30% – 50% between 1930 and 1945.
There were Protestant mother and baby homes too, such as the Bethany Home in Dublin, where a similar scandal took place. Between 1922 and 1949, close to 220 children died and were buried in an unmarked grave at Dublin’s Mount Jerome Cemetery. They were memorialized in 2010…..
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Mass-grave-at-Tuam-Childrens-Home-not-the-only-one-says-Kenny.html
Ireland shock over 800 babies ‘in septic tank’  Friday 06 June 2014  Ireland has been rocked this week as another horrific scandal linked to the Catholic church emerges in Galway, where a mass grave with the bodies of 800 children was uncovered.
….This week it was revealed that the site contained the remains of hundreds of children who died in the care of Bon Secours nuns between 1925 and 1961 and was not a famine grave as originally claims in the 70s.
The babies are believed to have been secretly buried at the home for unwed mothers, dubbed “fallen women”, which had an extraordinarily high infant mortality rates – with children dying of TB, pneumonia, measles and gastorenteritis.
A report from the institution in 1944 revealed emaciated childen, mothers suffering with mental health issues and overcrowding.
The Bon Secours sisters, a Roman Catholic organisation, began providing healthcare in Ireland in the 19th century and is now the country’s largest private healthcare provider.
The sisters said they were shocked and saddened by the reports, they ran 10 similar homes across Ireland and three of the others are believed to have plots with the remains of 3,200 babies and infants….
The case follows a series of scandals over abuse at institutions entrusted to the Catholic church in Ireland.
The Artane Industrial school case revealed how Christian brothers systematically neglected and abused orphans and boys from single parent families put into “state care” for decades.
Magdalen asylums, known as Magdalene laundries, ran in Ireland until 1996 with as many as 30,000 “fallen women” incarcerated, stripped of their identities and forced to carry out forced labour.
Women were locked up in abusive laundries for being sexually active outside marriage, having “illegitimate children” and some simply to safeguard their “moral purity”….
It found the entire system had treated children as prisoners and slaves, ignoring their rights and noted that some religious officials had encouraged ritual beatings – while protecting their own with a culture of secrecy.
http://www.channel4.com/news/bon-secour-galway-catholic-church-ireland-septic-tank

800 dead babies are probably just the beginning  The corpses found in an Irish septic pit resulted from a larger problem.  By Martin Sixsmith June 6  Martin Sixsmith’s book, Philomena, published by Penguin Books, was adapted for the screen last year.
The discovery of a grave containing the remains of as many as 800 babies at a former home for unmarried mothers in Ireland is yet another problem for the Irish Catholic Church. The mother and baby home at Tuam in County Galway was run by the nuns of the Sisters of Bon Secours and operated between 1925 and 1961. It took in thousands of women who had committed the “mortal sin” of unwed pregnancy, delivered their babies and was charged with caring for them. But unsanitary conditions, poor food and a lack of medical care led to shockingly high rates of infant mortality. Babies’ bodies were deposited in a former sewage tank….
During 10 years of research into the Catholic Church’s treatment of “fallen women” — I wrote about one of them in my book, Philomena, later turned into a feature film starring Dame Judi Dench — I discovered that the girls were refused medical attention, including painkillers, during even the most difficult births; the nuns told them the pain was the penance they must pay for their sin. In the home where Philomena gave birth, an unkempt plot bears the names of babies and mothers, some as young as 15. There are undoubtedly many more there who have no memorial.
For those who survived, the psychological trauma has endured. Philomena and thousands like her were forced to look after their babies for up to four years, bonding with them before they were taken away to be adopted. Many went to families in the United States in return for substantial “donations”; lack of proper vetting meant some were handed over to abusive parents. The mothers were told they were moral degenerates, too sullied to keep their babies. The nuns said they would burn in hell if they spoke to anyone about their children or what had been done with them….
The warped code of honour behind the decades of silence had been inculcated by an all-powerful Catholic Church. For much of the late 20th century, the Irish civil authorities were in thrall to the hierarchy; Archbishop John Charles McQuaid threatened pulpit denunciations if the government contradicted his policies. So the state connived in the mother and baby homes, paying the nuns at Tuam and all the other homes a per capita rate for every inmate….
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/06/06/800-dead-babies-are-probably-just-the-beginning/

Horrific truths of treatment emerge from Catholic mother and baby homes  Niall O’Dowd June 14,2014   There are some undeniable facts about the unmarried mother’s homes in Ireland from the time they were established in the 1920s until they were closed sometime in the 1960s.
Children died needlessly by the thousands in them. Many, possibly 800 in Galway, were buried without coffins, thrown in the earth, some in a septic tank….
Here is what happened there.  A conscientious health official, Dr .James Deeny, visited, and here are his exact words written in 1951:
“Shortly afterwards, when in Cork, I went to Bessborough. It was a beautiful institution, built on to a lovely old house just before the war, and seemed to be well-run and spotlessly clean. I marched up and down and around about and could not make out what was wrong; at last I took a notion and stripped all the babies and, unusually for a Chief Medical Adviser, examined them.
“Every baby had some purulent infection of the skin and all had green diarrhea, carefully covered up. There was obviously a staphylococcus infection about.
“Without any legal authority I closed the place down and sacked the matron, a nun, and also got rid of the medical officer.
“The deaths had been going on for years. They had done nothing.”
One year later under a new regime, less than one percent of babies perished from a high of over 60 percent….
It was all a part of the punishment ritual for the poor unloved unmarried mothers who suffered horrifically. Even if their children survived they were ripped away from them and sent abroad for adoption.
They were made to cut grass with scissors, forced to endure child birth without any painkilling drugs, denied stitches when wounds were opened – all testified to by local nurses and doctors who seemed helpless to stop the horrific suffering….
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Horrific-truths-of-treatment-emerge-from-Catholic-mother-and-baby-homes.html

18 children died of hunger at Tuam mother and baby home    PATRICK COUNIHAN June 15,2014
Details are emerging of the horrific stories behind some of the 796 deaths at the Tuam mother and baby home – where 18 children died of hunger. 12 of the 18 who starved were girls and there is a suspicion that some were mentally retarded. One child wasn’t even given a name by the Bons Secours nuns who ran the Tuam home. The youngest child to die was recorded as just ‘10 minutes old’ while the oldest was eight, a girl who had lived all her life in the home until measles killed her. Bridget Agatha Kenny was two months old when she died as a result of marasmus, child malnutrition, on August 23, 1947. She is described as having been ‘mentally defective.’ She was one of 18 children whose cause of death was listed as child malnutrition or the official term “marasmus.” Marasmus is a form of severe malnutrition characterized by energy deficiency.  A child with marasmus looks utterly emaciated with ribs protruding. Body weight is reduced to less than 60% of the normal body weight for the age….
The children were crammed into communal nurseries where contagious diseases ran unchecked according to the report….
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/-18-children-died-of-hunger-at-Tuam-mother-and-baby-home.html

Death records for 796 children at Tuam home published in full Sheila Langan June 17,2014
The names, ages, and causes of death of all 796 children who died at St. Mary’s Home, in Tuam, Co. Galway from 1925 to 1960 have been published in full, below. The list is long, and reading it is a horrifying, heartbreaking experience – though nowhere near as horrifying as the short lives of the children who died, or as heartbreaking as the sheer number of lost little lives. When she began her research, Catherine Corless, the local historian who set out to uncover the truth about the bones buried at the site of the former Mother and Baby Home, had no idea the number of deaths would be that high…. http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Death-records-for-796-children-at-Tuam-home-published-in-full.html

Former company director from Dewsbury had more than 300,000 indecent images of children May 24, 2014  A former company director from Dewsbury has been exposed as a child porn pervert collecting more than 300,000 of the worst images of girls on his computer.
Stephen Kay, 58, downloaded and distributed child porn from the internet to fuel his unnatural lust. He did it behind the backs of his wife and daughter while working for the IPS Group as a project engineer. Kay was made redundant from his job and asked to leave the family home after a police raid seized his computers, USB sticks and a hard drive from his home in Carlton Road. Analysis revealed he had 299,933 indecent images with 478 of the worst kind in category five, including ritual and satanic abuse. In addition he had 7,795 images of category seven of extreme pornography. Kay appeared at Hull Crown Court for sentence on Monday after pleading guilty to six charges of possession of indecent images of children and one charge of distributing images….
Kay was given a two-year suspended prison sentence, given a Sexual Offences Prevention order and must undergo a sex offenders treatment programme. He was also banned from working with children and must sign on the National Sex Offenders’ Register for 10 years. http://www.batleynews.co.uk/news/local/former-company-director-from-dewsbury-had-more-than-300-000-indecent-images-of-children-1-6636008

Norwich child abuse inquiry police charge woman with rapes 14 June 2014  A woman has appeared in court accused of raping and abusing children. Marie Black, 33, of Atkinson Close in Norwich, was charged with 24 offences on Friday night and appeared before the city’s magistrates. The charges relate to five victims under the age of 13 and are alleged to have happened between 2004 and 2010. She faces five counts of child cruelty, four rapes and related offences. She was released on bail and is due before Norwich Crown Court on 27 June. Ms Black is the ninth person to be charged in connection with the child abuse investigation. Eight men and women were charged in connection with the case in February 2014. They are all on conditional bail to appear at Norwich Crown Court at a future date. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-27850220

N.S. reaches $29m settlement in Home for Colored Children abuse claim EVA HOARE Staff Reporter Published June 3, 2014  The Liberal government announced a $29-million tentative settlement for the abuse victims of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children on Tuesday.
It’s a first step in a proposed two-prong process the McNeil government had promised some 130 to 150 former residents of the Dartmouth home who had endured decades of severe physical, sexual and psychological abuse while there.
Most of the victims were black, orphaned, or from homes where families could no longer look after them. Their cries for the abuse to be acknowledged had largely gone unanswered, until the former residents launched a class action lawsuit against the province and the home itself for failing to protect them.
The home has already settled with the residents for $5 million, but the province, under Darrell Dexter’s government, continued to wage the battle against the action being certified. The total settlement, from the province and the home, amounts to $34 million and is to cover residents who suffered abuse at the facility from late 1951 to 1989. Residents’ lawyer Ray Wagner of Wagners law firm in Halifax Lawyer said the distribution plan will go back to 1921….
http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/1211893-ns-reaches-29m-settlement-in-home-for-colored-children-abuse-claim

Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children
For the people who were raped, abused, humiliated and terrorized when they lived as children at the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, it has indeed been a “life journey,” as Premier Stephen McNeil aptly put it, to the tentative $29-million settlement of their class-action lawsuit announced Tuesday…. http://thechronicleherald.ca/tags/nova-scotia-home-colored-children

Aboriginal affairs ministers ask premiers to look at reparations for Sixties Scoop adoptions  CHINTA PUXLEY   WINNIPEG — The Canadian Press Monday, May. 19 2014
Canada’s aboriginal affairs ministers are asking the country’s premiers to look at compensation, counselling and repatriation for thousands of aboriginal children adopted into white families during the so-called Sixties Scoop….
It’s estimated that up to 20,000 aboriginal children were taken from their homes by child welfare services and placed with non-aboriginal families. Many consider the adoptions an extension of residential schools, which aimed to “take the Indian out of the child.”
Adoptees from the Sixties Scoop have said their time for reconciliation has come and they want an apology from the federal government….
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/aboriginal-affairs-ministers-ask-premiers-to-look-into-sixties-scoop-adoptions/article18752180/

EDITORIAL: The road to healing THE CHRONICLE HERALD Published June 3, 2014
http://thechronicleherald.ca/editorials/1211995-editorial-the-road-to-healing
    
Rolf Harris child sex abuse education video surfaces after entertainer found guilty in London court  Esther Han  July 1, 2014
….This is the opening scene of what is now an unsettling 20-minute long anti-child-abuse video that prosecutors planned to play for the jury at Harris’ indecent assault trial before it was barred by the judge. Overnight, Harris was declared guilty of all 12 charges of indecent assault against four girls, from 1968 to 1986.
The video, called ‘Kids Can Say No’, was developed in the mid-1980s, when he was indecently assaulting young women and girls – including one as young as seven or eight.
Harris had commissioned and fronted the child protection video, with endorsement from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, after being inspired by similar programs in Australia. In the period when the video began to be widely shown in schools, youth clubs and health institutes in the United Kingdom, the court found he was also having sexual encounters with his daughter’s best friend.
In 1986, he had sexually abused an eight-year-old girl at a community centre near her home when Harris performed ‘Two Little Boys’ for the children.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/rolf-harris-child-sex-abuse-education-video-surfaces-after-entertainer-found-guilty-in-london-court-20140701-zsrph.html

