Trauma and Memory – The Science and the Silenced

Trauma and Memory – The Science and the Silenced

  Recently a new book was published about the False Memory Movement. Over the years, this movement has been extremely damaging for trauma, rape, child abuse and ritual abuse survivors and their helpers. This movement has used propaganda, bullying, harassment, disinformation and pseudoscientific research to bolster its claims. The False Memory Movement has been used to defend accused and convicted pedophiles, rapists and murderers.

Fortunately there have been many brave therapists, researchers and survivors that have spent years fighting the false memory movement’s pseudoscience, including inaccurate statements denying traumatic amnesia and denying the traumagenic origins of dissociative identity disorder.

This new book “Trauma and Memory – The Science and the Silence” is an excellent resource for those who continue the fight against false memory disinformation. The book consolidates older historic information from  Freud’s era and the 1980’s and 1990’s as well as newer research about more recent events.
We highly recommend this book. There is a hard copy and e-book available at the website below. “The abuse of science to silence the abused” by the false memory movement has been exposed once again. https://www.routledge.com/Trauma-and-Memory-The-Science-and-the-Silenced/Sinason-Conway/p/book/9781032044293

Trauma and Memory
The Science and the Silenced
https://www.routledge.com/Trauma-and-Memory-The-Science-and-the-Silenced/Sinason-Conway/p/book/9781032044293

Trauma and Memory will assist mental health experts and professionals, as well as the interested public, in understanding the scientific issues around trauma memory, and how this differs from other areas of memory.
This book provides accounts of the damage caused to psychology and survivors internationally by false memory groups and ideas. It is unequivocally passionate about the truth of trauma memory and exposing the damaging disinformation that can seep into the field. Contributors to this book include leading professionals from the field of criminology, law, psychology and psychotherapy in the UK and USA, along with survivor-professionals who understand only too well the damage such disinformation can cause.
This book is a valuable resource for mental health professionals of all disciplines including those involved with relevant law and public health policy. It will also help survivors and survivor-professionals in gaining insight into the forces resisting disclosure.

Editors
Biography

Valerie Sinason, PhD, is a widely published Writer and Psychoanalyst. She has pioneered disability and trauma-informed therapy for over 30 years, is President of the Institute of Psychotherapy and Disability, Founder and Patron of the Clinic for Dissociative Studies and on the Board of the ISSTD.

Ashley Conway, PhD, AFBPsS, is a Counselling Psychologist. He has worked in a wide range of fields of trauma, ranging through severe critical incidents to long term abuse, and has published widely in these areas. He is currently the Chair of the Clinic for Dissociative Studies in London, UK.

ISBN: 978-1-032-04432-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-04429-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-19315-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003193159  

Chapters include:
1 In conversation with Ross Cheit ASHLEY CONWAY
2 False memory syndrome movement: The origins and the promoters MARJORIE ORR
3 The rocky road to false memories: Stories the media missed LYNN CROOK
4 Re-examining the “Lost in the Mall”: study Were “false memories” created to promote a false defence? In conversation with Ruth Blizard VALERIE SINASON
5 Evaluating false memory research WINJA BUSS
6 The abuse of science to silence the abused ASHLEY CONWAY
7 False memory syndrome SUSIE ORBACH
8 Trauma, skin: memory, speech ANN SCOTT
9 Sigmund Freud’s concept of repression: Historical and empirical perspectives BRETT KAHR
10 Terror in the consulting room – memory, trauma and dissociation PHIL MOLLON
11 How can we remember but be unable to recall? The complex functions of multi-modular memory MARY SUE MOORE
12 What if I should die? JENNIFER JOHNS
13 Finding a new narrative: Meaningful responses to “false memory” disinformation MICHAEL SALTER
14 “Do no harm”? KHADIJA ROUF AND DANNY TAGGART   Excerpts:   page 1 The FMS model provided an explanation for the beginning of the exposure of the scale of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) worldwide, and it enabled the awful truth to be displaced. The multitude of stories of abuse that were beginning to be made public could be explained away – they could be blamed on the therapists who were hearing their clients’ histories.
As long as truth struggles with power, there will be offshoots of such models of displacement and the history of denial goes far back. The FMS may have gone off-grid for now, but it is simply another move in the theories of denial of abuse, and more efforts to silence the truth will follow. The principles remain the same.

Excerpts:

page 2
The account of Cassandra tragically fits Jennifer Freyd’s concept of DARVO (Freyd, 1997). DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. This is the common response of a person or an institution that will not accept responsibility and accountability for the violations they have caused.
page 19
Jennifer Freyd regarding her parents (FMSF founders):….The grandparents had an affair which culminated after 11 years in marriage, at which time Pamela and Peter Freyd also married aged 18 and 20. Professor Freyd recollected her father speaking openly of his own childhood homosexual liaison as an 11-year-old with a paedophile artist. She remembered being made to dance nude in front of him aged 9 with a friend; of being taught to kiss on the mouth “like an adult” for a school play aged 11 in front of the cast….he continually made sexual comments which were regarded as normal in the family….He drank heavily through her childhood and was hospitalised for alcoholism.
page 26 – 27
Another key figure in the FMS movement is New Zealand doctor, Felicity Goodyear-Smith. Her book First Do No Harm is subtitled “The Sexual Abuse Industry” (Goodyear-Smith, 1993)….The major theme in First Do No Harm is that sexual abuse is a cultural taboo. There is no intrinsic moral objection to adult–child sexual contact and no automatic damage caused by it. Underwager and Wakefield are quoted as the principal references.
Felicity Goodyear-Smith admits to a personal as well as professional involvement in the abuse field. Her husband and parents-in-law were imprisoned for sexual abuse offences, having been members of a New Zealand community, CentrePoint, which encouraged sexual intimacy amongst its members, including the children.
The author quotes studies that purport to show that adult–child sex can be harmless. Under a section on “Children’s Sexual Rights” she describes groups, such as the Paedophile Information Exchange, the Rene Guyon Society (“sex by eight, or it’s too late”), and the North American Man/Boy Love Association, as “holding radical beliefs regarding children’s sexual rights”.
page 31
Lynn Crook
Some have suggested the media’s failure to challenge the false memory scenario reflected a need to deny the scale of the sexual abuse of children. Perhaps their editors failed to encourage a critical analysis of the story because everyone else was covering it – so it must be true. Some reporters may have failed to question the story because they had been accused of molesting a child. Others may have been protecting someone.
page 33
The government’s witnesses included many of the individuals who had appeared in Frontline producer Ofra Bikel’s “The Search for Satan”. In court, their stories did not hold up as well as they had in Bikel’s interviews. Under cross-examination by Peterson’s attorney, Rusty Hardin, Shanley conceded on 8 October 1997 that she could not name any memories that were implanted. The Houston Chronicle headline on 8 October 1998 announced, “Former patient can’t attribute false memories to therapy” (Smith, 1999). On 1 March 1999 the government moved to dismiss the indictment. The national media did not cover the story.  

page 36
Believing that one had been lost while shopping in childhood is not analogous to remembering sexual abuse. In fact, a large proportion of subjects can be convinced that they were lost in a mall as children, but none could be led to falsely believe they had been administered enemas (Pezdek, Finger & Hodge, 1997).

