Women Abused in Childhood at Higher Odds of Having Child With Autism: Study, The Neurobiology of Sexual Assault, ‘I wanted to sell victim’s phone’ – apparent satanic ritual killing, Ritual killing deviated from Bible verse, Baby burned to death in satanic ritual after Chilean cult leader says infant is the Antichrist

Women Abused in Childhood at Higher Odds of Having Child With Autism: Study
Researchers speculate that effect on immune system, stress response might explain why  Wednesday, March 20, 2013

WEDNESDAY, March 20 (HealthDay News) — Women who were physically, emotionally or sexually abused as children are more likely to have a child with autism, a new study suggests. For women who suffered the most severe abuse, the risk more than tripled, the researchers found.

“This is a completely new risk factor for autism,” said lead investigator Andrea Roberts, a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health.
“Child abuse has a horrible effect on individuals who experience it, but the effects might reach across generations,” she said. “The more abuse a woman had been exposed to in her own childhood, the more likely she was to have a child with autism.”

Even women who experienced moderate levels of abuse were 60 percent more likely to have a child with autism, she added.  Although this increased risk seems high, the absolute risk of autism associated with a mother’s exposure to abuse in childhood is very low, Roberts said.

In women who were not abused as children, fewer than one in 100 of those children had autism. Among women exposed to the highest level of abuse, two in 100 of their children had autism. “So, most of their kids don’t have autism,” she said….
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_135120.html

The Neurobiology of Sexual Assault by Rebecca Campbell, Ph.D. – National Institute of Justice
“So now let’s loop in the rape victim advocate perspective: “It’s hard trying to stop what police do to victims. They don’t believe them and they treat them so bad that the victims give up. It happens over and over again.” (slide 7)

“So what do we get from these three simple quotes? What these three quotes show us right off the bat is that sexual assault case attrition happens very early on in the criminal justice system. It’s happening in the first interactions between the victims and law enforcement. Indeed, if we take these qualitative data and look at them from a quantitative perspective, we see very similar findings.” (slide 9)

“This is the row that you want to pay attention to. This is the very first step in the criminal justice system. On average, 86 percent of the reported sexual assaults never went any further than the police. The vast majority of these cases were never referred by the police on to the prosecutors.” (slide 11)

“Now the psychological impact of that on victims is quite devastating. As a result of their contact with the legal system, most victims say they leave that interaction feeling blamed, depressed, anxious, and 80 percent say that they feel reluctant to seek further help after that interaction.” (slide 14)

“If the information coming into the brain, into the body, is emotionally charged, fearful, the amygdala is actually the structure that’s going to pick that up first. It’s a very old structure, old in an evolutionary sense. Part of the limbic system sort of vibrating — and they’re much more difficult for the brain to process because they’re laden with fear, they’re laden with terror. So the amygdala and the hippocampus have to kind of work together for the encoding of that information and then the consolidating of that information.” (slide 39)
http://nij.gov/multimedia/presenter/presenter-campbell/

‘I wanted to sell victim’s phone’ April 24 2013 By Sandy Moeketsi
Johannesburg – A man who took part in an apparent satanic ritual killing wanted to return to the scene to get a cellphone, a Johannesburg court heard on Wednesday.

“I was going to sell it for drugs,” Lester Moody told the High Court sitting in the Palm Ridge Magistrate’s Court. He said the cellphone belonged to one of the girls who had been set alight in the ritual….
http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/i-wanted-to-sell-victim-s-phone-1.1505867#.UXh6iMWIBXs

Ritual killing deviated from Bible verse 2013-04-25  Johannesburg – The “plan” to kill Kirsty Theologo came from a Bible verse, but deviated from it when satanic elements were added, the South Gauteng High Court sitting in the Palm Ridge Magistrate’s Court heard on Thursday.

“Originally, you were going to do what was in the Bible and satanic elements were added later?” Judge Geraldine Borchers asked Lester Moody. “Yes,” he said.

Moody was testifying in the trial of four people accused of setting alight Theologo and a 14-year-old friend of hers in an apparent satanic ritual on 21 October 2011….
http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Ritual-killing-deviated-from-bible-verse-20130425

Baby burned to death in satanic ritual after Chilean cult leader says infant is the Antichrist 
Cops say sect leader Ramon Gustavo Castillo Gaete, who is still at large, is responsible for the grisly murder, which occurred in Colliguay, Chile.
By Lee Moran / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Friday, April 26, 2013

A tiny baby was burned to death on a bonfire after a cult leader declared the child to be the Antichrist, police said.