Rolf: A life well lived… until the end  CHARLES MIRANDA   The Daily Telegraph  July 05, 2014
“I’ve lived a magical life,” an emotional Rolf Harris mused as he stared down at the royal crown-topped gold disc starring up at him from his palm and hanging around his neck. It was late 2012 and having just been appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of his decades of entertaining, he was in a reflective mood….
In that respect he was yesterday virtually handed a death sentence as he prepared to be jailed after being convicted of 12 counts of indecent assault. No more big concerts, no more art shows, no more TV hosting, no more feted by the royal family and no more molesting children.
What a difference 18 months can make.
At the time he was bestowed his OA, he had just sung for the Queen at that year’s Diamond Jubilee, had another hit TV show on British television with Animal Hospital, a BAFTA British film industry lifetime achievement award and 50 years of memories of topping the music, art and television industries.
Within days of getting his Order of Australia, he would also be getting a telephone call from the Australia Day Foundation asking him whether he would accept being the 2013 Australian of the Year in the UK at the following year’s Australia Day gala in central London….
his long-held sexual desire for little girls in bikinis and finally his ritual penchant for giving one girl bear hugs before spitting on his fingers and digitally assaulting her.
And most of these admissions made by the man himself as he apparently made the conscious decision to give a blow-by-blow account of his years of sordid liaisons and infidelity albeit of women rather than girls in a bid to detract from what he was really there accused of — being what the court heard was a manipulative, perverted deviant child abuser who groomed at least one girl like a pet dog to respond without questions to his sexual advances….
His hit tune Sun Arise was only pipped to the Number 1 chart spot by Elvis Presley in 1962 but then there was Two Little Boys, a worldwide hit in 1969 which in the UK alone was the last song to top the charts for the 1960s and the first to top the charts in the 1970s.
Then there was his painting of the Queen’s portrait, his OBE, his MBE, his CBE and his OA received just days before police started to look at his background….
When he was first arrested “Rolf Harris is Innocent” Facebook page attracted hundreds of “likes” and comments calling for people to get behind the star, branding the allegations and charges a witch hunt, some calling on him to take the “scum” trying to persecute him down.
The page attracted 727 likes but that was mostly in 2013 and by June 2014 the messages had well and truly dried up….
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/rolf-a-life-well-lived-until-the-end/story-fni0cx12-1226976734754

Fear of child abuse cover up secret dossier at the heart of establishment  THE grim catalogue of sexual depravity by celebrities continues. This week’s conviction of Rolf Harris follows the jailing of presenter Stuart Hall and publicist Max Cliffford for serial abuse of under-age girls.  By: Leo McKinstry Thu, July 3, 2014
In addition there has been a stream of appalling revelations about the perverted activities of those two paedophile knights: sinister entertainer Sir Jimmy Savile and gargantuan Liberal politician Sir Cyril Smith, both of whom went to their graves without being brought to justice.
In all these cases what is so shocking is not just the scale of abuse but also the fact that these dangerous predators were allowed to get away with their crimes for so long.
Inevitably the failure by the state to take any action against these high-profile abusers has prompted concerns about a major cover-up within the establishment, reflecting the desire of officials and politicians to protect their own….
In one fascinating illustration of this apparent complacency he said that in 1984 Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens had presented the home secretary of the time, Leon Brittan, with a comprehensive dossier about a paedophile network operating within Westminster.
It’s not clear what happened to the dossier or if any serious investigations were pursued. Dickens complained that his stance against child abuse meant that he was subjected to a brutal campaign of harassment including two break-ins and the appearance of his name on the hit list of a notorious contract killer.
In the early 1980s Dickens was regarded as something of a crank. Today, given what we know about abuse, he could be seen as a moral visionary. Yesterday, in response to Danczuk’s intervention, Lord Brittan issued a statement in which he said he had asked his office “to look carefully” at the dossier he had been handed.
But Brittan did not explain what ultimately happened to it. As a result his declaration will do little to lessen suspicions about complacency. This is not just about a few individual cases it is about a culture that appeared to allow entire institutions to be exploited by paedophiles, with the political class providing a shield to hide abuse….
http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/leo-mckinstry/486431/Fear-of-child-abuse-cover-up-at-the-heart-of-establishment

UK to Investigate Claims of Child Abuse Cover-Up LONDON — Jul 7, 2014 By JILL LAWLESS Associated Press   The British government vowed Monday to discover whether public institutions have exposed vulnerable children to sexual abuse — and whether authorities suppressed abuse allegations to protect politicians and other powerful people.
Home Secretary Theresa May said a panel of legal and child-protection experts would investigate how public agencies, including governments and hospitals, handled child-abuse allegations. She said she set up the inquiry after “appalling cases of organized and persistent” sexual abuse, including decades of assaults by the late TV host Jimmy Savile.
“Some of these cases have exposed a failure by public bodies to take their responsibilities seriously,” May told the House of Commons.
May said a related investigation, led by National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children chief executive Peter Wanless, would examine whether abuse claims handed to authorities in the 1980s were lost or destroyed to protect wrongdoers.
Last year, an internal government inquiry found that 114 files relating to allegations of child abuse that were handed to officials had been lost or destroyed….
Savile was exposed after his death in 2011 as a predatory pedophile who assaulted victims in hospitals, children’s homes and TV studios.
TV entertainer Rolf Harris was sentenced last week to almost six years in prison after being convicted of 12 counts of abusing girls.
Several recent cases in which gangs of men have been convicted of sexually exploiting girls in the care of local authorities also exposed failures by police and social services.
And after the 2010 death of Liberal Democrat lawmaker Cyril Smith, prosecutors acknowledged that in 1970 eight men accused Smith of abusing them as teens. Prosecutors said Smith was never charged but should have been. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/uk-investigate-claims-child-abuse-cover-24448962

The alleged paedophile ring at the heart of the British Establishment
Investigation in to alleged child abuse ring in Westminster dogged by claims of cover ups and missing files  By Tom Whitehead, Security Editor 06 Jul 2014
The country was still reeling from the horrors of the Jimmy Savile child abuse scandal that saw the BBC accused of cover up and culture of secrecy to protect itself.
But the expose opened the door on a potentially even more explosive scandal – the claims of a VIP Westminster paedophile ring operating from the heart of the British Establishment from the 1960s onwards.
It has led to allegations of a massive cover up across Whitehall spanning decades, pressure on the police and prosecutors not to pursue cases and the apparent disappearance of key dossiers and files detailing claims of child abuse and alleged attackers.
More than 10 current and former politicians are said to be on a list of alleged child abusers now being investigated by police and the pressure is growing for a public inquiry.
But the belated investigations only serve to highlight decades of apparent inaction in the corridors of power to get to the truth despite relentless campaigning by a number of MPs.
The story begins with Cyril Smith, the late Liberal Democrat MP, who was exposed as an alleged paedophile in 2012, two years after his death, aged 82.
Rumours of child abuse had dogged the 29-stone Rochdale politician throughout his career but no action was ever taken.
As early as the 1960s, he allegedly routinely assaulted young boys, especially in children’s homes and special schools in his home town, where he was MP from 1972 to 1992.
He was also said to have been a visitor to the notorious Elm Guest house in South-west London, now the focus of a Scotland Yard investigation into an alleged VIP paedophile ring
It was claimed earlier this year that police received 144 complaints against him over the years but no prosecution was ever brought fuelling allegations he was protected by influential friends….
However, Smith was only one of a number of alleged high profile child abusers within Westminster said to have been named in a 40-page dossier submitted to the Home Office by the late campaigning Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in 1983.
Mr Dickens told his family at the time that it named leading public figures, including senior politicians, and was going to “blow it all apart”.
It was also said to contain information on the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) which was set up in 1974 to promote and lobby the legalisation of sexual activity between minors and adults….
The then Home Secretary Lord (Leon) Brittan was sent the file but no record of any subsequent criminal inquiry has been found and the dossier itself has disappeared….
It is understood more than 10 current and former politicians are now on a list of alleged child abusers held by police investigating claims of a Westminster paedophile ring.
MPs or peers from all three main political parties are on the list, which includes former ministers and household names….
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10950111/The-alleged-paedophile-ring-at-the-heart-of-the-British-Establishment.html

Ex-senior judge Butler-Sloss to head child sex abuse inquiry 8 July 2014  Retired senior judge Elizabeth Butler-Sloss has been named as the chairwoman of a wide-ranging review into historical child sex abuse. The inquiry will examine how state institutions handled their duty of care to protect children from paedophiles…..
It comes after Mark Sedwill, the Home Office’s top civil servant, answered MPs’ questions about historical child abuse allegations. He was asked by the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee how his department lost or destroyed 114 files that could have shed light on alleged abuse. Mark Sedwill: “I am concerned about all material that we can’t find” Mr Sedwill told the committee the files, which relate to the 1980s and 1990s, were discovered missing after an expert investigator was drafted in to look into the Home Office’s handling of paedophile allegations in February last year.
He said the investigator discovered they were missing after he trawled a database of 750,000 files using search terms including “child abuse”, “paedophilia” and “PIE”, an anagram for the Paedophile Information Exchange….
Lady Butler-Sloss’s broader, independent inquiry, will look at how seriously public bodies and other important institutions have taken their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse.
The probe aims to address public concern over failings exposed by recent child sex abuse cases involving celebrities such as Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris…. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-28203914

Police announce wider investigation into Knowl View ‘cover-up’  7 July 2014 Police have said there will be a wider investigation into an alleged cover-up  of sexual abuse claims at a school linked to the late MP Cyril Smith. Greater Manchester Police (GMP) has been looking at claims of abuse at Knowl View residential school for boys in Rochdale from the 1970s…. The Crown Prosecution Service has also released letters detailing why Cyril Smith was not prosecuted in 1998 and 1999, however much of the detail was released in 2012. On both occasions the files were passed to prosecutors but no charges were brought. Seven men have alleged they were abused by the former Rochdale MP at a residential school in Greater Manchester, police have said. Greater Manchester Police has said the men claimed they were abused by Smith at Knowl View in Rochdale in the 1970s and 1980s. Smith’s family said he had always denied the abuse claims. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-28203463

I won’t quit, says head of inquiry into cover-up of child sex abuse despite her BROTHER sitting in the Cabinet in the 1980s
Former High Court judge to lead panel inquiry into abuse allegations
It will examine allegations about politicians, police, judiciary and the BBC
But Labour MP Keith Vaz expressed ‘surprise’ at her appointment
Lady Butler-Sloss’s brother was attorney general in the Cabinet 1979-87
By Matt Chorley, Mailonline Political Editor  9 July 2014
Former High Court judge Baroness Butler-Sloss today rejected criticism of her appointment to lead an inquiry into claims of an Establishment cover-up of child sex abuse, despite her brother being in the Cabinet at the time.
She is to lead a panel of experts investigating allegations that politicians, the police, the judiciary, celebrities, the BBC, the NHS and the Church conspired to cover-up abuse over several decades.
But her brother, Sir Michael Havers, sat in the Conservative Cabinet as attorney general from 1979-87, the period in which much of the alleged abuse is said to have taken place.
Downing Street refused to comment on whether Baroness Butler-Sloss’s family connections were considered before announcing her appointment.
Sir Michael was accused of a ‘cover-up’ in the early 1980s over a refusal to prosecute Foreign Office diplomat Sir Peter Hayman, who was a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange.
Sir Michael, who died in 1992, is said to have had a 20 minute argument outside the Commons chamber with Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in the 1980s in an attempt to stop him using parliamentary privilege to name diplomat Sir Peter as a paedophile….
Harriet Harman today called for the child sex abuse inquiry to examine links between a civil liberties group she used to work for and the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange.
Labour’s deputy leader worked as legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties between 1978 and 1982, when PIE was one of its affiliates.
Ms Harman said Baroness Butler-Sloss’s inquiry should ‘obviously’ look into PIE.
She told BBC Radio 4: ‘The thing about PIE, which was so pernicious about it, is that they infiltrated organisations, so they infiltrated social work organisations, they infiltrated even the Home Office as it turns out, and obviously that is deeply regrettable.
‘What they did is they said they were just for free speech and talking about sexual identity, but actually what they were doing was covering up for their own evil child abuse.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2685949/Head-inquiry-cover-child-sex-abuse-faces-calls-quit-BROTHER-Cabinet-1980s.html