  page 37
The first six subjects in the formal mall study failed to develop false memories (Coan, 1993), but those results were never published. In the second iteration of the formal mall study (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995), there is little explicit description of the methods of recruitment of subjects, experimental controls or training of investigators….Most importantly, no evidence is presented that any subjects formed full false memories. Nevertheless, the authors imply that, based on study results, they “are providing an ‘existence proof’ for the phenomenon of false memory formation” (pp. 723–4).

page 40
Rather, most false memory studies attempt to suggest to subjects that they experienced much more commonplace events, such as getting lost, spilling a bowl of punch, going for a balloon ride, or getting sick after eating eggs. It may be profitable to wonder whether many of the false memory researchers have been swept up in the FMSF campaign to exonerate parents who claim they have been falsely accused.

page 41
Other researchers and authors attempting to criticise false memory studies may have been intimidated. Between 1992 and 2017, nearly two dozen psychologists, psychiatrists, attorneys, authors, researchers, journalists, and abuse survivors have been subjected to ad hominem attacks by Loftus (Crook, personal communication, 2019). Those defamed include Ellen Bass, E. Sue Blume, Martha Dean, Laura Brown, Mary Harvey, Jim Coan’s mother, Judith Herman, David Calof, Kenneth Pope, David Corwin, Diana Russell, Lynn Crook, Lenore Walker, Laura Davis, Charles Whitfield, B. J. Levy, Neil Brick, Karen Olio, Bessel van der Kolk, Holly Ramona, Nicole Taus Kluemper and Gerald Koocher.

page 42
Many academics may be equally motivated to deny the existence of child abuse as was Freud. Those who gain considerable income from testifying in defence of accused perpetrators, as have Underwager, Gardner and Loftus, may have additional motivation for claiming that abuse accusations were fabricated.

page 44
Careful analysis of the research shows it is not easy to implant false memories of childhood abuse. False memories with autobiographical belief, recollective experiences and confidence in memory are rare to non-existent.

page 55
The false memory syndrome (FMS) advocates do not want evidence of false negatives – that we can experience something and then be persuaded that it did not happen, because that would not suit their narrative.
….There is no evidence that anyone has ever had a false belief implanted that they were sexually abused as a child.

page 59
Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is the most severe of all dissociative disorders, and its features include recurrent amnesia. Recent research (Reinders et al., 2019) has demonstrated that individuals with DID can be distinguished from healthy controls on the basis of abnormal brain morphology.
….“Every single scientific study of memory of childhood sexual abuse, whether prospective or retrospective, whether studying clinical samples or general population samples, finds that a certain percentage of sexually abused individuals forget, and later remember, their abuse” (Van der Kolk, 2014, note on p. 398 re. p. 190).

page 60
As McMaugh and Middleton (2020) state, “the ‘false memory’ movement enabled society to ignore a whole new generation of abused children”.

page 61
Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes & Conway, 2010) is an informative book written to describe how vested interests have manipulated the media, to mislead and confuse in areas of great importance to society, including smoking, acid rain and climate change….they create an institute, with scientific advisors who can use their credentials to present themselves as authorities. The advisors cherry-pick data to advance a position, present ideas as if they were facts and use their authority to try to discredit any science they do not like. They use the mass media, making simplified, dramatic statements to capture public attention and draw in journalists to give their minority views more credence than they deserve. They then use these press stories, quoting them as if they were facts. If there is an individual whose opinions are contradictory to the desired line, ad hominem attacks are an option.

page 88
Sigmund Freud also realised that repressions could be lifted as a result of psychoanalytical treatment. In his essay on “Trauer und Melancholie” (Freud, 1917a), better known in English as “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud, 1917b), he observed that the clinical process of psychoanalysis will frequently activate memories, and, that after treatment has progressed satisfactorily, repressed and unconscious memories will eventually return to the fore of consciousness, no longer subject to the disguise of repression.

page 90
Nevertheless, Erdelyi’s data does most certainly substantiate Freud’s claim that repressed material can return to consciousness, simply as a result of talking….Astonishingly, 38% of the sample of 129 women did not report the abuse, which Williams and colleagues knew, on the basis of hospital records, had, in fact, occurred.

page 156
Survivor accounts, combined with scientific advances in the understanding of trauma, are creating enriched understandings of how abuse can injure the usual process of memory and psychological functioning. Time is yielding an opportunity to reshape public understandings of trauma and its aftermath. This could lead to the correcting of harmful narratives which have led to unethical treatment of survivors, through denial, victim-blaming, or “othering”.

False Memory Syndrome at 30 – Flawed Science, Scientific Evidence for Dissociative Amnesia,- Michael Salter – Organized Abuse, Evan Rachel Wood accuses Marilyn Manson of abuse,- Paedophile Karl Sabbagh jailed for grooming child (False Memory Proponent), Survivorship 2021 Winter Journal and May Conference

 

 – The False Memory Syndrome at 30: How Flawed Science Turned into Conventional Wisdom

 The Scientific Evidence for Dissociative Amnesia

– Michael Salter – Organized Abuse– Evan Rachel Wood accuses Marilyn Manson of abuse

– Paedophile Karl Sabbagh, author and film maker, jailed for grooming child (False Memory Proponent)

– Survivorship Notes and Journal  – 2021 Winter Journal

– Survivorship Online Conference – May 21 – 23, 2021

The False Memory Syndrome at 30: How Flawed Science Turned into Conventional Wisdom
The false memory syndrome stands in direct scientific opposition to the wealth of evidence supporting dissociative amnesia—a psychological defense mechanism which, according to trauma therapists, enables people to split off painful events from conscious awareness for years….

Moreover, the broad acceptance of the false memory syndrome in the cultural ecosystem can end up silencing, or even shaming, people like Jennifer Freyd, who believe that they have stumbled upon painful experiences in their childhood and seek to understand the truth about their own past and its connection to their current feelings. In addition, in the courtroom, the Freyds’ view of memory can serve as a protective shield for those who have, in fact, sexually abused children…

Another problematic flaw with the mall study is its laboratory setting. “Loftus is not a clinician and never studied how people process traumatic experiences,” said psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. “Trauma often overwhelms the central nervous system, so the brain may not be able to register it fully when it happens. That’s why delayed memories of abuse are not uncommon.”

Finally, critics have pointed out that the study is riddled with methodological flaws and lapses in its reporting of results. For example, in “Lost in the Mall: False Memory or False Defense,” published in 2019 in The Journal of Child Custody, psychologists Ruth Blizzard and Morgan Shaw reported that Loftus tossed out six subjects who were in her original 1993 study—a move which constitutes a major ethical lapse for an experimental researcher. “The mall study,” they concluded, “has received a minimal amount of critical analysis, regardless of the vague and contradictory reporting of results, failure to report negative results, lack of definition of false memory, and conflation of informal observations with formal research.”…

Loftus was the sole defense witness called in the February 2005 trial of the late Paul Shanley, the so-called “Boston street priest,” who had admitted on several occasions since the late 1970s—to both journalists and to church authorities—that he had abused numerous boys. The 2005 case concerned a Boston area firefighter who claimed that Shanley had raped him on numerous occasions when he was between six and nine years old. The accuser, who was 27 at the time of the trial, testified that he had forgotten about the years of abuse for about 15 years….