The baby, just 3 days old, was strapped naked to a board and tossed onto the blaze because “the end of the world was near.” The horrific ritual allegedly happened in a house in Colliguay, near the Chilean coastal resort of Valparaiso, last Nov. 12.

The baby’s mom, 25-year-old Natalia Guerra, allegedly gave permission for the brutal murder to go ahead. Cops have arrested four people — from a 12-member sect led by Ramon Gustavo Castillo Gaete — in connection with the death.

The Police Investigative Unit’s Miguel Ampuero said Gaete, 36, formed the cult — which consisted of professionals including a filmmaker, a veterinarian and a flight attendant — in 2005….
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/baby-burned-death-satanic-ritual-article-1.1328050

Evidence of Satanic Ritual Abuse by Noemi Mattis, JD, PhD., Washington police accused of ‘disturbing’ failures to investigate rape, Sara Reedy, the rape victim accused of lying and jailed by US police, wins $1.5m payout

Evidence of Satanic Ritual Abuse written August 7 2003 to Judy Byington by Noemi Mattis, JD, PhD., Co-chair of the Utah Governor’s Task Force on Ritual Abuse.
http://22faces.com/sra-evidence

Washington police accused of ‘disturbing’ failures to investigate rape

Human Rights Watch to publish report that shows some victims experience fresh trauma from police neglect in rape cases
Joanna Walters in New York
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 January 2013

Police in Washington DC frequently fail to investigate reports of rape, and treat victims so dismissively at times, that they experience fresh trauma while the chances of the perpetrator being caught are undermined, according to a comprehensive report due out next week.

Campaign group Human Rights Watch is expected to uncover “disturbing evidence of police failure” in a 200-plus page report after a two-year investigation into law enforcement practices in the US capital.

But although shocking, the situation in Washington is far from isolated. There are widespread examples across the US of the police routinely neglecting crimes of sexual violence and refusing to believe victims.

“This is a national crisis requiring federal action. We need a paradigm shift in police culture, because rapes and sexual assaults are being swept under the rug, and too many victims are being bullied,” said Carol Tracy of the Women’s Law Project, a legal advocacy group that specialises in sexual violence cases….

Sara Reedy, 27, last year won a $1.5m settlement from the Cranberry police near Pittsburgh after they did not believe she had been raped at gunpoint and arrested her. She was about to stand trial when her perpetrator was caught elsewhere….

In Cleveland, Ohio, serial rapist and murderer Anthony Sowell was caught in 2011 after killing 11 women, six of them after a rape kit was disregarded. Milwaukee serial rapist Gregory Below was finally sentenced to 350 years in 2011, but three of his victims said the police dismissed their cases initially….
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/17/washington-police-accused-rape-failures

Sara Reedy, the rape victim accused of lying and jailed by US police, wins $1.5m payout

Pittsburgh woman raped at gunpoint and charged with fabricating her story has won a settlement after a marathon legal battle, changing federal law along the way

Joanna Walters in Pittsburgh
The Observer, Saturday 15 December 2012

….Reedy was 19 when the man entered the petrol station near Pittsburgh where she was working to pay her way through college and pulled a gun. He emptied the till of its $606.73 takings, assaulted her and fled into the night. But the detective who interviewed Reedy in hospital didn’t believe her, and accused her of stealing the money herself and inventing the story as a cover-up. Although another local woman was attacked not long after in similar fashion, the police didn’t join the dots.

Following further inquiries, Reedy was arrested for theft and false reporting and, pregnant with her first child (by her now ex-husband), thrown in jail. She was subsequently released on bail, but lost her job. More than a year after attacking Reedy, the man struck again, but this time he was caught and confessed to the earlier crime.

When the charges against her were dropped, Reedy sued the police and has now won a marathon legal battle and a $1.5m (£1m) settlement against the detective who turned her from victim into accused. The payment was agreed earlier this year, but can be revealed only now because of a non-disclosure clause that was part of the settlement….

Upon being bailed, she was turned away from a local victim help centre, and old school friends spread rumours about her. Even her parents expressed doubts about their daughter’s veracity after talking to Evanson. But a month before Reedy’s trial, Wilbur Brown, 44, was arrested after raping a woman in a convenience store several miles away. He admitted attacking Reedy too, and in 2006 she was in court to see him plead guilty to assaulting 10 women. He is now serving life in prison.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/15/sara-reedy-rape-victim-wins-police-payout

22 Faces revives ritual sexual abuse controversy

22 Faces revives ritual sexual abuse controversy by Stephen Dark

2012-06-25 ….A new book, Twenty Two Faces: Inside the Extraordinary Life of Jenny Hill and Her Twenty-two Multiple Personalities, by retired, Saratoga Springs-based psychiatrist Judy Byington, tells the story of Hill, who, according to Byinton, was the victim of sexual assaults by both her father and by neighborhood boys. Hill told Byington that on June 21, 1965, in Garden Grove, Calif., she was tortured on an altar and forced to watch the murder of a 6-year-old by a satanic coven….