Keith Vaz demands information about ‘missing’ child abuse files Home Office told to provide any details about 114 official files linked to allegations of 1980s paedophile ring by Friday Alan Travis, home affairs editor theguardian.com, Tuesday 8 July 2014
The chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, Keith Vaz, has demanded that the Home Office provides by Friday the titles and any other information known about the “missing” 114 official files linked to allegations of a 1980s paedophile ring at Westminster.
Mark Sedwill, the Home Office’s most senior mandarin, undertook to try to provide further details on the missing 114 “potentially relevant” files but warned the MPs that most of them had “probably been destroyed”.
Sedwill, the Home Office’s permanent secretary, ordered the inquiry which revealed the “missing” files last year after complaints about the fate of a 1980s dossier alleging abuse by prominent public figures sent to then home secretaries by the late Geoffrey Dickens MP….
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jul/08/keith-vaz-information-missing-child-abuse-files-home-office

ICE seeks ‘John Doe’ in largest-ever child porn investigation Jun 09, 2014 By Rob Polansky and Tina Martin  NEW HAVEN, CT (WFSB) – Federal officials sought the public’s help Monday to find a suspected child pornography distributor. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations said “John Doe” helped facilitate one of the largest underground networks ever encountered by law enforcement. ICE said the man was the only remaining suspected administrator of the website. They believed the suspect’s name was Shaun and that he may be between the ages of 40 and 50….
The search was part of Operation Round Table, one of the largest child exploitation investigations in history. It involved victims in 39 states, including Connecticut, and five additional countries. As a result of the operation, investigators said they identified 251 victims. Eight of the victims were female while 243 were male. The majority of the victims were between 13 and 15 years old. A handful of victims were 6 years old and younger….
http://www.wfsb.com/story/25729030/feds-seek-help-in-finding-child-porn-suspect

FBI: 168 kids rescued, 281 pimps nabbed in sex-trafficking crackdown  CBS/AP June 23, 2014   WASHINGTON — Nearly 170 victims of child sex trafficking, many of whom had never been reported missing, were rescued in the last week as part of an annual nationwide crackdown, the FBI said Monday.
Besides the 168 children rescued from the sex trade, 281 pimps were arrested during the same period on state and federal charges. “These are not faraway kids in faraway lands,” FBI Director James Comey said in announcing the annual enforcement push known as Operation Cross Country. Instead, he added, “These are America’s children.” This is the eighth such week long-operation, which this year unfolded in 106 cities. The FBI says nearly 3,600 children have so far been recovered from the streets…. He said one concerning trend is the increasing prevalence of children who are being prostituted online…. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-168-kids-rescued-281-pimps-nabbed-in-sex-trafficking-crackdown/

Deputies: Day care, mentoring program a front for Sanford child porn operation 6/25/14  Sanford, N.C. — A pseudo day care and mentoring program operating out of the Sanford home of a convicted sex offender was actually a front for a child porn production operation, Harnett County Sheriff’s Office detectives said.
Four people have been arrested in the case. Investigators are searching for Tommy Wall, a fifth person who may be in the Raleigh or Fayetteville areas….
Investigators say Bailey Joe Mills, 33, who was convicted three times on charges related to sexual contact with children, ran the operation out of his former Nicole Drive home. They believe Mills ran the day care and mentoring program to attract young girls to his residence and to create a relationship with their parents. Mills then offered the girls money to have sex with men he found through different social media sites, authorities said….
Mills has had multiple arrests and convictions over the years….
The operation, which involves about 10 male and female victims ranging from ages 1 to 14, dates back to 2013, but it wasn’t discovered until Mills’ arrest in January. Investigators said they realized they had a much bigger case after going through Mills’ computer and cell phones….
http://www.wral.com/deputies-day-care-and-mentoring-program-a-front-for-child-porn-operation/13758447/

Claims ADF abuse victims ignored by specialist taskforce June 10, 2014  Timna Jacks   Victims of rape and sexual abuse at the Defence Force were never told about a Government taskforce set up to investigate instances of abuse in the military and provide compensation to those affected.
The ABC TV’s Four Corners program has broadcast four case studies of former cadets who report being sexually assaulted and raped at the Australian Defence Force Academy in the 1990s and 2009 but have not had their cases investigated by a specialist taskforce, the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce (DART).
DART was established to assess complaints of abuse, particularly of the ADFA 24 cases –  a group of about two dozen cadets who were sexually abused at the military college between 1994 and 1998. It would also determine whether any ADFA 24 victims or perpetrators are still serving members of the ADF.
However, the Four Corners investigation revealed only seven of the ADFA 24 have lodged submissions, and the deadline for submissions was in May last year….
DART has already assessed more than 2,400 complaints of abuse, paid $28 million in compensation and referred 63 matters to police….
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/claims-adf-abuse-victims-ignored-by-specialist-taskforce-20140609-39thv.html

Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse
by Alison Miller, Publisher : Karnac Books, 2014 ISBN 13 : 9781782200765
ISBN 10 : 1782200762 In contrast to the author’s previous book, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control, which was for therapists, this book is designed for survivors of these abuses. It takes the survivor systematically through understanding the abuses and how his or her symptoms may be consequences of these abuses, and gives practical advice regarding how a survivor can achieve stability and manage the life issues with which he or she may have difficulty. The book also teaches the survivor how to work with his or her complex personality system and with the traumatic memories, to heal the wounds created by the abuse.
A unique feature of this book is that it addresses the reader as if he or she is dissociative, and directs some information and exercises towards the internal leaders of the personality system, teaching them how to build a cooperative and healing inner community within which information is shared, each part’s needs are met, and traumatic memories can be worked through successfully.
https://www.karnacbooks.com/Product.asp?PID=34803

Survivorship Movie (the Survivorship edit) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BONGdkCuSiw

ATLANTIC VOICE  Jun 1, 2014  Hidden Horrors
The CBC’s Angela MacIvor introduces to two women on a mission to bring awareness to non-state torture. http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Local+Shows/Maritimes/ID/2460990696/
Friday May 30, 2014 Hidden Horrors Posted by Christina Harnett
This week the CBC’s Angela MacIvor brings us a project in conjunction with CBC Investigates. It’s about two nurses from Truro, Nova Scotia who began counselling victims of what they call “non-state torture” about twenty years ago. Now they want the Criminal Code changed to recognize what they say those victims are facing. http://www.cbc.ca/atlanticvoice/
Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald  Jeanne Sarson MEd, BScN, RN & Linda MacDonald MEd, BN, RN
Persons Against NST Non-State Torture Including Ritual Abuse-Torture (RAT) http://nonstatetorture.org/

Incredibly Moving Photo Book Documents Child Sexual Abuse in South Africa DL Cade · May 22, 2014
Editor’s Note: None of the images in this post are graphic, but the content and captions might be upsetting to some. Photographer Mariella Furrer has spent over a decade of her photographic career focusing on the latter, documenting the stories of the survivors and families of child sexual abuse in South Africa. Those stories — told through her photography, through interviews, and sometimes even though victims’ artwork and poetry — come together in her 700-page book My Piece of Sky, a culmination of what might be called Furrer’s life’s work….
This photographic journey began for Furrer in 2002, when she was asked to shoot a story about infant rape in South Africa for Marie Claire. However, after realizing just how shockingly vast this problem was, she knew that a single magazine article wasn’t going to cut it. Thus began a now 12-year-old project at the Johannesburg-based Teddy Bear Clinic for Abused Children, where she has recorded the harsh realities of child sexual abuse in incredibly raw and hard-to-stomach photographs that never reveal the children’s faces, but do a tremendous amount to further their cause and tell their stories…. http://petapixel.com/2014/05/22/incredibly-moving-photo-book-documents-sexual-abuse-south-africa

My Piece of Sky http://www.mypieceofsky.com

A look into the heart of child sex abuse  May 21 2014 By Tanya Farber Cape Town  ….On another page, but in the same orbit of horror, a young rape survivor’s legs bear the welts of lacerations she received during a satanic initiation ritual from when she was eight years old.
….But there are 700 pages in the book. And thousands upon thousands of cases in the country which both amplify one another but also mask the individual story behind each one. Photojournalist Mariella Furrer, who captured images of child abuse in South Africa over a period of more than 10 years before publishing them herself in a book called My Piece of Sky, says it has been a personal journey. Thirty years ago, she was a survivor of molestation by a stranger, and this made her all too aware of the impact it has on a child’s being. “You lose your childhood really, your innocence is snatched away, and what little is left of that once-pure child is now being transformed into a sexual being, a child with knowledge of things way before her time,” she said….
http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/a-look-into-the-heart-of-child-sex-abuse-1.1691582

Falmouth pagan pervert Petrauske refused appeal Wednesday 21st May 2014 in Cornwall  A pervert involved in “ritualistic” sexual abuse of children as part of a witches’ coven has failed in a bid to challenge his convictions.
Peter Helmut Petrauske was jailed for 18 years at Truro Crown Court in December 2012, after being found guilty of indecent assault, aiding and abetting an attempt to rape and rape.
The 74-year-old, of Falmouth, yesterday (Tuesday) launched an attempt to have his convictions overturned at London’s Criminal Appeal Court.
He maintained his denials, saying he had never had any sexual interest in children and argued that evidence of his “bad character” should not have been disclosed to jurors at his trial, as it was “prejudicial” to his defence.
But his appeal was rejected by three of the country’s top judges, who said his trial was fair and his convictions “safe.” Petrauske and his accomplice, 71-year-old Jack Kemp, also of Falmouth, were said to have worn ceremonial robes and had pagan paraphernalia when they abused girls in Cornwall during the 1970s. Petrauske described himself as the high priest of a white witches’ coven in St Ives, west Cornwall….
Kemp was also found guilty of indecent assault and indecency with a child, and was jailed for 14 years….   http://www.thisisthewestcountry.co.uk/news/cornwall_news/11225477.Falmouth_pagan_pervert_Petrauske_refused_appeal/

UN warns Britain over child voodoo victims, sex tourists Agence France-Presse June 19, 2014
Hundreds of children are believed to have been kidnapped in Africa and brought to Britain for brutal voodoo rituals, a UN watchdog said Thursday, urging London to step up its fight against the scourge. “We’re concerned about reports that hundreds of children have been abducted from their families in Africa and trafficked to the UK, especially London, for religious rituals,” said Kristen Sandberg, head of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. “They are used in so-called voodoo rituals, and are also raped and sexually abused. The number of convictions is extremely low,” said the former Norwegian supreme court judge. British police are reported to have recorded scores of cases over the past decade of children who have faced torture and abuse as part of witchcraft rituals….
Sandberg said child trafficking for rituals was part of a wider problem, with thousands of minors brought into Britain every year for sexual exploitation and labour. The UN committee is made of up 18 independent experts who monitor the implementation of international children’s rights treaties. It held a hearing with British officials last month. In its conclusions on that session, released Thursday, it said Britain should “strengthen the capacity of law-enforcement authorities and judiciary to detect and prosecute trafficking of children for labour, sexual and other forms of exploitation, including for religious rituals”….
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/140619/un-warns-britain-over-child-voodoo-victims-sex-tourists-0

Nigeria: How Two Teenage Students Escaped Ritual Murder in Gboko By Peter Duru, 14 May 2014
Makurdi — A 13-year-old Junior Secondary II student of Government Secondary School Gboko, Dooyum Moar, and another female student of Gkoko High School, narrowly escaped being beheaded by a ritualist after being kidnapped by a commercial vehicle operator in Makurdi….
“My son said they were taken to a forest in Gboko where the kids were tied to the ground and presented before an aged woman in a shrine who wanted to behead them for rituals, but later changed her mind. “At this time, my son said they were crying and begging for mercy, then the woman handed a machete to one of the kidnappers, instructing that they should be killed on their way back.
“However, by divine intervention, the kidnappers did not kill them as instructed, but dumped them at Apir on the outskirts of Makurdi, where a good Samaritan picked them up.”….
http://allafrica.com/stories/201405140066.html

Ugandans drum alarms to rescue abducted children Mon Jun 23, 2014 By Rodney Muhumuza AP Writer
BUIKWE, Uganda — When a child goes missing in this central Ugandan district, villagers beat drums into a pulsing rhythm that sends rescuers scampering through bushes. Others, riding motorcycles, try to block exit routes.
In response to the kidnappings and ritual killings of children here, the traumatized community has created a rudimentary but effective abduction alert system that has saved at least two children so far this year.
Although the problem of children being killed as human sacrifices is reported in several parts of Uganda, Buikwe has gained notoriety recently as the country’s witchcraft capital. One in three households here keeps a shrine — a thatched hut in which so-called witchdoctors can be consulted — a frightening statistic that explains the prevalence of superstitious practices that threaten the lives of many children and even adults….
Eight children have been abducted and ritualistically killed in Buikwe this year, their mutilated bodies dumped in bushes and sugarcane plantations, according to local officials.
Across Uganda, at least 729 children were abducted in 2013, according to a Ugandan police report that also cited a 39 percent increase in crimes against children over the previous year…..
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/ugandans-drum-alarms-to-rescue-abducted-children/article_ddac5238-2ba8-512e-a0f8-9056ba3925c1.html