The Scientific Evidence for Dissociative Amnesia The flip side to the false memory studies is a large body of research, conducted over the last century, that provides evidence that dissociative amnesia is, in fact, a common reaction to trauma. However, this research has often been ignored in news articles and textbooks that discuss the false memory syndrome. “There are now hundreds of studies in lots of different populations showing that people forget trauma,” said psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. “We see it in victims of sexual abuse, natural disaster, torture, rape, war, and kidnapping. And research also shows that delayed memories of abuse are as reliable as continuous memories.” One of the psychologists who has synthesized much of this research on dissociative amnesia has been Jennifer Freyd herself. “I am a memory psychologist, so I needed to make sense of what had happened to me,” she said. In 1996, she published Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse (1996)—a book published by Harvard University Press, which describes what she has called betrayal trauma theory. “Memory of trauma can be dangerous to children,” she stated, summing up the central argument of her book. “They may need to forget in order to function in important relationships.”….

Evidence for dissociative amnesia has also been gathered by Brown University political scientist Ross Cheit, who reports that he forgot his own sexual abuse at the age of 12 by a camp counselor for decades. In the mid-1990s, he launched the Recovered Memory Project, and he has now gathered 110 corroborated cases of recovered memory. He also has compiled a long list of citations to scholarly articles on dissociative amnesia in various populations such as child abuse victims and Holocaust survivors. Cheit spent a decade writing a book, The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children (2014), in which he reviewed the major child abuse cases over the previous 30 years—from the McMartin Preschool case of the 1980s through the priest abuse cases and the Jerry Sandusky case. In it, he documents how there has been a bias in the media against recognizing dissociative amnesia, even though in the clinical world it is well known that “sexual abuse disclosures are often delayed and then disclosed in bits and pieces.”
https://www.madinamerica.com/2021/02/false-memory-syndrome

/Michael Salter – Organized Abuse
https://ritualabuse.us/smart/michael-salter/

Michael Salter
Organised abuse has been reported by child victims, adult survivors and a range of professionals for over thirty years. However, organised abuse remains poorly understood.
This website has been developed by criminologist Scientia Associate Professor Michael Salter who specialises in the study of organised abuse and complex trauma. The aim of the website is to disseminate reliable information about organised abuse to professionals, victims and survivors.
https://www.organisedabuse.com/

Scientia Associate Professor Michael Salter
I am the Scientia Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of New South Wales, Australia. I specialise in the study of organised sexual abuse. In addition to my work on complex trauma, I have researched and published widely on violence against women and children.
I sit on the Scientific Advisory Committee and the Board of Directors of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. I am an Associate Editor of Child Abuse Review, the peer-reviewed journal of the British Association for the Study and Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, and I sit on the editorial board of the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation.
I act as a consultant and trainer to a range of non-government organisations and government departments at the state and national level. I am an expert advisor to the Australian Office of the eSafety Commissioner and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.
https://www.organisedabuse.com/michael-salter

Marilyn Manson: His satanic majesty
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/marilyn-manson-his-satanic-majesty-116023.html
Evan Rachel Wood describing the abuse she suffered when she was in a relationship with Marilyn Manson
https://twitter.com/i/status/1270709342032072704

Evan Rachel Wood accuses Marilyn Manson of abuse
2 February 2021
‘Brainwashed’
On Monday, Wood alleged that Manson was her abuser for the first time via a statement posted on her Instagram account.
“The name of my abuser is Brian Warner, also known to the world as Marilyn Manson,” the Westworld actress claimed.
“He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years. I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-55889002

Remembering our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us
Karl Sabbagh
Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199218417  Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015  

Freyds and Feuds  Karl Sabbagh 
This chapter describes the British False Memory Society (BFMS) and its American equivalent, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). These organizations are made up of parents who had been accused of abuse — they would say falsely — by one of their children.
https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199218417.001.0001/acprof-9780199218417-chapter-11

Paedophile Karl Sabbagh, author and film maker, jailed for grooming child
By Will Walker 
27th September 2019
A RENOWNED author and filmmaker was secretly a depraved paedophile who preyed on a ‘vulnerable’ child before grooming her.
Predator Karl Sabbagh began talking to his 14-year-old victim about films and literature but the conversation soon moved on to him sending videos of himself performing sex acts.
The 77-year-old pervert of Crab Tree Close, Bloxham, went on to ask the child to ‘stop shaving her pubic hair’ and later sent her a vibrator in the post….”He sent a video of himself masturbating, there was talk of meeting her.”….
Sentencing, Judge Peter Ross, jailed Sabbagh for 45 months and ordered that he sign the sex offenders register for life.
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/17933474.paedophile-karl-sabbagh-author-film-maker-jailed-grooming-child

Survivorship Notes and Journal
2021 Winter Journal

Articles:
Institutional Child Abuse – Annika Lundin and Randy Noblitt
Boulspo, 2016 – Wendy Hoffman
My Personal Experience – Victoria Skye

Poetry:
Whitman’s Samplers on the dining room table – Forest Hills, 1940s – Wendy Hoffman
Now and Then – Victoria Skye
https://survivorship.org/notes-and-journal/

Survivorship Online Conference – May 21 – 23, 2021 “

Being a survivor/clinician in a changing world”  https://survivorship.org/the-survivorship-ritual-abuse-and-mind-control-2021-conference/ 

Survivorship is one of the oldest and most respected organizations supporting survivors of extreme child abuse, including sadistic sexual abuse, ritualistic abuse, mind control, and torture. Survivorship provides resources, healing, and community for survivors; training and education for professionals who may serve survivors; and support for survivors’ partners and other allies. The organization functions as a lifeline for survivors who may be isolated emotionally or geographically. Through community outreach and training, Survivorship also raises awareness about these difficult issues.  

Speakers Include:  

One Hundred Children: A Parable for Healing from Dissociation-savvy Mind Control Presenter: Ellen Lacter, Ph.D. 

Production of Sadistic Child abuse Materials: Psychology of the Victims and Perpetrators Presenter: Ellen Lacter, Ph.D.  

Self-Esteem  Presenter: Wendy Hoffman  

 Mind Control and How to Stop it. Presenter: Neil Brick  

 

Donald Trump Rape Accuser Drops Suit, Janet Reno Frank Fuster County Walk Case, Appco Workers

– Jane Doe Who Accused Trump of Raping Her When She Was 13 Drops Her Suit
– NIGHTMARE IN COUNTRY WALK
– What Beck Left Out
– Debunking Frontline’s – Did Daddy Do It? “”Frank Fuster was living the American dream.” Or so claims Frontline
– Appco: Workers allegedly forced to ‘shove cigarettes up bottoms’ after missing sales targets

Quotes on the County Walk Frank Fuster Case (sources below):


“The Fuster case originated with a child spontaneously talking about being abused. That clear statement caused two families to withdraw their children from Fuster’s home daycare, which they did without informing anyone else. Months later, a spontaneous statement from a different child, started an investigation by law enforcement. An articulate 5-year-old boy was soon located, who gave several detailed statements that were later corroborated in various ways.”

“When the charges emerged in the home daycare case, Frank Fuster was on parole for sexually assaulting a 9-year-old two years earlier….the fact is that Fuster admitted in his parole violation hearing on the 1984 charges that, in the course of driving the girl home, he made her sit on his lap and he touched “her chest area” and “her vagina area.”