Subsequently, Hill was subjected to mind control experiments which resulted, Byington says, in Hill having 22 personalities. Hill moved to Utah County and ended up spending a year in the Utah State Hospital under the care of Weston Whatcott between 1984 and 1985. In a press release by the book’s publisher, Whatcott acknowledges that Hill’s multiple personalities were a result of childhood trauma, “namely repeated sexual assaults coupled with ritual abuse.”

Byington says Hill “really wanted her story told.”  Byington drew on journals Hill and some of her other personalities kept from when she was 5 to 24. “We could all be multiple personalities if we have gone through all the trauma that these people have gone through,” Byington says.”Children under tremendous torture, their minds can separate into different personalities.”

Hill went to the FBI looking for the parents of the child she had seen killed, Byington says. While an FBI agent who looked at Hill’s medical records told Byington that there was confirmation that horrendous torture had occurred, “he wouldn’t open up a case for her.”

Byington has also investigated local satanic covens in Utah, she says, and talked to a special-investigations unit at the Utah Attorney General’s office in 2006 on ritual abuse cases. “”It’s still very much of a problem,” Byington says. “These covens are very active and it’s very difficult to prove what’s going on.”
http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/blog-24-7837-22-faces-revives-ritual-sexual-abuse-controversy.html

Day care teacher gets 35 years for sexual assaults on 12 boys

Ex-teacher gets decades in prison for child molestations
Monday, January 30, 2012 By Paula Reed Ward, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A former teacher at Tender Care Learning Center in Scott pleaded guilty to 13 cases involving child molestation and child pornography this morning in Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas.

Matthew K. Byars, 26, was sentenced to 35 to 70 years in prison for his actions abusing 12 boys, ranging in age from 6 to 17 years old. He also must register for life as a sex offender.

The families of the boys agreed to the plea deal in part to end the case quickly and avoid having them testify.

“We made an offer that will not victimize these boys any further,” said Deputy District Attorney Laura Ditka….

According to Ms. Ditka, Mr. Byars molested seven boys he taught at Tender Care, met the cousin of a boy there who he also abused, and molested two other boys.

He befriended the boys at the daycare, as well as their families, and often took them on outings, organized pickup hockey games, brought them to his church and invited them to sleepovers at his home.

In some instances, the boys were fondled and photographed or recorded on video. In others, they were forced into sex acts or sexually assaulted, Ms. Ditka said….

Speaking briefly, Mr. Byars apologized.

“I do realize the affect of my actions on so many people,” he said. “I truly am sorry.”
http://www.postgazette.com/pg/12030/1207008-100.stm

Day care teacher gets 35 years for sexual assaults on 12 boys
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
By Paula Reed Ward, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Scrawled across the page in all capital letters, written in the hand of a child, the statement read, “I HATE MATT.”

Another boy, in blue ink, wrote to the judge, “I feel sad and lonely. But once I see the other kids, I’m not so lonely because I know I’m not the only one.

“But what’s the worst is that every morning I wake up, I think of that.”

They were two of 11 boys who sat in the jury box in Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Donna Jo McDaniel’s courtroom Monday and listened as the prosecution listed each one’s case, and the horrific things they had to endure at the hands of Matt Byars, a man they trusted.

In the middle of Deputy District Attorney Laura Ditka’s summary, one of those boys, who is now 9, shouted, “Find someone your own age, Matt,” and fled the courtroom….

Mr. Byars, hired at Tender Care in 2007, pleaded guilty Monday to sexually abusing 12 boys, ranging in age from 6 to 17 years old, over a period of several years….

According to Ms. Ditka, Mr. Byars, 26, of the West End, sexually abused seven boys he taught at Tender Care, as well as the cousin of a boy who attended the center. He also abused four others.

He befriended the boys at the day care, as well as their families, and often took them on outings, organized pickup hockey games, brought them to his church and invited them to sleepovers at his home.

While at Tender Care, Ms. Ditka said, Mr. Byars would sometimes call boys out of line when they were going outside and have them stay back with him. In some instances, he assaulted them there.

In other cases, he took the boys to his home where he showed them pornography and photographed and recorded them on video performing sex acts. He also set up a video camera in his shower and recorded the boys while they washed.

Mr. Byars told them to “flex” their muscles when he photographed them, the prosecutor said.

In one instance, Mr. Byars made a boy engage in oral sex to let him play video games.