‘Satanic’ murder teens back in court South Africa Wednesday 18 June 2014 SOWETO – Two teenage boys accused of murdering two Soweto schoolgirls will appear in the Protea magistrate’s court on Wednesday.
….The girls were found dead in a field in Dobsonville, Soweto, in February. They were both wearing George Khoza Secondary School uniforms and had cuts on their hands and necks. Three black candles and two razor blades were found at the scene, leading to speculation that  the murders were related to a satanic ritual. -Sapa  http://www.enca.com/satanic-murder-teens-back-court

‘Black magic’ sex abuse trial: Jury fail to reach a verdict May 22, 2014 By Liz Keen   Prosecutors have been given two weeks to decide if they will seek a retrial at Cardiff Crown Court  ‘Black magic’ wife Carolee Hickman and her husband, who deny abusing a Bridgend schoolgirl 40 years ago may face a second trial after a jury failed to reach a verdict in their case after more than six hours of deliberations.
Prosecutors have been given two weeks to decide if they will seek a retrial at Cardiff Crown Court. The alleged victim, now 52, alleges she was sexually assaulted by Hickman and raped by her husband Albert Hickman in the 1970s at their home after threats of black magic and witchcraft petrified her into submission over a period of time.
The couple deny it, saying although they were each later jailed for offences against other children – information about which is available on the Internet – there was no incident in Bridgend….
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/black-magic-sex-abuse-trial-7155519

‘If I wanted to pin anybody down on the floor I don’t need the help of another person,’ rape accused tells court May 19, 2014  By Liz Keen    Former fireman Albert Hickman, 64, is accused of raping a Bridgend schoolgirl more than 40 years ago
A man accused of raping a Bridgend schoolgirl while his ‘black magic’ wife held her down told a jury he would not have needed any help to assault a child.
Former “fit” fireman and RAF mechanic Albert Hickman said the allegation, dating back 40 years, when there were allegedly books on witchcraft as well as pornography at his home, was not true….
Hickman, now 64, admitted being jailed for 10 years in the 1980s for the rape of a 13-year-old girl in Shropshire but said while he was stationed at RAF St Athan and attending Salvation Army meetings with his wife several years before he did no such thing.  The alleged victim, now 52, has told the jury she would ‘mitch off’ school and go to the Hickmans’ house after being befriended by his wife Carolee, who herself has admitted holding down another girl for a man to have sex with her during a black magic ritual. The woman has accused Mrs Hickman of kissing and touching her over a period of time, frightening her into submission with witchcraft, before helping her husband commit rape….
He said he was never involved in black magic rituals himself and if ceremonies did take place at any of their homes he was unaware of it….
The couple were divorced while he served his sentence for abuse and his wife was serving a five-year term but later remarried – after she had had a second husband….
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/rape-accused-albert-hickman-says-7142685

Cops probe claim that notorious sex abuse cases are linked  Friday 27th June 2014 Crime Desk By Nicola Tallant  GARDAI have been asked to investigate links between two notorious child abuse cases amid claims that a network of paedophiles preyed on children in one of the country’s most affluent suburbs.
Rape victim Fiona Doyle has given a statement to cops investigating the Dalkey House of Horror file saying she believes there are sinister connections between the two cases.
And she has appealed to anyone who was abused in the area, or knew about abuse, to come forward.
The Sunday World understands that at least one other claim of historical sex abuse in the Killiney area has also been made.
Fiona, who won a People of the Year award for her bravery, says she believes that child abuse was rife in South County Dublin.
After a lengthy campaign for justice backed by the Sunday World, Gardai in Dun Laoghaire are currently reviewing allegations made by Cynthia Owen that she was raped by a group of men in Dalkey, and by members of her own family, and that she bore two children out of incest and rape when she was aged 11 and 14.
Among those who have given statements to the investigation is Fiona, whose father Patrick O’Brien was jailed for 12 years after an outcry when he was initially freed on bail pending sentence.
Fiona has told Gardai how her uncle Michael Cowap, recently deceased, and a friend of her father’s also raped her as a young child. But the 47-year-old mum says that she has now become aware of a number of different paedophile rings operating in the Dun Laoghaire area….
Three of my father’s friends that I know of were paedophiles. They were from the same area. There was an underlying acceptance of sexual abuse of children in the greater Dun Laoghaire area. A lot of people knew of my abuse and did nothing….
The Sunday World understands that a number of people have now come forward to Gardai in Dun Laoghaire. One has alleged she was sexually abused on Killiney Hill and another has told this newspaper she recalls being told ritual abuse took place on Dalkey Island.
http://www.sundayworld.com/top-stories/crime-desk/ring-of-evil

Jimmy Savile: ‘It couldn’t happen again.’ Yes it could and it’s probably happening right now
Beginning his working life in the aviation industry and trained by the BBC, Tony Gosling is a British land rights activist, historian & investigative radio journalist. June 27, 2014
We heard this week yet more horrors about the BBC presenter, ‘volunteer hospital porter’ and prolific child abuser Jimmy Savile having molested living patients at 28 separate hospitals, as well as testimony that he gained access to at least one mortuary to sexually abuse corpses. But despite Savile having up to a thousand victims, it was only due to the immense courage and persistence of a handful of selfless journalists that the devastating story of Britain’s most prolific ever pedophile and child abuser saw the light of day.
Since the scandal broke in October 2012, the London media have criticized police, royalty, government officials, health service managers and BBC staff for covering up Savile’s crimes, but few if any of these media commentators has admitted to their own vital role in hushing up Britain’s ‘worst kept secret’ for decades….
Many have been shocked at Savile’s ability to keep his child sexual abuse secret for nearly fifty years, while mingling with royalty and others at the top of British society. Those he abused were told they better never breathe a word about it because he had ‘friends in high places,’ which he did.
Those who endorsed Britain’s most prolific ever child sex abuser were not just the obvious and unpunished BBC bosses, but included Prince Charles and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher….
Social Affairs Correspondent Liz Mackean, from the BBC’s nightly flagship Newsnight, was the only senior journalist in the country with the courage to bite the bullet on the ‘worst kept secret in journalism.’ She put her career on the line and pushed her editor to broadcast the Savile accusations. Despite Liz, a former BBC Radio colleague of mine, having obtained heart-wrenching interviews with Savile’s victims in December 2011, Newsnight editor Peter Rippon refused to even watch, let alone transmit them….
West Yorkshire police The Cook Report and Savile’s ‘satanic rituals’
Psychotherapist Valerie Sinason had been talking for years, to anyone who would listen, about Savile. She personally interviewed two of his victims in her London based ‘Clinic for Dissociative Studies’ who told her at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire that they had been repeatedly sexually abused in horrific rituals they described as ‘satanic.’
Wearing robes and masks in the hospital basement and to Latin chants of ‘Hail Satanus’, the idea, it seems, was two-fold: for Savile to ‘share’ his victims with other abusers and also to so deeply traumatize the children with supernatural threats of demons and devil masks that, through fear, they would never dare breathe a word to anyone. They were being groomed, as so many children are in government ‘care homes’ for serial abusers, and for pimps, heading down the lonely road to a life of abuse or prostitution.
Sinason has not been the only one to talk of satanic ritual abuse in connection with Savile. Britain’s most popular TV journalist ever, Roger Cook, also exposed what he believed was a satanic ritual abuse ring in Savile’s home town of Leeds, Yorkshire. During the airing of an edition called the ‘The Devil’s Work’ on 17 July, 1989 (under the umbrella of the ten-million-viewers-a-night ‘Cook Report’ series), witnesses told Cook that a certain ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice shop’, run by one Chris Bray, was connected to a ritual abuse ring in the city. Post-transmission threats by Bray to prosecute Central TV proved empty….  http://rt.com/op-edge/168876-savile-scandal-bbc-presenter/

Recap: Jimmy Savile had sex with dead bodies in mortuary, shocking hospital report reveals  Jun 27, 2014 By Anthony Bond, Steve Robson  An investigation into Savile’s abuse at Leeds General Infirmary (LGI) heard the now-dead entertainer claimed to have “interfered with the bodies of deceased patients”
Jimmy Savile boasted about having sex with corpses and had jewellery made from glass eyes he removed from their bodies, it was revealed today. The sick paedophile also gloated to others that he enjoyed “posing” the corpses and that he would “wheel them around” at night at Leeds General Infirmary.
The twisted crimes were revealed in 28 NHS reports published today…. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/recap-jimmy-savile-sex-dead-3767280

Sickening extent of Jimmy Savile’s full depravity laid bare in shocking NHS report Jun 26, 2014 By Andrew Gregory, Tom Pettifor, David Collins  The sex beast, free to roam hospitals abusing victims at will, boasted of having sex with corpses while he continued to abuse until he was 82
Police are probing claims sick Jimmy Savile was involved in the death of a young girl. The former DJ was allegedly seen dragging away a child at a care home who was later said to have died.
The sickening extent of his depravity was laid bare today as damning NHS reports revealed the pervert was free to roam hospitals abusing victims at will – even targeting the dead.
The mass of NHS papers revealed vile Savile boasted about having sex with corpses in a mortuary, posed with bodies and wheeled them around at night, stole glass eyes from the dead and made them into rings and abused teenage patients in their beds as they recovered from surgery.
And it is said the paedophile targeted at least 103 men, women, boys and girls aged between five and 75 for his attacks in hospitals and state -institutions, which included three rapes….
He bragged about having sex with corpses at Leeds General Infirmary. A former nurse at -Broadmoor said Savile told her about his appalling activities at the Yorkshire hospital, where he was a charity fundraiser and volunteer porter.
He said he would “muck about” posing with dead bodies of men and women together before taking photographs.
The nurse added: “I was a little bit upset because I had no concept, in those days, of… while I’d heard of -necrophilia… but I didn’t -understand what it meant.”
It is claimed former Top of the Pops frontman Savile told her he sexually assaulted the bodies as well, something he sickeningly dubbed “garamoosh”.
A former patient at Barnet General Hospital in North London said nurses told her in 1983 that Savile “liked to have sex with dead bodies”….
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sickening-extent-jimmy-saviles-full-3769301

Minnesota cult leader called the girls ‘brides of Christ’ – and he was ‘Christ’ By Karl Kahler Special to the Pioneer Press 05/19/2014
Lindsay Tornambe was just 13 when her parents dropped her off at a Christian camp in Pine County, Minn., where a charismatic cult leader had summoned her to be one of his 10 “Maidens” — virgins who were to be “sacrificed to God” by being married to Christ.
“He started explaining that having sex with me was his way of showing me God’s love, and that because he was Christ in the flesh, I could still remain a virgin even though I had sex with him,” she said. Now 27, Tornambe says she endured nine years of sexual abuse by Victor Barnard, 52, the head of a secretive cult who is believed to be hiding with followers in the state of Washington after he was charged last month in Minnesota with 59 counts of criminal sexual conduct — chiefly charges of child rape. I remember Barnard well, as I went to Bible college with him in Kansas in the 1980s, when we were both members of The Way International, a notorious Christian cult based in Ohio. In fact, I recognize the playbook he is alleged to have used to justify the sexual abuse of trusting followers, because he would have learned it from our former masters in The Way….
Karl Kahler is national editor of the San Jose Mercury News and author of “The Cult That Snapped: A Journey Into The Way International.”
http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_25783953/victor-barnard-called-girls-brides-christ-and-he

describes violence
Nebraskan convicted in ’85 cult murder gets commutation Grant Schulte, Associated Press May 20, 2014 LINCOLN, Neb. – A Nebraskan who participated in a gruesome, cult-related murder in 1985 was granted a rare commutation Tuesday that will end his lifetime parole sentence later this year.
The Nebraska Board of Pardons voted unanimously to grant Timothy Haverkamp’s request to stop his parole supervision. Haverkamp was released from his prison in 2009 after serving 23 years of a 10-years-to-life sentence….
Haverkamp, 52, was convicted of second-degree murder for his role in the torture and murder of James Thimm, a fellow cult member, at a farm compound near Rulo in southeastern Nebraska. He pleaded guilty and later testified against cult leader Michael Ryan, who remains on death row. Haverkamp also was a key witness against Ryan’s son, Dennis….
Michael Ryan ordered Thimm’s murder because he had displeased Yahweh, their god. Michael Ryan also was convicted in the beating death of the 5-year-old son of a cult member.
The Ryans and about 20 cult members lived on the farm. The group hated Jews and stored weapons in preparation for a final battle between good and evil….
http://www.argusleader.com/story/news/crime/2014/05/21/nebraskan-convicted-cult-murder-gets-commutation/9363277/