“Beck makes a point of saying that, despite claims about games involving feces, the police were “unable to find” any “feces smeared across the walls of the Fuster home” (p. 141). But he does not inform his readers that the police found a photo of precisely that: Frank’s son in a room smeared with feces on the floor and wall.”

“Beck acknowledges Frank Fuster’s 1982 conviction for lewd and lascivious assault on a minor, but he quickly adds, without any apparent skepticism, that “Frank had always maintained his innocence.” (p. 142). But Beck does not tell his readers that Fuster actually admitted the actions charged in that case, and then tried to minimize them, while testifying at his Parole Violation Hearing three years later (Cheit, p. 337).”

“But Frank Fuster was not living the American dream. He was on probation for a 1982 child molestation conviction for a lewd and lascivious assault on an nine-year-old girl. Fuster also served four years in New York for manslaughter, after shooting a man in after a traffic accident and then threatening an off-duty policeman with his loaded rifle. His “new wife” was also his third wife, a girl barely sixteen years old whose status as an immigrant was unsure…And he gained custody of his son after threatening his ex-wife’s life if she contested the matter.”

“The things that Martha Fuster is willing to admit in this deposition are haunting, partly for the similarities to Ileana’s situation. Frank met Martha when she was sixteen; she lost her virginity and felt forced to marry Frank. Ileana confessed something similar to Shirley Blando and others at the prison, months before the psychologists were hired by her lawyer. And she used the word rape. (Blando deposition, State v. Fuster, August 1, 1985; tr. 78). Martha Fuster was kicked out of her house after Frank beat up her father (Martha Gonzalez Fuster Deposition tr., 13). Ileana’s mother remarried – and her new husband, Isreal Mendosa, called the police when Frank Fuster pulled a gun on him during an argument.”

“Also during this time, the police were called when Frank Fuster, in the heat of an argument, pulled a gun on Ileana’s step-father. In the year before the Country Walk case broke, Frank Fuster hit Ileana in the face repeatedly in front of other people at a Halloween party after she mentioned that he owned a gun.”

“In his own testimony in the Country Walk trial, Frank Fuster told so many lies that his lawyer was forced to admit as much to the jury in closing arguments. His most outrageous lie was one he maintained throughout the case: that he did not run a day care operation and that there was no Country Walk babysitting service. He also said “there were only a few children.”

Jane Doe Who Accused Trump of Raping Her When She Was 13 Drops Her Suit
By Dave Quinn and Diane Herbst November 5, 2016

The anonymous California woman who accused Donald Trump in a federal lawsuit of raping her in the ’90s when she was 13 has voluntarily dismissed her lawsuit, her attorney said late Friday….  Doe had accused the Republican presidential nominee of raping her during the summer of 1994, allegedly in the home of Jeffrey Epstein — a businessman and convicted sex offender also named in the lawsuit.  “Jane Doe instructed us to dismiss her lawsuit against Trump and Epstein today,” Bloom wrote….
  http://people.com/politics/donald-trump-rape-lawsuit-dismissed/

NIGHTMARE IN COUNTRY WALK
BY GLENN COLLINS December 14, 1986

UNSPEAKABLE ACTS By Jan Hollingsworth. Illustrated. 592 pp. New York: Congdon & Weed. $18.95.

OF Susan, a parent who suspects that her child has been sexually abused, ”Unspeakable Acts” tells us: ”Susan said she couldn’t rest until she knew the truth. She wouldn’t rest afterward, either.” Readers of Jan Hollingsworth’s account of a widely publicized Florida child-abuse case may feel the same. In its lurid details, its frustrating complexity and in the agony of the children and families who were victimized, this case would seem to be the paradigm of incidents in Minnesota, California and elsewhere that have surfaced in recent years. A startling difference, though, is the outcome: the molester was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Indeed, after reading Ms. Hollingsworth’s description of the trial, it seems almost a miracle that, in October 1985, the owner of the Country Walk Babysitting Service, one Frank Fuster, was found guilty of 14 counts of abuse. ”It was an almost perfect crime,” Ms. Hollingsworth comments, and this could be said of child sexual abuse in general, since it is usually committed in the absence of witnesses or corroboration other than the testimony of the small victims.

Mr. Fuster was convicted of molesting the children entrusted to his wife’s care in their home in the middle-class Dade County suburb of Country Walk, a planned development that was intended to be an idyllic refuge from the anxieties of urban Miami.

Of course, given the media coverage, the triumph of the Fuster prosecution was a consuming matter for Dade County residents. But the importance of the case transcends Floridians’ concerns. This book is almost a primer for parents, criminal justice personnel and social service workers in the do’s and don’ts of attempting to prevent, and make prosecutable, ”the most unprosecutable crime in the nation,” as the book describes it.

….Her presentation of the case includes trial testimony and the verbatim reports of psychiatrists and polygraph operators, and it may be too thorough for some readers’ taste. But it has a mesmerizing quality that makes this book as compelling as it is heartrending.

Readers are likely to recoil from accounts of Mr. Fuster’s actions. It is sickening stuff. But such details account for both the public attention accorded the case and the outrage that animated parents and prosecutors alike – indignation that led to Mr. Fuster’s life sentence. Mr. Fuster’s unspeakable acts were more than just the repeated sexual abuse of children; the victims also testified that he led them in satanic rituals in which both crucifixes and excrement played a part. Some of the children’s most disturbing testimony involved descriptions of the ways in which he terrorized them: one method was to force them to watch him mutilate pet birds, an object lesson to tots who might disclose the abuse. THE author cites the specifics of these revolting rituals to illustrate disturbing similarities in some of the multiple-victim sexual-abuse cases that have recently been discovered in other states. She suggests that such acts are fostered by a nationwide network of pedophiles who swap information and videotapes in a mega-dollar child-pornography business the F.B.I. would do well to target….

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/14/books/nightmare-in-country-walk.html

Mythical Numbers and Satanic Ritual Abuse

Sep 10, 2014  Ross Cheit Professor at Brown University

The Fuster case originated with a child spontaneously talking about being abused. That clear statement caused two families to withdraw their children from Fuster’s home daycare, which they did without informing anyone else. Months later, a spontaneous statement from a different child, started an investigation by law enforcement. An articulate 5-year-old boy was soon located, who gave several detailed statements that were later corroborated in various ways. The case was tagged by some as “satanic ritual abuse” because children made statements about Fuster wearing masks, killing a bird and playing with feces. Those allegations quietly disappeared from the witch-hunt narrative when adult testimony and photographic evidence corroborated these statements. But the satanic tag lived on. The leading academic psychologists on child suggestibility still claim that the case was filled with “fantastic” elements like “riding a shark.” But the only child who said anything close to that was describing a Jacques Cousteau program. Hardly a matter of satanic ritual abuse.

When the charges emerged in the home daycare case, Frank Fuster was on parole for sexually assaulting a 9-year-old two years earlier. The jury that convicted Fuster in 1985 was unaware of this prior conviction. But others who have embraced Frank Fuster as innocent know about it and claim that lighting struck twice — Fuster was innocent the first time, too. But the fact is that Fuster admitted in his parole violation hearing on the 1984 charges that, in the course of driving the girl home, he made her sit on his lap and he touched “her chest area” and “her vagina area.”….