Police became aware of Mr. Byars’ actions when the mother of one boy told her son “Mr. Matt” wanted to take him to the movies.

The woman explained the terror she saw in her son’s eyes that day, and how the boy reacted to what she had said.

“It all makes sense now,” she said. “How my son went from an open, caring, loving little boy to an angry, fearful and sad lost soul.”

Her son had been having head- and stomachaches daily. She took him to doctors, and he was diagnosed with having anxiety.

“I blamed myself,” she said.

As a single mother of two, she wondered if her son was jealous of his little brother, or was mad that she no longer read to him.

“My life will never be the same,” she said.

All of the family members who spoke talked about betrayal and the loss of innocence.

“He has taught them hate. He has taught them fear,” read one woman who is the grandmother of one victim and the great-aunt of another.

Another mother called Mr. Byars a “monster.” She told the court that her son has only recently been able to cuddle with his own father after having been abused.

“[He] is having trouble learning how to trust men again, including his dad,” she said.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/12031/1207105-55-0.stm

Germany mass child abuse, Knights of Columbus accused of child abuse, porn ring

Germany admits enslaving and abusing a generation of children
Lawsuits accuse Knights of Columbus of child abuse
Federal authorities say they broke up a global child porn ring

Germany admits enslaving and abusing a generation of children
Government agrees up to €120m in compensation for three decades of post-war ‘Nazi-era’ brutality in foster homes  By Tony Paterson in Berlin  Tuesday, 14 December 2010

Germany has owned up to one of the most disturbing examples of mass child and youth abuse in its post-war history, some 60 years after the first teenagers started being locked away and mistreated by supposedly “caring” foster homes.

The country agreed yesterday to provide a €120m (£101m) compensation fund for the estimated 30,000 victims who were among the 800,000 children in German foster homes in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies.

Institutions that for decades meted out inhuman treatment – including ritual beatings, periods of solitary confinement, forced labour and sexual assaults – were not youth remand centres or borstals as might be expected, but homes run by nuns and priests in former West Germany’s Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as state-run homes.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-admits-enslaving-and-abusing-a-generation-of-children-2159589.html

Lawsuits accuse Knights of Columbus of child abuse NEW HAVEN, Connecticut Dec 14, 2010 (Reuters) – The Knights of Columbus was sued on Tuesday by two men who said they were sexually abused as children by a leader of a youth group run by the Roman Catholic fraternal organization. The federal lawsuits allege that Knights of Columbus officials knew a leader of the Columbian Squires youth group in Texas was molesting children but did not make any effort to stop him or remove him from the position.

The suits are believed to be the first child sex abuse claims filed against the Catholic group, said Jeffrey Herman, the attorney representing the two alleged victims….
“We emphatically deny the allegations that have been made,” said Patrick Korten, a spokesman for the Knights of Columbus.
With 1.8 million members worldwide, the Knight of Columbus is the world’s largest Catholic mens’ organization and is focused on charity work….

In one of the lawsuits, an unnamed Kansas resident claims the Squires leader abused him from 1978, when he was 10 years old, until 1986.
He claims the leader shared him with other youth counselors in the group and threatened to kill him if he told anyone, the lawsuit said.
The second lawsuit came from Texas resident Jim Dennany, who said he alerted Knights of Columbus officials in 1986 to assaults he said he suffered in the 1970s when he was a young teenager.

He claimed the group took no action, concealed the allegations and told him to keep quiet, according to the lawsuit….
The Knights of Columbus spokesman said the group first became aware of allegations of sexual abuse against Rivera in December 2009.
“We acted immediately, removing him from any responsibility involving youth programs,” Korten said. The group also alerted local authorities in Brownsville, Texas…
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BD5LW20101214

Federal authorities say they broke up a global child porn ring By Michael Martinez, CNN December 15, 2010 Los Angeles (CNN) — Federal authorities announced Tuesday they dismantled an international child pornography ring that allowed its 35 male members to trade thousands of images and videos of boys in sexually explicit situations through a website.

The announcement was made in the wake of Monday’s guilty plea by a Georgia man to transporting child pornography using a secret Internet bulletin board called “Lost Boy.” That website operated from September 2007 to January 2009, when authorities shut it down and began investigating the men who operated it, officials said….

The investigation has also led to the identification of 27 victims of child abuse in the United States, including some whose images were posted on the Lost Boy bulletin board, officials said….

The bulletin board also had a “Handbook Project,” where members contributed to a guide on how to find and groom boys to engage in sex and how to move on to other victims when the current victim grows too old to be attractive to the members, authorities said.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/12/14/california.child.porn/index.html