‘Mind pilots’ steer plane sim with thoughts alone  Seven test pilots demonstrate an X-Men-like ability to steer an airplane through a flight simulation with surprising accuracy.
by Michael Franco     May 27, 2014  Electrodes attached to a cap convert brain waves into signals that can be processed by the flight simulator for hands-free flying. Technische Universität München….
New research out of the Technische Universität München (TUM) in Germany is hinting that mind control might soon reach entirely new heights — even by us non-mutants. They’ve demonstrated that pilots might be able to fly planes through the sky using their thoughts alone.
The researchers hooked study participants to a cap containing dozens of electroencephalography (EEG) electrodes, sat them down in a flight simulator, and told them to steer the plane through the sim using their thoughts alone. The cap read the electrical signals from their brains and an algorithm then translated those signals into computer commands.
Seven people underwent the experiment and, according to the researchers, all were able to pilot the plane using their thoughts to such a degree that their performance could have satisfied some of the criteria for getting a pilot’s license….
http://www.cnet.com/news/mind-pilots-steer-a-plane-with-thoughts-alone/

describes crimes
Suspected devil worshipper accused of killing woman and eating part of her corpse Jun 10, 2014 By Christopher Bucktin   Gregory Hale, has been arrested at his home in Coffee County, Tennessee, and is charged with premeditated first-degree murder and abuse of a corpse   A suspected devil worshipper has been accused of killing a woman, dismembering her body and eating part of her corpse, authorities said. Gregory Hale, has been arrested at his home in Coffee County, Tennessee, and is charged with premeditated first-degree murder and abuse of a corpse….
He is reported to have admitted killing Hyder and then disposing of the body by chopping it up.
Hale buried the victim’s body but ate part of the corpse, court documentation stated.
A friend of Hale’s said he a self-described devil worshipper who was fired from a slaughterhouse after the owner caught him performing a satanic ritual with animal parts….
http://www.irishmirror.ie/news/suspected-devil-worshipper-accused-killing-3672033

describes crimes
Tennessee man kills woman, eats corpse: US officials  Wednesday Jun 11, 2014
A man in Tennessee has been arrested after local police discovered a woman’s partially-eaten corpse in his rural home.
37-year-old Gregory Scott Hale is charged with first-degree murder and abuse of a corpse in connection with the death of Lisa Marie Hyder….
Local NBC affiliate WSMV reports that neighbors say Dale described himself as a devil worshipper, and he was fired from his job at a slaughterhouse when the owner caught him using animal parts to perform a satanic ritual.
His is being held on $1.5 million bond and will next appear in court June 23.UPI
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/06/10/366414/tennessee-man-kills-woman-eats-corpse/

describes crimes
Tennessee man killed, dismembered and ate woman before burying leftover body parts: police
Gregory Hale, 37, admitted to police that he cut off Lisa Marie Hyder’s head, feet and hands before burying the 36-year-old’s torso in a burn pile. The alleged ‘devil worshipper’ also ate some of the woman and asked a neighbor in Summitville for help disposing of a body, police said.
BY Sasha Goldstein  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS  Tuesday, June 10, 2014
A Satanic worshipper in Tennessee killed, dismembered and ate a woman he had just met in a disturbing ritualistic murder, police said.
Cops learned of Gregory Hale’s gruesome secret when the 37-year-old asked a friend for help in disposing of a body, The Tullahoma News reported.
By that point, Hale had already allegedly killed and beheaded Lisa Marie Hyder, 36, then cut off her hands and placed them in a plastic bucket. He also allegedly cut of her feet and other body parts and placed them in another bucket before burying the woman’s torso under a burn pile behind his home.
When cops caught up to and arrested Hale on Sunday, he admitted to the gruesome crime, cops said. Hale also told cops he ate part of the woman, whom he had met the day she died, which prosecutors believe was on Friday, WSMV-TV reported…..
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/tenn-man-killed-dismembered-ate-woman-police-article-1.1824786

‘Satanist’ arrested for ritual murder in square Tuesday, June 17, 2014   Associated Press
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greek police say they have arrested a self-described Satanist suspected of ritually killing a homeless woman in an Athens public square and planning a second murder for this weekend’s summer solstice. A police statement Tuesday said the 22-year-old Greek suspect confessed to killing the woman with a heavy stone during a pre-dawn “ritual Satanist ceremony” in the seaside Glyfada suburb. The 41-year-old woman was found dead on April 20, Orthodox Easter Sunday, with severe head injuries. A nearby bench had been daubed in blood with Satanist insignia. The statement said the suspect was arrested Monday, also in Glyfada. It said police identified him by references to the killing on social media, DNA analysis and a fingerprint on a plastic bag containing the murder weapon, found in a nearby bin. http://www.moultonadvertiser.com/news/national/article_f42fe80d-681d-52ab-91fb-43408e47e294.html

‘Satanist’ arrested for ritual murder in square  By Associated Press June 17  ATHENS, Greece — A self-described Satanist has been arrested in Greece on suspicion of ritually killing a homeless woman in an Athens public square and planning a second murder for this weekend’s summer solstice, police said Tuesday. A police statement said the 22-year-old Greek suspect confessed to killing the woman with a heavy stone during a pre-dawn “ritual Satanist ceremony” in the seaside Glyfada suburb. Police said the suspect had been working alone, and did not appear to be linked with any organized group….
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/satanist-arrested-for-ritual-murder-in-square/2014/06/17/b422e15c-f62d-11e3-afdf-f7ffea8c744a_story.html

World Cup 2014 First Ball To Be Kicked By Paralyzed Teen With Mind-Controlled Prosthesis From ‘The Walk Again Project’ May 26, 2014
That quote, courtesy of David Prawel, Ph. D, is sure to get your attention. According to the report from Engadget, that’s exactly what he and the folks at Colorado State University have been working on according to the video above.
It describes a high-tech prosthesis designed as part of the “Walk Again Project,” a venture described by Duke University’s Immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE) as a “nonprofit, international collaboration among the Duke University Center for Neuroengineering, the Technical University of Munich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal in Brazil, The University of California, Davis, The University of Kentucky, and Regis Kopper of The Duke immersive Virtual Environment.”
“This is the first exoskelton that is getting feedback from the volunteer,” says Colorado State Vice President of Research Alan Rudolph, Ph. D. “who’s more integrated into the device and learning how to control the device through non-invasive signals, but more importantly through providing feedback about their world as they’re learning how to re-walk or learning again how to walk inside the exoskeleton.”
According to the Washington Post, the candidate, a Brazilian teenager paralyzed from the waist down and selected from a pool of 10, has been training for months with a virtual reality simulator. His legs will be stabilized by motorized metal braces, in turn stabilized by battery-powered gyroscopes. The desired result, of course, is that he will use this Iron Man-like prosthesis to translate human thought into mechanical motion on June 12 as part of the 2014 World Cup Opening Ceremony….
http://www.inquisitr.com/1268033/the-walk-again-project/

Child Abuse and Trauma Issues

‘Witchhunt Narrative’ Retells ’80s Day Care Abuse  By Wendy Murphy WeNews contributing editor
Friday, May 23, 2014 For readers who learned about these cases from conventional media, this book will be a shocking revelation of how reporters skewed criminal cases to the disadvantage of victims. Now it seems an awful lot of abused children deserve an apology.
(WOMENSENEWS)–In his explosive new book, “The Witchhunt Narrative,” Brown University Professor Ross Cheit challenges everything you think you know about the “day care center” hysteria of the 1980s.
The infamous California McMartin case, for example, was widely perceived as a terrible injustice where innocent adults were persecuted based on statements from hysterical parents, bad cops, fascist prosecutors and incompetent children. But as it turns out in this book, it wasn’t such an injustice after all. Several of the teachers charged were innocent, but the underlying claims about many children being sexually abused by Ray Buckey (aided by his mother) were quite credible….
Cheit, a lawyer with a doctorate in public policy, meticulously documents the evidence from many of the high-profile cases and proves time and time again that nearly all the day care center cases were based on credible and compelling evidence. The children in many of the stories he discusses made statements independent from one another, free from the influence of parents, police or anyone else. Contrary to the theme of much media coverage, there was no reason to suspect the children were being made to lie by vindictive parents….
http://www.womensenews.org/story/books/140521/witchhunt-narrative-retells-80s-day-care-abuse

Abuse Cases, and a Legacy of Skepticism  ‘The Witch-Hunt Narrative’: Are We Dismissing Real Victims? JUNE 9, 2014  ….McMartin was the first of a series of prosecutions in the 1980s that have come to be seen as a collective witch hunt, in which panicked parents and incompetent investigators led children to make up stories of abuse by adults at day care centers and preschools.
At first, the news media ran with the lurid accounts of abuse, but then some skeptical reporters questioned the prevailing narrative and discredited the snowballing allegations. The pendulum swung from credulity to doubt.
But what if the skeptics went too far? What if some of the children were really abused? And what if the legacy of these cases is a disturbing tendency to disbelieve children who say they are being molested?
Those are the questions that frame this new book by Ross E. Cheit, a political scientist at Brown University who spent nearly 15 years on research, poring over old trial transcripts and interview tapes.
His conclusion about the McMartin case is that the outcome was “doubly unjust.” While he acknowledges that some defendants were falsely accused, he argues that Mr. Buckey was probably guilty, meaning that some of the children were not only sexually abused but “have been demeaned by the witch-hunt narrative’s assertion that the entire case was a ‘hoax.’ ”
It’s a provocative notion, that the debunkers deserve a debunking. Professor Cheit, who himself suffered sexual abuse as a child, criticizes the skepticism that helped bring down the prosecutions of McMartin and other day-care providers, calling it a “crusade to promote the witch-hunt narrative.”
He thinks the continued treatment of these cases as a modern-day episode of mass hysteria does disservice to children and even puts them in danger….
Most children who are sexually abused do not tell anyone. “Perpetrators often choose children on the basis of the likelihood that they will comply and keep the secret,” Dr. Lyon writes.
It’s a pattern that played out in the years of hidden sexual abuse by Catholic priests, and at Penn State by the coach Jerry Sandusky.
Professor Cheit is rightly haunted by the cover-up at Penn State. “We often minimize and deny so as to allow us to avoid seeing things we would rather not see,” he writes….
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/science/the-witch-hunt-narrative-are-we-dismissing-real-victims.html

The Witch-Hunt Narrative By Ross E. Cheit  Based on a comprehensive examination of primary sources, The Witch-Hunt Narrative challenges the conventional wisdom about these cases. Ross Cheit uses trial transcripts and related court documents to demonstrate that many of the cases at the core of the witch-hunt narrative involved compelling evidence of abuse. He focuses on three major cases while also surveying dozens more, including some that involved injustice to the defendants. He finds that in many cases the conventional wisdom is significantly overdrawn.
Cheit’s years of research also revealed a history of minimizing and denying abuse, and a surprisingly lenient response to many child molesters. Those trends continue into the present, where there are pockets of overreaction to sexual abuse in a sea of under-reaction….
This powerful book shows how a narrative based on empirically thin evidence became a theory with real social force, and how that theory stood at odds with the grim reality of sexual abuse. The Witch-Hunt Narrative is a magisterial account of the social dynamics that led to the denial of widespread human tragedy. http://blogs.brown.edu/rcheit/sample-page-2/   http://blogs.brown.edu/rcheit/

The Leonard Lopate Show  Are Child Sexual Abuse Cases More Common Than We Think? Tuesday, July 08, 2014 Court documents reveal surprising leniency in trials of child molestors, claims Cheit
In the early 1990s, a new narrative emerged that child sex abuse cases were part of a “moral panic” that produced a witch hunt, and the children who testified were not reliable and easily swayed by prosecutors. But Ross Cheit reveals that the issue had not been blown out of proportion at all. His book The Witch Hunt Narrative, shows that child sex abuse convictions were regular occurrences and that the crime occurred far more frequently than many believed.
http://www.wnyc.org/story/behind-narrative-child-sex-abuse-convictions/

President Obama signs child abuse bill honoring Kilah Davenport Geoff Bennett, Washington, D.C. Bureau  Tuesday, May 20, 2014 NATIONWIDE — President Obama signed the Kilah Davenport Child Protection Act into law on Tuesday. Republican Congressman Robert Pittenger introduced the bill in honor of a young North Carolina girl. Republican Congressman Robert Pittenger repeatedly used the word “grateful” to describe how he feels now that President Obama has signed the Kilah Davenport Child Protection Act into law. It’s named in memory of 4-year-old Kilah Davenport, who was severely beaten by her stepfather in Union County back in 2012. Kilah Davenport died from those injuries earlier this year….
The law requires the Department of Justice to investigate state child abuse laws to make sure abusers are appropriately punished. North Carolina was among the states that had incredibly lenient child abuse laws and criminal penalties….
http://triadnc.twcnews.com/content/news/707897/president-obama-signs-child-abuse-bill-honoring-kilah-davenport