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ross-cheit/mythical-numbers-and-sata_b_5578078.html

What Beck Left Out

August 8, 2015

The witch-hunt narrative, as described in my book, has deep roots in American culture. It ranges from Salem Massachusetts to the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. The power of those cautionary tales, however, causes many people to drop their skeptical guard when told that something is a modern day witch-hunt. So it is with the conventional wisdom about the highly publicized day-care sexual abuse cases from the 1980s.

Richard Beck, a comparative literature major from Harvard who works at a literary magazine, is the latest one spreading the witch-hunt narrative about those cases. His book, We Believe the Children, based largely on secondary sources, reaches the same conclusions that Debbie Nathan and defense lawyer Michael Snedeker offered twenty years ago. In both instances, the authors repeatedly omitted significant evidence that contradicts the witch-hunt narrative. Consider some examples of what Beck left out:….

Beck makes a point of saying that, despite claims about games involving feces, the police were “unable to find” any “feces smeared across the walls of the Fuster home” (p. 141). But he does not inform his readers that the police found a photo of precisely that: Frank’s son in a room smeared with feces on the floor and wall. Beck also omits any mention that Debbie Nathan, his primary source for the book, once acknowledged that it “appears that [Frank Fuster] perpetrated sadomasochistic assaults against [Ileana, his wife] (who was legally a minor) and possibly against the younger children, including abuse involving urine and excrement” (Cheit, p. 327, fn. 125). When characterizing the case as “satanic ritual abuse,” Beck does not acknowledge that evidence, but he mentions that there were allegations involving masks (pp. xiii). But Beck omits the fact that masks were found in Fuster’s house and that adults testified in the case about being scared by Frank Fuster using them (Cheit, pp. 297-98, 331).

Beck repeats the claim that Ileana Fuster was held naked in an isolation cell in the Country Walk case (p. 143). But he does not acknowledge that Ileana Fuster made no such claim in the actual motion she brought concerning her treatment in prison, while being held. In that motion, alleging “cruel and unusual punishment,” Ileana Fuster complained of things like having “only limited access to shower facilities” and “only limited access to hot water for coffee.” There was nothing in her motion about being held nude (Cheit, p. 333). Beck also neglects to inform his readers that Ileana Fuster denied that she had been held naked when asked about it years later, by defense lawyer Arthur Cohen, in an interview that Beck cites elsewhere with approval (Cheit, p. 335).

Beck acknowledges Frank Fuster’s 1982 conviction for lewd and lascivious assault on a minor, but he quickly adds, without any apparent skepticism, that “Frank had always maintained his innocence.” (p. 142). But Beck does not tell his readers that Fuster actually admitted the actions charged in that case, and then tried to minimize them, while testifying at his Parole Violation Hearing three years later (Cheit, p. 337). Here is how Fuster explained what he did to a 9-year-old while driving her home one night:

This is how I touch her chest area. I don’t see any sexual movement here. I also touch her in the vaginal area. That’s it. That’s the whole case.

Nor does Beck acknowledge Frank Fuster’s long record of documented lies about his manslaughter conviction. As I said in The Witch-Hunt Narrative: “one wonders how anyone could cite his denials with utter credulity and without any acknowledgment of the considerable evidence to the contrary” (Cheit, p. 338).

Beck also impugns the most important child in the Fuster case without acknowledging that he never examined the first interview with that child, an interview that played a major role in the case. Psychology professor James Wood recently admitted that he and Debbie Nathan, his co-author for a forthcoming commentary on my book, never examined this interview, which Wood described as “key for understanding the case” (Wood, personal communication; July 18, 2015)….

In many of the cases proclaimed to be witch hunts, looking closely at the record revealed substantial evidence of abuse and compelling reasons that jurors voted to convict. It’s true that I also found cases where people were charged who shouldn’t have been. Yet even in some of those cases, there was strong evidence of abuse. A crime was committed and a child was assaulted by someone who was never apprehended, but only the false accusation story lives on….

http://blogs.brown.edu/rcheit/2015/08/08/what-beck-left-out/

Debunking Frontline’s – Did Daddy Do It? “”Frank Fuster was living the American dream.” Or so claims Frontline
…for the 4/25/02 program, “Did Daddy Do It?” Fuster had “a new house in the suburbs, a successful landscaping business, and a new wife.” Then, according to the highly-acclaimed PBS program, Fuster “found himself” charged with sexually abusing children in their home day care. His subsequent conviction, considered ironclad by many, was the target of this hour-long program. But Frank Fuster was not living the American dream. He was on probation for a 1982 child molestation conviction for a lewd and lascivious assault on an nine-year-old girl. Fuster also served four years in New York for manslaughter, after shooting a man in after a traffic accident and then threatening an off-duty policeman with his loaded rifle. His “new wife” was also his third wife, a girl barely sixteen years old whose status as an immigrant was unsure…And he gained custody of his son after threatening his ex-wife’s life if she contested the matter.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20070404174438/http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Taubman_Center/PBS/

Frank Fuster gained custody of his son after threatening his ex-wife’s life if she contested the matter

Source: State v. Escalona [Fuster], Case No. 84-19728, Deposition of Martha Gonzales Fuster (August 8, 1985), tr. 58-60 (“he told me that he would kill me,” “if I ever took Noel away,” “he would kill me if I took Noel,” “afraid of him.”)

The things that Martha Fuster is willing to admit in this deposition are haunting, partly for the similarities to Ileana’s situation. Frank met Martha when she was sixteen; she lost her virginity and felt forced to marry Frank. Ileana confessed something similar to Shirley Blando and others at the prison, months before the psychologists were hired by her lawyer. And she used the word rape. (Blando deposition, State v. Fuster, August 1, 1985; tr. 78). Martha Fuster was kicked out of her house after Frank beat up her father (Martha Gonzalez Fuster Deposition tr., 13). Ileana’s mother remarried – and her new husband, Isreal Mendosa, called the police when Frank Fuster pulled a gun on him during an argument.

Further contradicting the “American Dream” image painted by Frontline, Fuster has acknowledged (and Jan Hollingsworth reported) that he was the subject of a criminal complaint for rape 1980.

Fuster was also the victim of a close-range gunshot to the face in 1980. The authorities were told it was a robbery; but nothing was stolen and the act appeared to be personal. The authorities speculated that it was an act of revenge. Also during this time, the police were called when Frank Fuster, in the heat of an argument, pulled a gun on Ileana’s step-father. In the year before the Country Walk case broke, Frank Fuster hit Ileana in the face repeatedly in front of other people at a Halloween party after she mentioned that he owned a gun.

Having a gun was a violation of Frank Fuster’s parole conditions—for his 1982 conviction for lewd and lascivious assault on a nine-year-old girl….

Frank Fuster’s documented history of deception about this case

In his own testimony in the Country Walk trial, Frank Fuster told so many lies that his lawyer was forced to admit as much to the jury in closing arguments. His most outrageous lie was one he maintained throughout the case: that he did not run a day care operation and that there was no Country Walk babysitting service. He also said “there were only a few children.” Then in an impromptu press conference while the jury was out, Fuster argued “she babysat 50 kids and they only had seven here, how come”? (The answer, of course, is that many children were too young to testify, others did not want to, and other’s were not thought to have been abused by the Fusters.)

Fuster also lied to his lawyer. Exasperated, he told the judge that he was tired of “only getting abuse” from Fuster. (Magistrate’s Report, p. 25) Later, he used his lawyer’s conclusion that he was “an unmitigated liar” as one of his alleged grounds from appeal! (Magistrate’s Report, p. 113) Fuster eventually lied to the judge about why his own lawyer wanted out of the case. The judge called him on this lie….

https://web.archive.org/web/20070206102956/http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Taubman_Center/PBS/intro.html#3

Appco: Workers allegedly forced to ‘shove cigarettes up bottoms’ after missing sales targets

By the National Reporting Team’s Lorna Knowles and Elise Worthington

Young charity workers were forced to lick underwear, cross dress and take part in obscene cigarette rituals, according to lawyers suing the marketing giant Appco.

The shocking allegations are the latest to emerge as part of an $85 million class action against the Appco Group in the Federal Court of Australia.

The Appco Group is one of the world’s biggest fundraising agencies and rattles the tin on behalf of some of Australia’s best known charities, including Surf Life Saving Australia and The Starlight Foundation.

But its workers, sometimes known as “charity muggers” or “chuggers”, claim they were overworked, grossly underpaid and bullied.

Lawyer Rory Markham told the ABC more than 500 former workers had come forward since he filed the class action against the Appco Group last month.

Mr Markham said some alleged that they were forced to cross dress, take part in “cockfights” and lick underpants if they did not meet their daily sales targets.

Workers in Tasmania also allege they were forced to participate in an obscene ritual involving cigarettes….

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-05/fresh-allegations-of-bizarre-rituals-at-marketing-giant-appco/7996710 

Editorial Ethical standards, truths, and lies

Editorial   Ethical standards, truths, and lies
Bethany L. Brand Ph & Linda McEwen MA
Journal of Trauma & Dissociation Volume 17, Issue 3, 2016 pages 259-266
DOI: 10.1080/15299732.2016.1114357

This is an editorial about recent social and professional ethical developments that may signal attempts to arrive at truth about critical aspects of trauma after decades of lies and cover-ups. The first development came with the release of the Hoffman Report (Hoffman et al., 2015a), an investigation of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) complicity in abusive, traumatizing interrogations of political detainees, with one particular reference of note to this discussion. Another development was the publication of The Witch-Hunt Narrative by Ross Cheit (2014), which challenges widely held misconceptions about victims of child abuse and their credibility perpetuated since the preschool child abuse trials of the 1980s.

The ethical standards for International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) members are derived from the ethical guidelines of national and professional groups (ISSTD, 2015). For psychologists who are members of the ISSTD, the APA provides ethical principles (APA, 2010), including general principles and ethical standards. Not only did some powerful people within the APA fail to follow its principles and standards, but, as noted in the Hoffman Report, it was the APA ethics director who was among those complicit in this failure.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15299732.2016.1114357

Article PDF
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15299732.2016.1114357

We Believe the Children – What Beck Left Out, Pakistan child abuse video case – 400 videos of 280 minors – 20 to 25 people abused the children

Richard Beck admits that his work is not investigative journalism. He describes it as history. But historians do not rely on secondary sources for major arguments and historians do not omit evidence for the sake of telling a simplified story.

Pakistan:
a gang of 20 to 25 people had abused the children between 2009 and 2014
around 400 videos were made of 280 minors

What Beck Left Out
August 8, 2015
By Ross E. Cheit

The witch-hunt narrative, as described in my book, has deep roots in American culture. It ranges from Salem Massachusetts to the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. The power of those cautionary tales, however, causes many people to drop their skeptical guard when told that something is a modern day witch-hunt. So it is with the conventional wisdom about the highly publicized day-care sexual abuse cases from the 1980s.

Richard Beck, a comparative literature major from Harvard who works at a literary magazine, is the latest one spreading the witch-hunt narrative about those cases. His book, We Believe the Children, based largely on secondary sources, reaches the same conclusions that Debbie Nathan and defense lawyer Michael Snedeker offered twenty years ago. In both instances, the authors repeatedly omitted significant evidence that contradicts the witch-hunt narrative. Consider some examples of what Beck left out:

Beck reduces all of the medical evidence in the McMartin case to a single paragraph and insinuates that there was no credible medical evidence substantiating sexual abuse (pp. 155-56). But Beck does not tell his readers that even defense lawyer Danny Davis allowed that the genital injuries on one girl were “serious and convincing.” Beck also did not mention that the vaginal injuries on another girl, one of the three involved in both McMartin trials, were considered as proving sexual abuse “to a medical certainty.” Beck also fails to mention that the case began when Judy Johnson saw a drop of blood. Beck allows that the boy was examined twice and, as he put it, both doctors reported suspected child abuse (p. 34). But Beck did not disclose the basis for those reports: the Emergency Room doctor observed the “red and roughened” area around the boy’s anus, concluding that there “appeared to be some friction like trauma to the rectal area.” The pediatric expert who subsequently examined the boy described discolored bruising patterns and said that his anal injury “was within the last week” (Cheit, p. 25). That is why Ray Buckey was arrested….

Beck discusses the Kniffen and McCuan case from Bakersfield, California, presenting them as victims of a witch-hunt (pp. 70-72). But Beck never mentions considerable medical evidence against the McCuans, including vaginal scarring and trauma to the lining of the anus, that occurred between 1980 and 1982 (when Rod Phelps was away). Debbie Nathan once wrote that this evidence “seriously weakened Alvin and Debbie’s protestations of innocence.” But Beck ignored this evidence entirely, also neglecting to mention that the McCuan daughters, unlike the Kniffen sons, have never recanted their claims against their parents. Finally, Beck notes that the convictions of the Kniffens and McCuans were set aside, but he does not reveal that the judge opined that “it may be that all of the acts reported actually occurred” (Cheit, pp. 119-123)….

Beck claims that “no pornography” was ever found in any of these cases (p. xvi). But he neglects to mention that Isabel’s Day Care, not far from the McMartin Preschool, had exactly that kind of evidence. So did the Rainbow Day Care Center case in Fort Lauderdale. So did Robert Shell’s case in Massachusetts. Also, two defendants in the Bakersfield cases were convicted partly because there was photographic evidence of their sexual abuse of children: Charles Bishop and Grant Self (Cheit, pp. 163-165).

Beck also claims that Jesse Friedman, who pleaded guilty to child sex abuse charges, was falsely convicted (pp. 173-181). But he does not mention that Friedman failed two lie detectors, both arranged by his own lawyer, and that the psychological evaluation, also arranged by his own lawyer, concluded that Friedman was a “psychopathic deviant” who was “capable of committing the crimes with which he was charged.” Beck also does not mention that he has never spoken to a single one of the fourteen men who formed the basis for the case. This is significant since Andrew Jarecki, who directed the film, never spoke to the vast majority of actual complainants in the case, either. Nor does Beck acknowledge that two of those men wrote a letter in 2004, objecting to the movie, and attesting to sexual abuse by Jesse Friedman (Cheit, pp. 130-133)….

Beck acknowledges Frank Fuster’s 1982 conviction for lewd and lascivious assault on a minor, but he quickly adds, without any apparent skepticism, that “Frank had always maintained his innocence.” (p. 142). But Beck does not tell his readers that Fuster actually admitted the actions charged in that case, and then tried to minimize them, while testifying at his Parole Violation Hearing three years later (Cheit, p. 337). Here is how Fuster explained what he did to a 9-year-old while driving her home one night:

This is how I touch her chest area. I don’t see any sexual movement here. I also touch her in the vaginal area. That’s it. That’s the whole case.