Child abuse numbers aren’t pretty By Patsy Kelly Friday, May 23, 2014 TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) – Local children are suffering every day. It’s a hidden epidemic of child abuse and neglect. Nationally, more than three million reports of child abuse are made in the United States each year and the U.S. has one of the worst records in the world. More than four children die every day as a result of child abuse. And it can have long-term effects throughout the next generations…. http://wthitv.com/2014/05/23/child-abuse-numbers-arent-pretty/

Second UN panel criticizes Vatican on sex abuse By John L. Allen Jr. Globe Staff   May 23, 2014
ROME — For the second time, a United Nations panel has criticized the Vatican for its response to the child sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, charging it with failing to mandate that abuse charges be reported to police, moving clergy to evade discipline, and failing to see that victims obtain adequate compensation.
“Clergy . . . were transferred to other dioceses and institutions where they remained in contact with minors and others who are vulnerable,” the United Nations Committee against Torture charged in a new report, “and in some cases committed abuse in their subsequent placements.”
The report follows a similar indictment from the Committee on the Rights of the Child that appeared in February, which asserted that the Vatican had fostered “impunity” for abusers….
Unlike the earlier UN assessment, the new report mixes criticism with praise for steps taken by the Catholic Church over the last decade to combat child abuse, including tougher legal sanctions for clergy and the creation of a new papal commission in December 2013 to press for reform. That commission includes Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston…..
At the same time, the committee suggested that pledges of zero tolerance by church officials aren’t always effectively translated into action….
In its report, the panel said it was “concerned by reports’’ that Catholic officials “resist the principle of mandatory reporting’’ of abuse allegations….
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/05/22/second-panel-criticzes-vatican-sex-abuse/YuX300eGKJYDNUPVdTXcmJ/story.html

Pope to meet abuse victims with Boston’s O’Malley By John L. Allen Jr. Globe Staff   May 26, 2014 ROME — Pope Francis said Monday that he plans to celebrate a Mass with a small group of victims of sexual abuse in the coming weeks and to hold a private meeting to hear from them, a session in which Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston will also take part. Francis also revealed that three Catholic bishops are under Vatican investigation for matters related to sexual abuse, citing those inquiries as proof that there will be no “daddy’s boys” in the clergy who enjoy special privileges on his watch.
Francis did not make it clear whether those three bishops are being investigated for abuse they are alleged to have committed or for an alleged failure to respond properly to possible abuse by others…. http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/05/26/pope-francis-meet-abuse-victims-with-boston-malley/6iJGjmYr3ujHBmXpQLRpTN/story.html

Priest Accused of Abuse in U.S. Rises Again in Paraguay By Will Carless, GlobalPost
Father Carlos Urrutigoity glides into the sanctuary, his ivory and scarlet robes swishing between the pews. Revered by his flock in the unruly diocese of eastern Paraguay’s Ciudad del Este, the priest will deliver his sermon to hundreds of worshippers. They will later clamor outside the church to meet the man, to receive his benediction.
This is a man who’s been described by bishops from Switzerland to Pennsylvania as “dangerous,” “abnormal,” and “a serious threat to young people.”
He has spent two decades flitting from diocese to diocese, always one step ahead of church and legal authorities, before landing in this lawless, remote corner of South America. Here, in the pirate-laden jungle near the Iguacu falls, he has risen to a position of power.
Today, despite warnings from the bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where in 2002 Urrutigoity was accused of molesting a teenage boy and sleeping with and touching other young men, this priest leads a starry-eyed cadre of young male seminarians. Despite once being accused of running what a fellow priest called a “homosexual cult” in the hills of Pennsylvania, Urrutigoity now graces the diocese website here, advertising seminars for budding young Catholics.
Urrutigoity’s voyage from his native Argentina to Pennsylvania and back to South America represents a new chapter in the shocking story of abuse in the Catholic Church.
It illustrates the church’s seeming inability to prevent a priest accused of illegal acts in the United States from fleeing to a remote developing country — even one on the doorstep of Pope Francis’ homeland — and remaking himself into a powerful religious leader.
Urrutigoity, who denies ever molesting anyone, says he’s been the victim of a smear campaign. But to those devoted to uncovering church misdeeds, the Argentine’s sustained protection by the Catholic establishment is emblematic of an ethos of cover-ups and gross negligence that continues to place young people at risk….
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/priest-accused-abuse-u-s-rises-again-paraguay-n121231

Re-Watching Woody Allen The newly-chilling themes that you can see throughout his movies By Stephen Marche on February 4, 2014
….Nobody except Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen knows what happened in that attic, and no one else ever will. But the sheer vividness with which Farrow recounts the experience, as well as the forum in which she does so, is enough to make even the most ardent fan reevaluate an artist’s entire body of work, especially one as personal as Allen’s. So what happens when you go looking for evidence of sex crimes in Woody Allen movies? If you look, you find it, again, and again, and again….  http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/dylan-farrow-woody-allen-movies

AnnaLynne McCord reveals she was suicidal after childhood abuse, sexual assault: ‘It’s time to talk about the truth’ The ‘90210’ actress spoke out about traumatic incidents she experienced when she was younger as a way to let women know that ‘they have a voice.’ BY Kirthana Ramisetti NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Thursday, May 29, 2014  AnnaLynne McCord can no longer remain silent.
The “90210” star has opened up about being raped when she was a child, then being sexually assaulted early in her Hollywood career, revealing these traumatic incidents in the July issue of Cosmopolitan. The actress said that she had decided to speak out now to empower other women and let them know that “they have a voice.”
McCord, 26, described her childhood in Monroe, Ga., as “extremely religious and conservative,” with a pastor father who believed in discipline that she said was more akin to abuse, describing it as “painful and ritualistic.”….
The harrowing upbringing led a teenage McCord to have unhealthy relationships with men, including provoking them to be violent toward her. “My sexual relationships were dark and violently dramatic,” she said.
It was only when she discussed it with her first boyfriend that she realized her parents’ disciplinary tactics were actually abuse, and she confronted them about it, calling it “an important step.”
When McCord moved to Los Angeles for her acting career at age 18, she was raped by a friend who staying overnight at her apartment….
McCord was able to pull through her depression with professional help and support of her family and friends — and said she wants to help others who have gone through similar trauma, including launching a college speaking tour this fall.
“Don’t put yourself in a box,” McCord advises. “Don’t let the polite lies of society silence you. Honestly, I would endure everything all over again – it has led me to my own revolution.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/annalynne-mccord-opens-abuse-rape-article-1.1810337

AnnaLynne McCord: Why I’m Done Staying Quiet About My Sexual Assault  As Told To Abigail Pesta Celebrity Interviews & Gossip May 29, 2014 Onscreen, Dallas and 90210 star AnnaLynne McCord radiates pure confidence. But before she found Hollywood success, she survived a strict, violent upbringing and a sexual assault by a close friend. Now she’s speaking out to help other women who don’t have a voice.
When I was on 90210 a few years ago, the character I played, Naomi, was raped by someone she knew. I welcomed the story line, thinking it was impor-tant for viewers. I memorized my lines and rehearsed the scenes. I felt ready to go. Then when the cameras were rolling on an intense scene — a fight with an unsupportive friend after the assault — I broke down, sobbing uncontrolla-bly. My castmates thought I had done a great job playing the part. They had no idea that I had actually been sexually assaulted by someone I knew in real life.
For you to understand what happened to me and my reaction to it — burying the assault deep down inside — first you need to know a few things about my life. I’m telling my story now because I think it’s time to talk about the truth. When I was a kid, my candor got me in a lot of trouble, and I learned to stay quiet, to keep my feelings to myself. But no more. I’m in spiritual warrior mode.
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/celebrity/exclusive/annalynne-mccord-sexual-assault

1 in 8 Children Will Be Maltreated, Study Says The numbers are even higher for African-American and Native American children. By Allie Bidwell June 2, 2014  The number of children who experience a confirmed case of maltreatment in their lifetime could be much higher than previous estimates, according to a new study released by Yale University on Monday.
Maltreatment – which can come in the form of neglect or physical, sexual or emotional abuse – is also known to have negative physical and mental health outcomes for children, including improper brain development, lower language development and impaired cognitive abilities.
More than 12 percent of American children will experience a confirmed case of maltreatment by the time they turn 18, the study found. Among African-American and Native American children, the numbers were even higher: 1 in 5 black children and 1 in 7 Native American children experienced maltreatment during that time, according to the study, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
Still, the actual number of child maltreatment incidents is likely much higher, says Christopher Wildeman, an associate professor of sociology at Yale. The 12.5 percent estimate he and his colleagues determined is “the absolute floor,” he says, because confirming maltreatment cases is such a complicated process.
“The bar for getting to the point that you have a confirmed maltreatment case is very, very high,” Wildeman says. “The fact that 12.5 percent is actually a drastic underestimate is pretty concerning.”….
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/06/02/study-1-in-8-american-children-will-experience-maltreatment-by-age-18

The Prevalence of Confirmed Maltreatment Among US Children, 2004 to 2011 ONLINE FIRST
Christopher Wildeman, PhD1; Natalia Emanuel, BA2; John M. Leventhal, MD3; Emily Putnam-Hornstein, PhD, MSSW4,5; Jane Waldfogel, PhD, MED6; Hedwig Lee, PhD7
JAMA Pediatr. Published online June 02, 2014. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2014.410
Importance  Child maltreatment is a risk factor for poor health throughout the life course. Existing estimates of the proportion of the US population maltreated during childhood are based on retrospective self-reports. Records of officially confirmed maltreatment have been used to produce annual rather than cumulative counts of maltreated individuals….
Conclusions and Relevance  Annual rates of confirmed child maltreatment dramatically understate the cumulative number of children confirmed to be maltreated during childhood. Our findings indicate that maltreatment will be confirmed for 1 in 8 US children by 18 years of age, far greater than the 1 in 100 children whose maltreatment is confirmed annually. For black children, the cumulative prevalence is 1 in 5; for Native American children, 1 in 7.
http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1876686

Research Ethics and Private Harms  Gerald P. Koocher  DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA  J Interpers Violence May 28, 2014 0886260514534986   Abstract
This commentary addresses the emotionally powerful account of Nicole Taus Kluemper from the perspective of a psychologist familiar with the administrative operation of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the ethics of the profession. The application of the APA’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct to the case is discussed, and alternative methods of response that researchers who have concerns about case studies might use are offered. The author concludes that existing ethical principles—the aspirational standards in particular—do bear upon the matter in question. However, the enforceable code of conduct is not sufficiently clear about obligations to those whom psychologists publicly discuss when the psychologist does not have a specific duty of care to an individual.    Keywords:  case studies   ethics  Taus v. Loftus http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/05/28/0886260514534986

Astha Rajvanshi on life in India for women and what is being done to address the gender imbalance  June 10, 2014
AS A girl born in India, it was normally expected that I only ever step out on the street when accompanied by a male relative. For many Indian women, sexual harassment, catcalling and whistling are pervasive but regular parts of their lives. And every day, somewhere, this interaction crosses the line into something more fatal.
Reports coming out of India over the last few weeks on the abduction, gang rape and lynching of two teenage girls in Badaun were distressing, but not new. Neither was the honour killing of a pregnant woman in Lahore, who was stoned to death by her family for marrying the man she loved….
There are certain expectations of a woman in Indian society. Girls should be shy, not loud. They should learn how to cook and clean, not play sports. They should be modest; they shouldn’t wear clothes that are too short or revealing. They should keep to themselves; too much interaction with boys is no good….
The loud aftermath of the gang rape in Delhi has seen some progress. Over 1,300 rape cases and thousands of molestation cases have been reported, and anti-rape laws and better enforcement have been stressed, with the Indian Parliament passing a bill containing harsher punishments for rapists.
Under the Bill, stalking, acid violence, disrobing are all specific crimes attracting increased jail terms. And any protections afforded to police officers, allowing them to let complaints slide, have been removed. These changes have made women more willing to speak out and report the crimes against them.
On the other hand, a large number of honour killings because of caste divisions are still inherent in Indian society, leading to inter-caste violence and social oppression between marginalised groups. One in five cases of honour killings reported internationally comes from India….
Changing mindsets is perhaps the biggest challenge for India, which has ranked as the world’s fourth most dangerous country for women, behind Afghanistan, Congo and Pakistan.
Dr Manjula O’Connor, who has worked on various Indian campaigns and projects for gender-based violence, comments that a large reason behind such crimes is “the male patriarchal system, which is still going on in huge parts on the country”….
http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/astha-rajvanshi-on-life-in-india-for-women-and-what-is-being-done-to-address-the-gender-imbalance/story-fnixwvgh-1226950548741