Nor does Beck acknowledge Frank Fuster’s long record of documented lies about his manslaughter conviction. As I said in The Witch-Hunt Narrative: “one wonders how anyone could cite his denials with utter credulity and without any acknowledgment of the considerable evidence to the contrary” (Cheit, p. 338)….

Richard Beck admits that his work is not investigative journalism (p. xxv). He describes it as history. But historians do not rely on secondary sources for major arguments and historians do not omit evidence for the sake of telling a simplified story. A comprehensive examination of the actual transcripts—something that Beck did not do in a single case beyond McMartin—reveals a different picture. As I wrote last summer:

In many of the cases proclaimed to be witch hunts, looking closely at the record revealed substantial evidence of abuse and compelling reasons that jurors voted to convict. It’s true that I also found cases where people were charged who shouldn’t have been. Yet even in some of those cases, there was strong evidence of abuse. A crime was committed and a child was assaulted by someone who was never apprehended, but only the false accusation story lives on.

And so it is with Richard Beck’s history of these cases.
http://blogs.brown.edu/rcheit/2015/08/08/what-beck-left-out/

7 charged in Pakistan child abuse video case
By Sophia Saifi, Ralph Ellis and Laura Smith-Spark, CNN
Tue August 11, 2015

Kasur, Pakistan (CNN) Seven people accused of blackmailing scores of children into making sex videos and then blackmailing them again by threatening to sell the recordings have been arrested in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

Police Officer Rai Babar Saeed said a gang of 20 to 25 people had abused the children between 2009 and 2014 in the village of Hussain Khan Wala in the Kasur district.

Chaudhary Hamid, a villager, said the gang blackmailed the children into engaging in sexual activity again and again to stop the videos from being leaked. Parents were also blackmailed, he said.

At least one CD shop in Kasur had been selling the videos, Saeed said. In most of the videos, the faces of criminals are not shown, but the child’s face can be seen clearly, the officer said.

Latif Sara, a lawyer representing parents of the abused children and the head of a nongovernmental organization called Children Abuse Protection, said 274 videos had been circulated.

According to a survey by the group last week, one in three of the 500 households questioned in the district of Kasur had a child who had been sexually abused, Sara said.

CNN affiliate Geo TV reported higher numbers, saying around 400 videos were made of 280 minors…. http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/10/asia/pakistan-child-abuse/

Number of arrests in child abuse scandal rises to 14  August 10, 2015
KASUR: The number of accused arrested in the child abuse scandal has risen to 14 after police made two more arrests on Monday.

The arrests came after the interim bail extension of five accused was denied by a local court. Police said seven accused are on judicial remand.

Main accused confesses

Haseeb Amir, the main accused of Kasur child abuse scandal, has confessed to subjecting children to abuse and making their videos.

SP Investigation Kasur said that in a statement given to the police the main accused of the child abuse scandal admitted to committing the crime of sexually abusing children and capturing the same in videos.

On Saturday, the nation was shocked by reports of gang of criminals producing and selling illicit videos of child sexual abuse in Ganda Singh Wala area of Kasur in Punjab province for the last 10 years.

Investigations into the massive child sexual abuse scandal – termed the biggest in the country’s history – revealed that around 400 videos were made of 280 minor victims of sexual abuse by the organised gang of over 25 criminals.

Several parents of victims were consistently blackmailed and coerced into paying hundreds of thousands of rupees with threats of releasing the videos in public. Reports said families in the locality were helpless as officials all along remained apathetic to the incident….
http://www.geo.tv/article-193765-Number-of-arrests-in-child-abuse-scandal-rises-to-14

The Witch-Hunt Narrative: “most of the charges brought against child molesters were grounded in some truth”

Research By the Dozens
By Lawrence Goodman  September/October 2014

….More than fifteen years in the making, The Witch-Hunt Narrative examines dozens of child sexual abuse cases from the 1980s. Over time, these cases ensnared dozens of defendants, some of whom were eventually cleared of any wrongdoing. Many experts believed these prosecutions came about when interrogators asked young children leading questions, resulting in a witch-hunt in which wrongful accusations were made against thousands of people.

Thanks in part to the work of Brown students, Cheit reviewed all the so-called witch-hunt cases and concluded that most of the charges brought against child molesters were grounded in some truth. At the very least, he says, there was enough credible evidence to begin police investigations.

Cheit, who holds a law degree and is also a professor of public policy, believes we are far too quick to dismiss the accounts of young children. “We have, over the last twenty years,” he writes in The Witch-Hunt Narrative, “discounted the word of children who might testify against sexual abuse. We have become more worried about overreacting to child sexual abuse than we are about underreacting to it.”….
http://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/content/view/3759/31/

How the ‘Witch Hunt’ Myth Undermined American Justice

How the ‘Witch Hunt’ Myth Undermined American Justice
Jason Berry  07.12.14

Innocent people persecuted by a legal system out of control? In The Witch-Hunt Narrative, Ross E. Cheit argues the media and courts have gone too far in dismissing evidence of abuse….

Accusations of ritual abuse and grisly cult behavior with Satanic overtones have been discussed at conferences on child abuse and treated in research literature since the mid-’80s. Kenneth Lanning, an FBI agent who specialized in child-abuse investigations for many years, found no evidence “of a well-organized Satanic cult” and said so in a research guide. And yet, writes Cheit, even though the FBI guide became Exhibit A for those scoffing at charges of Satanic abuse, “it actually recognized many activities described as ritual abuse and it cautions that there might be plausible explanations for children making such statements in other cases about sexual abuse.”

The absence of a well-organized cult does not mean the absence of ritualized abuse. Cheit provides several pages of numbing case studies on people who were prosecuted, sometimes with testimony from their traumatized children who finally grew old enough to unburden themselves. In Florida, a monster named Eddie Lee Sexton Sr. “ran his family like a cult, subjecting them to the kinds of rituals that…others claim is only imaginary,” Cheit reports. Sexton’s children showed authorities the burial place of an infant he had murdered. “Sexton, who told his children he was the devil, inflicted horrendous torture on his family, including sexual abuse.”

The most controversial case that Cheit explores, and the one he calls “the turning point” in the journalistic development of a witch-hunt narrative, is that of Margaret Kelly Michaels. In 1985, Michaels was arrested on the testimony of children at a New Jersey day-care center where she had worked. An attractive woman in her twenties, Michaels was convicted on 96 of 131 counts, with young children testifying. Michaels took the stand and denied the accusations.

Michaels was imprisoned while awaiting trial. An inmate she befriended would later testify that Michaels told her, “I didn’t mean to hurt those children.” The inmate had already been sentenced and made no deal with prosecutors. Cheit continues:

The jury did not hear additional evidence concerning disturbing sexual behavior in the Michaels family. The state offered evidence about her being groped by her father during an early jail visit. The incident was documented at the time and the prosecution found out about it only because a correctional official in a barbershop was heard talking about it… The judge deemed it too prejudicial to present to the jury….
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/12/how-the-witch-hunt-myth-undermined-american-justice.html

There’s no evidence of hundreds of cases of false convictions of child sexual abuse in this era, “Evidence of abuse in the Keller case has been minimized or denied”, Westminster ‘chumocracy’ has protected itself from paedophile revelations, claims Cameron’s advisor

Mythical Numbers and Satanic Ritual Abuse
Ross Cheit  Professor at Brown University 07/11/2014

There’s no evidence of hundreds of cases of false convictions of child sexual abuse in this era. In my new book, The Witch-Hunt Narrative, I examine dozens of specific cases from the 1980s and early 90s that are said to be wrongful prosecutions or wrongful convictions. Aided by dozens of research assistants, I spent fifteen years doing the painstaking work of original trial court research to figure out what kind of evidence actually existed in these cases….