Pakistani woman raped, killed and hanged from tree: police Reuters  6/20/14  MULTAN Pakistan (Reuters) – A 20-year-old woman has been gang-raped, killed and hanged from a tree in Pakistan in a case with a chilling resemblance to a double rape and murder that caused outrage in neighbouring India last month. Pakistani police said Muzammil Bibi, 20, was attacked by three men in a field in the impoverished Layyah area of densely populated Punjab province….
http://news.yahoo.com/pakistani-woman-raped-killed-hanged-tree-police-163615646.html

Indian Village Feels Aftershocks of Rape Politicians Visit Hamlet of Two Girls Killed Last Week as Families Recall ‘Best Friends,’ Their Final Walk to the Chili Field By Jesse Pesta and Krishna Pokharel June 1, 2014  KATARA SADATGANJ, India—VIPs swept into this isolated village over the weekend as outrage rippled through India and beyond over the country’s latest case of violent sexual abuse.
Two girls were allegedly raped and then hanged from a mango tree here last week. After a photo of the dead girls circled the globe, some of India’s most prominent politicians came to this hamlet of mud-and-brick huts, while the murders have reinvigorated calls for India to address the persistent problem of violence against women.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/indian-village-feels-aftershocks-of-rape-1401669669

India’s ‘Temple Slaves’ Struggle to Break Free By Stella Paul Tuesday, June 24, 2014
NIZAMABAD, India, Jun 22 2014 (IPS) – At 32, Nalluri Poshani looks like an old woman. Squatting on the floor amidst piles of tobacco and tree leaves that she expertly transforms into ‘beedis’, a local cigarette, she tells IPS, “I feel dizzy. The tobacco gives me headaches and nausea.”
At the rate of two dollars for 1,000 cigarettes, she earns about 36 dollars a month. “I wish I could do some other job,” the young woman says longingly.
But no other jobs are open to her in the village of Vellpoor, located in the Nizamabad region of the southern Indian state of Telangana, because Poshani is no ordinary woman.
She is a former jogini, which translates loosely as a ‘temple slave’, one of thousands of young Dalit girls who are dedicated at a very young age to the village deity named Yellamma, based on the belief that their presence in the local temple will ward off evil spirits and usher in prosperity for all.
Poshani says she was just five years old when she went through the dedication ritual.
First she was bathed, dressed like a bride, and taken to the temple where a priest tied a ‘thali’ (a sacred thread symbolising marriage) around her neck. She was then brought outside where crowds of villagers were gathered, held up to their scrutiny and proclaimed the new jogini.
For several years she simply lived and worked in the temple, but when she reached puberty men from the village – usually from higher castes who otherwise consider her ‘untouchable’ – would visit her in the night and have sex with her.
Poshani says she was never a sex worker in the typical sense of the word, because she was never properly paid for her ‘services’. Rather, she was bound, by the dedication ritual and the villagers’ firm belief in her supernatural powers, to the temple….
According to official records, there are an estimated 30,000 joginis – also known as devdasis or matammas – in Telangana today. An additional 20,000 live in the neighbouring state of Andhra Pradesh….. http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/06/indias-temple-slaves-struggle-to-break-free/

Celebrities Join the Fight to Stop Rape as a Weapon of War By Janine di Giovanni 6/16/14  ….“War zone rape thrives on silence,” Jolie said in her opening remarks, and Hague agrees: Sexual crimes should not be shameful. “It’s about waking people up,” he told Newsweek. “Despite all the communications within the modern age, these crimes have taken place on a vast scale without the world noticing. And that now is changing.”
….Five years after the Sri Lankan government defeated the Tamil Tigers, human rights groups report continued abductions, torture, rapes and other sexual violence against both men and women of the Tamil minority.
“For all intents and purposes, the war has not finished,” insists Frances Harrison, author of Still Counting the Dead, a brutal account of the Sri Lankan conflict. “Especially for young men and women who had association with the rebels, they are still being abducted, hunted down. It’s a mopping up operation five years on.”
Harrison says the Sri Lankan government—which is not considered a pariah state, despite its persistent human rights violations—“are using very sophisticated intelligence methods like facial-recognition software, as well as hooded informers who nod when they identify somebody.” ….
http://www.newsweek.com/celebrities-join-fight-stop-rape-weapon-war-255054

Despite tougher laws, India can’t shake rape culture  Mandakini Gahlot  USA Today Jun 16, 2014
NEW DELHI (RNS) Despite tougher laws against sexual violence, the grisly rape and murder of two teenage girls found hanging from a tree shows India has a long way to go to safeguard women in its male-dominated, socially stratified culture, critics say.
Protestors rally outside Sufdarjung Hospital in 2012 while seeking justice for a gang rape victim. Despite recent reform to toughen India’s sexual violence laws, India’s male-dominated and socially stratified culture isn’t helping solve the problem, critics say.
Protestors rally outside Sufdarjung Hospital in 2012 while seeking justice for a gang rape victim. Despite recent reform to toughen India’s sexual violence laws, India’s male-dominated and socially stratified culture isn’t helping solve the problem, critics say. Creative Commons image by Ramesh Lalwani
“Even though the laws are there, many people feel they can get away with anything, an attitude that some of our politicians have gone out their way to encourage,” said Ranjana Kumari, a prominent women’s rights activist and director of the Centre for Social Research in New Delhi.
The incident in Katra Sadatganj, an impoverished village in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, is just the latest in a string of attacks. At least two other rape cases were reported in the past two weeks in the same state. The incidents are igniting debate about sexual violence against women and triggering outrage over lax attitudes about it, despite the strengthening of laws against rape last year….
More than 240,000 sexual offenses against women were reported in 2012, according to Indian government statistics. But human rights experts believe that number is vastly underestimated because many women don’t report the crimes.
India’s government enacted measures last year to address concerns after nationwide protests seeking more security for women followed Singh’s death. The new laws mandate strict guidelines for reporting rapes, shorter trials, less onerous hurdles for victims making accusations and requirements that female officers process victims.
However, high-profile rapes continue to occur, suggesting men’s behavior isn’t changing and marring the country’s image abroad. Last year, the number of female tourists dropped 10 percent, according to industry experts, in a country where tourism makes up 6 percent of GDP….

Despite tougher laws, India can’t shake rape culture

Prosecutors Rarely Bring Charges In College Rape Cases  Tyler Kingkade 06/17/2014
….Amid recent accusations that colleges are mishandling reports of sexual assault on campuses, like Reed’s case against the University of Southern California, observers have questioned why colleges are tasked with handling these cases in the first place. They often argue that felony crimes such as these should be left entirely to the criminal justice system — but such arguments assume that the guilty are more likely to be punished under that system, which is rarely the case.
Although roughly 1 in 6 women nationwide are victims of sexual assault — with the rate being higher for women in college, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey — rapists often escape jail time. Only between 8 percent and 37 percent of rapes ever lead to prosecution, according to research funded by the Department of Justice, and just 3 percent to 18 percent of sexual assaults lead to a conviction.
Multiple self-identified sexual assault victims that HuffPost spoke with, in states like California, Colorado, Montana, Massachusetts and New York, said they attempted to press charges against their assailants, some claiming they had confessions, but local prosecutors declined.
….The reality is the criminal justice system often decides against prosecuting cases of acquaintance rape and date rape. Once a case reaches prosecutors, there’s no guarantee of a conviction, let alone a trial or full prosecution. An analysis of the National Violence Against Women Survey by the group End Violence Against Women International concluded that roughly 5 percent of rapes are ever prosecuted. (The analysis sought to account for the underreporting of sexual assault, which resulted in numbers lower than the DOJ’s estimates.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/17/college-rape-prosecutors-press-charges_n_5500432.html

The “Justice Gap” for Sexual Assault Cases: Future Directions for
Research and Reform Kimberly A. Lonsway and Joanne Archambault
Abstract
Media coverage often reports “good” news about the criminal justice system’s ability to effectively respond to sexual assault, concluding that the past two decades have seen an increase in rape reporting, prosecution, and conviction. The objective of this article is to examine the validity of such conclusions by critically reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of various data sources and comparing the statistics they produce. These statistics include estimates for sexual assault reporting rates and case outcomes in the criminal justice system. We conclude that such pronouncements are not currently supported by statistical evidence, and we outline some directions for future research
and reform efforts to make the “good news” a reality in the United States.
Violence Against Women 18(2) 145–168  Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav  DOI: 10.1177/1077801212440017 http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/Justice-Gap-paper.pdf

Long-forgotten rape evidence finally reveals its clues in Northern Virginia lab By Monica Hesse June 16  ….The problem is a backlog of untested rape kits, tens of thousands of them, each representing an alleged assault. In every case, evidence was collected from victims after their attacks, but it was never analyzed. Instead it sat on shelves for years, even decades.
There is no federal law requiring rape kits to be tested or tracked, and only a handful of states have enacted their own legislation. Staffing and money shortages have contributed to the backlog; a single kit can cost more than $1,000 to process. Sometimes, if a victim had already identified her attacker, police might not have processed her kit — though it could have contained DNA linking the assailant to other unsolved crimes.
Whatever the reasons, the backlog kept growing as kits were overlooked, ignored and forgotten. Recently, as attention on the issue has increased, that has begun to change. Twelve hundred kits were uncovered in Colorado Springs. Four thousand in Dallas. Twelve thousand in Memphis. And 6,600 in Houston, 5,000 of which were processed last year by Bode, one of several private companies contracting with local jurisdictions in a kit-by-kit effort to bring the backlog down to zero.
….Testing in other jurisdictions has yielded results: New York’s arrest rate for sexual assaults went from 40 percent to 70 percent after its backlog was cleared. When Detroit tested 1,600 of its backlogged kits, the city came back with 127 potential serial rapists, according to the Joyful Heart Foundation, which advocates on issues related to the backlog.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/long-forgotten-rape-evidence-finally-reveals-its-clues-in-northern-virginia-lab/2014/06/16/e4aa1aea-d538-11e3-95d3-3bcd77cd4e11_story.html

Amy’s Letter Supporting The Amy and Vicky Child Pornography Victim Restitution Improvement Act of 2014
“I am writing today to give my support to the Amy and Vicky Child Pornography Victim Restitution Improvement Act of 2014. It is very important that this law get passed as soon as possible.”
“The past eight years of my life have been filled with hope and horror. Life was pretty horrible when I realized that the pictures of my childhood sex abuse were on the Internet for anyone and everyone to see. Imagine the worst most humiliating moments of your life captured for everyone to see forever. Then imagine that as a child you didn’t even really know what was happening to you and you didn’t want it to happen but you couldn’t stop it. You were abused, raped, and hurt and this is something that other people want. They enjoy it. They can’t stop collecting it and asking for it and trading it with other people. And it’s you. It’s your life and your pain that they are enjoying. And it never stops and you are helpless to do anything ever to stop it. That’s horror.”
….“Then we started having problems with the restitution law. Judges sometimes gave me just $100 and sometimes nothing at all. A few judges really got it, like when I was at the Fifth Circuit oral argument two years ago and the judges agreed that the child sex abuse images of me really do cause ongoing and long-term harm. The article by Emily Bazelon in the New York Times also really helped to tell my story so that people can understand what it’s like to live with child pornography every day of your life. I was really happy to discover recently that her article received honorable mention in a contest recognizing excellence in journalism.”
….“My hope turned to horror when the (Supreme) Court decided two weeks ago that restitution was impossible for victims like me and Vicky and so many others. I couldn’t believe that something which is called mandatory restitution (twice) was so hard to figure out. It just seemed like something somewhere was missing. Why, if so many people are committing this serious crime, why are the victims of that crime, who are and were children after all, left out? The Court’s decision was even worse than getting no restitution at all. It was sort of like getting negative restitution. It was a horrible day.”
“This is why I am so happy, and hopeful, that Congress can fix this problem once and for all. Maybe if they put mandatory in the law for a third time judges will get it that restitution really really really must be given to victims! After all this time and all the hearings and appeals and the Supreme Court, I definitely agree that restitution needs improvement and hopefully this bill, the Amy and Vicky Child Pornography Restitution Improvement Act of 2014, can finally make restitution happen for all victims of this horrible crime.”….
http://www.childlaw.us/amys-letter-supporting-the-amy-and-vicky-child-pornography-victim-restitution-improvement-act-of-2014/

The Amy and Vicky Child Pornography Victim Restitution Improvement Act
….The Amy and Vicky Act creates an effective, balanced restitution process
for victims of child pornography that also responds to the Supreme Court’s decision in Paroline v. United States. It does three things that reflect the nature of these crimes. First, it considers the total harm to the victim, including from individuals who may not yet have been identified. Second, it requires real and timely restitution. Third, it allows defendants who have contributed to the same victim’s harm to spread the restitution cost among themselves….
http://www.hatch.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/457b1bfb-0c61-4325-ba97-119d07182904/Amy%20and%20Vicky%20Act%20one-pager.pdf

Text of the Amy and Vicky Child Pornography Victim Restitution Improvement Act of 2014
This bill was assigned to a congressional committee on May 7, 2014, which will consider it before possibly sending it on to the House or Senate as a whole. The text of the bill below is as of May 07, 2014 (Introduced).
S. 2301  Amy and Vicky Child Pornography Victim Restitution Improvement Act of 2014
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s2301/text

Child abuse ‘has serious consequences for brain development’  Sunday 22 June 2014
A new study recently published in the American Journal of Psychiatry has found an association between child abuse and the reduction of gray matter in the brain that is responsible for information processing.
Child abuse, also referred to as child maltreatment, describes all forms of physical and emotional abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, negligence and any other exploitation that harms the health, development, dignity or survival of a child under the age of 18 years.
The World Health Organization (WHO) state that worldwide, around 20% of women and 5-10% of men report being sexually abused as children, while 23% of individuals report being physically abused during childhood….
The studies included 56 children or adolescents and 275 adults with a history of childhood abuse, as well as 56 children and 306 adults who had not been exposed to childhood maltreatment.
Using a 3D meta-analytical neuroimaging technique created by Radua – called “signed differential mapping” – the team was able to determine the volumes of gray matter in each individual.
They found that the individuals who had been exposed to childhood maltreatment had much smaller volumes of gray matter in certain brain areas, compared with those who had no history of child abuse….  http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/278537.php

Family violence leaves genetic imprint on children June 17, 2014 Tulane University Summary:  Children in homes affected by violence, suicide, or the incarceration of a family member have significantly shorter telomeres -— a cellular marker of aging — than those in stable households. The study suggests that the home environment is an important intervention target to reduce the biological impacts of adversity in the lives of young children.
Researchers discovered that children in homes affected by domestic violence, suicide or the incarceration of a family member have significantly shorter telomeres, which is a cellular marker of aging, than those in stable households. The findings are published online in the latest issue of the journal Pediatrics.
Telomeres are the caps at the end of chromosomes that keep them from shrinking when cells replicate. Shorter telomeres are linked to higher risks for heart disease, obesity, cognitive decline, diabetes, mental illness and poor health outcomes in adulthood. Researchers took genetic samples from 80 children ages 5 to 15 in New Orleans and interviewed parents about their home environments and exposures to adverse life events.
“Family-level stressors, such as witnessing a family member get hurt, created an environment that affected the DNA within the cells of the children,” said lead author Dr. Stacy Drury, director of the Behavioral and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Laboratory at Tulane. “The greater the number of exposures these kids had in life, the shorter their telomeres were — and this was after controlling for many other factors, including socioeconomic status, maternal education, parental age and the child’s age.”
S. S. Drury, E. Mabile, Z. H. Brett, K. Esteves, E. Jones, E. A. Shirtcliff, K. P. Theall. The Association of Telomere Length With Family Violence and Disruption. PEDIATRICS, 2014; 134 (1): e128 DOI: 10.1542/peds.2013-3415 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140617102505.htm

The Association of Telomere Length With Family Violence and Disruption     Stacy S. Drury, MD, PhDa,   Emily Mabile, Bab,     Zoë H. Brett, PhDa,      Kyle Esteves, Baa,    Edward Jones, BAa,
Elizabeth A. Shirtcliff, PhDc, and     Katherine P. Theall, PhDb
….RESULTS: Cumulative exposure to interpersonal violence and family disruption was correlated with bTL. Controlling for other sociodemographic factors, bTL was significantly shorter in children with higher exposure to family violence and disruption. Witnessing family violence exerted a particularly potent impact. A significant gender interaction was found (ß = -0.0086, SE = 0.0031, z test= -2.79, P = .0053) and analysis revealed the effect only in girls.
CONCLUSIONS: bTL is a molecular biomarker of adversity and allostatic load that is detectable in childhood. The present results extend previous studies by demonstrating that telomeres are sensitive to adversity within the overarching family domain. These findings suggest that the family ecology may be an important target for interventions to reduce the biological impact of adversity in the lives of children. http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/06/10/peds.2013-3415

Myths About the Country Walk Case  Ross E. Cheit David Mervis
ABSTRACT
The Country Walk case in Dade County, Florida was long considered a model for how to prosecute a multi-victim child sexual abuse case involving young children. In the past 10 years, however, a contrary view has emerged that the case was tainted by improper interviewing and was likely a false conviction. This is the first scholarly effort to assess the competing views of this case. Critics of this case advance three primary claims: (1) the positive STD test result from Frank Fuster’s son was unreliable; (2) highly suggestive interviewing produced the children’s claims; and (3) Frank Fuster’s wife, Ileana, was coerced into testifying against her husband. On close examination, all three claims prove to be false. This article documents the reasons why these claims constitute myths and why those findings are significant in the larger debate on children as witnesses.
CONCLUSIONS
Three major claims that have been advanced to challenge the conviction of Frank Fuster do not stand up to close factual scrutiny; they stand only as myths. As such, they inform us about our cultural fears and they alert us to our cultural blind spots. This is not an explication of all the  evidence in the case. A longer version of this analysis, covering virtually every claim advanced at the trial and since, will be published as a chapter in a forthcoming book. This analysis covers enough of the evidence to generate a hypothesis about the previously unrecognized problem of disconfirmation bias. Ceci and Bruck (1995) “believe that the evolution of many of the mass-allegation day-care cases” are caused by the phenomenon of “interviewer’s bias,” also known as “confirmation bias” (p. 93). A close examination of the Country Walk case, however, reveals that a reverse kind of bias is apparently at work. Disconfirmation bias involves a selective examination of evidence with a predisposition toward the child-suggestibility defense.
The persistence of all three myths analyzed in this article seems to exemplify disconfirmation bias. These myths can be believed only by ignoring available evidence to the contrary. The exaggerated claim on error rates and STD testing can be uncovered by reading the sources cited in Whittington’s affidavit. So, too, the child-suggestibility defense can be debunked by reading the trial transcripts….  Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, Vol. 16(3) 2007 doi:10.1300/J070v16n03_06
http://blogs.brown.edu/pols-1821t-2010fall-s01/files/2010/12/Country_Walk_Myths.pdf

Child abuse victims stung by Albany inaction By Shant Shahrigian 6/25/14
Horace Mann School graduate Joseph Cumming says it took him 34 years to fully realize his treatment at the hands of his music teacher Johannes Somary was sexual abuse. But by then, even if he had wanted to, it was far too late for him to take legal action. New York’s criminal and civil statute of limitations for sexual abuse of minors is five years after the victim turns 18.
After revelations of decades of abuse involving more than 30 victims at Horace Mann emerged in June 2012, the Bronx District Attorney’s office said the limitations prevented it from prosecuting any of the perpetrators.
The state legislature’s recent failure to take up the Child Victims Act — which would eliminate the criminal and civil statues of limitations for child sexual abuse and create a one-year window for past victims to seek justice — infuriated Mr. Cumming and other survivors….
“The main reason [the Child Victims Act] has not passed is that there is a caucus of centrist Democrats in the senate who have blocked it again and again,”….
A man who says he suffered sexual abuse at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, N.Y., which earlier this year acknowledged abuse of students in the 1960s, echoed Mr. Cumming’ point of view.
“These politicians end up protecting very bad people,” said the surivor, who did not want his name published.
The New York State Catholic Conference is strongly opposed to the act, saying it would unfairly subject the church — which has seen widespread allegations of child abuse by priests in recent years — to costly litigation.
http://riverdalepress.com/stories/Child-abuse-victims-stung-by-Albany-inaction,54539

Girls targeted from nine, boys from ten and it takes 22 YEARS for survivors to come forward: Chilling statistics of child sex abuse revealed in Royal Commission report
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse released its interim report on Monday
Analysis so far shows 90 per cent of Australian sex abusers are men
It takes men longer than women to disclose their abuse
The commission hasn’t decided on a national redress scheme for survivors
Has asked government for $104 million and an extra two years to do its job
By Sarah Dean and Australian Associated Press  30 June 2014
It takes an average of 22 years for survivors of child abuse to come forward and many Australians who have been abused still haven’t spoken out, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse says.
In its interim report, released on Monday, the commission said on average female victims were nine years old and male victims 10 years old when the abuse started and that it takes men longer than women to disclose their abuse.
The commission, which began its inquiry into institutional abuse on 13 January 2013, said its analysis also showed 90 per cent of sex abusers are men.
‘We understand that although many people have come forward to the Royal Commission, it is likely that they represent only a minority of those abused,’  the commission said.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2674893/Royal-Commission-finds-takes-22-years-survivors-child-sex-abuse-come-forward-average-abuse-begins-9-girls-10-boys.html

Harrowing tales at abuse royal commission By Australian Associated Press  29 June 2014 Forty years later in 2006 the man giving evidence read an article by Tommy Campion, another former resident of the North Coast Children’s Home….
In the 1980s he had been diagnosed with depression and attempted suicide several times. He now had leukaemia. In broken voice he told of beatings that left him scarred; of being left at a table for ten hours because he could not eat the food. If he threw up he would be made to eat the vomit.
A priest who seemed kind made him lie naked while he performed a pseudo-religious ritual that involved molesting him sexually….
His life has been no life just like many among the thousands of people who are coming forward to tell their stories – often for the first time….
Children of abuse survivors are learning for the first time why their mum or dad could never hug them. A landscape of broken lives, failed relationships, drug use, anger, suicides, bravery and extraordinary honesty while people struggle still for happiness is being painted by these witnesses.
Preparing for and giving evidence is a renewed trauma and the commission always has counsellors on hand to help them through.
Institutions, the Christian and Marist brothers, the Salvation Army, Catholic and Anglican dioceses, the YMCA, Scouts Australia, state run child-protection agencies and police forces across the country are trying to explain how it happened on their watch.
When a Salvation Army witness started to say how different standards of child discipline in the 1960s and `70s might explain why boys were beaten until they bled in homes in NSW and Queensland, commission chair Justice Peter McClellan interrupted to remind her she was talking about criminal assaults.
Brand protection, systemic failures, wilful ignorances, whether it be in the YMCA, the Scouts or the Catholic Church are being uncovered daily at these hearings.
The Catholic and Anglican churches moved abusers when complaints were made.
They kept no records that can now be produced.
In the case of the Marist Brothers, a man who was jailed for 12 years in 2006 was put on a plane to a clinic for sex-offending priests in Canada three days after the order knew police were investigating him for offences dating back years….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/aap/article-2674516/Harrowing-tales-abuse-royal-commission.html

One third of adults with dyslexia report they were physically abused during their childhood  7/3/14 TORONTO, ON – Adults who have dyslexia are much more likely to report they were physically abused before they turned 18 than their peers without dyslexia, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill.
Thirty-five per cent of adults with dyslexia report they were physically abused before they turned 18. In contrast, seven per cent of those without dyslexia reported that they had experienced childhood physical abuse.
“Even after accounting for age, race, sex and other early adversities such as parental addictions, childhood physical abuse was still associated with a six-fold increase in the odds of dyslexia” says co-author Esme Fuller-Thomson, professor and Sandra Rotman Endowed Chair at University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work….
http://www.healthcanal.com/child-health/52706-one-third-of-adults-with-dyslexia-report-they-were-physically-abused-during-their-childhood.html

The Impact of Sexual Abuse Committed by a Child on Mental Health in Adulthood     Brian Allen, Alexandra Tellez, Amy Wevodau, Carol L. Woods, Amy Percosky J Interpers Violence August 2014 vol. 29 no. 12 2257-2272  Abstract
Numerous research studies document the negative mental health outcomes associated with the experience of childhood sexual abuse. In addition, factors such as one’s relationship with the perpetrator and the severity of the abuse predict the likelihood of future mental health problems. Less attention, however, has focused on the age of the perpetrator, and recent years have seen an increased interest in children who display sexual behavior problems. College students completed measures of mental health functioning and retrospective reports of maltreatment histories. Participants were categorized as abused by an adult (n = 48), teenager (n = 39), or another child (n = 37), and non-abused (n = 219). Victims of abuse, regardless of perpetrator age, displayed higher levels of mental health problems than non-abused participants. There were no differences between the abused groups on any of the mental health outcomes; however, individuals who were abused by other children were less likely to label their experiences as abuse. http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/29/12/2257.abstract

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