In many of the cases proclaimed to be witch hunts, looking closely at the record revealed substantial evidence of abuse and compelling reasons that jurors voted to convict. It’s true that I also found cases where people were charged who shouldn’t have been. Yet even in some of those cases, there was strong evidence of abuse. A crime was committed and a child was assaulted by someone who was never apprehended, but only the false accusation story lives on…..

on the day that the 3-year-old complained to her mother about Dan Keller pulling down her pants and spanking her at day-care, she later screamed while she was urinating, “It hurts, it hurts.” That prompted her mother to take the preschooler to the emergency room.

The emergency room doctor found what he believed were two physical indications of sexual abuse: “what appeared to be lacerations of the hymen” and “a tear of the posterior fourchette,” a fold of skin on the vagina. It might surprise readers to learn that a year after the 1991 added emergency room visit, the doctor “didn’t have any independent recollection” of the exam and testified entirely from the medical records.

….omits that fact in reporting that, when contacted by a newspaper in 2009, the doctor described a revelation that supposedly happened “years after” the trial. We don’t know what year. But according to Dr. Mouw, while attending a professional training seminar, he saw a slide about normal variations in hymens and realized that what he thought had been lacerations in the Keller case were probably innocuous. In 2013, Dr. Mouw filed an affidavit to this effect. Notably, the affidavit does not withdraw his finding of a vaginal tear, which had been the more certain of his original findings….

Douglas Perry, a friend of the Kellers, confessed to being at a beer-and-sex party where adults sexually abused a boy and a girl who were under the Kellers’ care. He said that, “Fran had a pen and was sticking it in and out of the little girl’s vagina.” He identified the 3-year-old girl from the trial in a videotape. Perry later recanted his confession, but he also pleaded guilty to “indecency with a child by contact.” ….

The Fuster case originated with a child spontaneously talking about being abused. That clear statement caused two families to withdraw their children from Fuster’s home daycare, which they did without informing anyone else. Months later, a spontaneous statement from a different child, started an investigation by law enforcement. An articulate 5-year-old boy was soon located, who gave several detailed statements that were later corroborated in various ways. The case was tagged by some as “satanic ritual abuse” because children made statements about Fuster wearing masks, killing a bird and playing with feces. Those allegations quietly disappeared from the witch-hunt narrative when adult testimony and photographic evidence corroborated these statements….

When the charges emerged in the home daycare case, Frank Fuster was on parole for sexually assaulting a 9-year-old two years earlier. The jury that convicted Fuster in 1985 was unaware of this prior conviction….But the fact is that Fuster admitted in his parole violation hearing on the 1984 charges that, in the course of driving the girl home, he made her sit on his lap and he touched “her chest area” and “her vagina area.”….

But what did Judy Johnson do to set off the “witch-hunt?” She saw a spot of blood on her son’s anus and called the police, who told her to take him to a doctor, which she did. She was then referred to a pediatric specialist, who reported to the Manhattan Beach Police Department that “the victim’s anus was forcibly entered several days ago.” That’s why the original defendant, Ray Buckey, was arrested….

even the defense lawyer, Danny Davis, allowed that the genital injuries on one girl were “serious and convincing.” (His main argument to the jury was that much of the time that this girl attended McMartin was outside the statute of limitations.) They don’t mention that vaginal injuries on another girl, one of the three involved in both McMartin trials, were described by a pediatrician as proving sexual abuse “to a medical certainty.”….

many jurors believed the original defendant Ray Buckey was guilty and voted to convict him. Within an hour after the first trial ended in a hung jury, seven jurors held a press conference to announce that they thought children had been sexually abused. They spoke about the difficulty in proving such claims “beyond a reasonable doubt.”….

Now, while the media publicizes sexual abuse stories about celebrities and cover-ups of abuse in the past, and repeats the mythical numbers from the witch-hunt narrative, they overlook a real number that concerns real victims — the number of children being sexually abused today. It’s a major public health problem that gets almost no attention at all.

While this type of crime is, not surprisingly, difficult to quantify, studies over many years have found that 20 percent of women and 5 to 10 percent of men report having been sexually abused as children. Just last month, a study in the American Journal of Public Health showed much higher rates of male victimization than previously thought. There’s every reason to believe that child sexual abuse is still widespread. Yet how often do the media delve into that real problem? How often do they examine the enormous gap between the number of children — judging from studies — being abused today and the number of their abusers who end up in court, much less in prison? ….
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ross-cheit/mythical-numbers-and-sata_b_5578078.html

Evidence in the Keller Case
July 10, 2014

This post elaborates on some of the evidence in the Keller case, discussed in an article that was just published on Huffington Post. The article, which is about the witch-hunt narrative writ large, argues that the evidence of abuse in the Keller case has been minimized or denied, while the “satanic” aspects of the case, which were never part of the charges, have been exaggerated.

Dr. Mouw’s Testimony

The Keller case began the day that a mother took her daughter to the Emergency Room, after the little girl screamed “It hurts, it hurts” while urinating. The Emergency Room doctor, Dr. Michael Mouw, found two different signs of sexual abuse. Seventeen years later, the doctor told a reporter that his diagnosis was likely incorrect.

Dr. Mouw’s claim has been accepted at face value, without any apparent skepticism or scrutiny by those advancing the witch-hunt narrative. Yet, on close examination, there are two reasons to discount Dr. Mouw’s current claim. First and foremost, it is flatly contradicted by his testimony in 1992, when he said repeatedly that he had “no independent recollection” of the exam….

Second, even accepting what Dr. Mouw now says at face value, his current position, contained in this affidavit filed in 2013, contradicts only one of the two findings in his 1992 report. Dr. Mouw claims that the “lacerations” he reported seeing in two places in the girl’s vagina were probably normal hymenal variations. But his affidavit did not withdraw his finding of a “tear in the posterior fourchette.”….

A civil complaint filed by the parents of one of the children who attended the Keller’s home daycare contains the allegation that a “longtime friend and confident” of Francis Keller was told about “Daniel Keller’s abusive habit toward children” (p. 2). If this allegation is true, it provides additional support, beyond the word of the children, for the allegation against the Kellers. But this evidence was never heard in court because the defendants were ultimately successful in an appeal that argued that such causes of action should not be allowed in Texas.
http://blogs.brown.edu/rcheit/2014/07/10/keller/

Westminster ‘chumocracy’ has protected itself from paedophile revelations, claims Cameron’s advisor on child abuse

Claire Perry says politicians have ‘out of touch sense of entitlement’
Tory junior minister launched blistering attack on establishment cover up
Comes after Theresa May this week launched two probes into historic abuse

By Tom Mctague, Mail Online Deputy Political Editor  11 July 2014

David Cameron’s advisor on child abuse has lashed out at the Westminster ‘chumocracy’ that has protected itself from allegations of paedophilia.

Tory junior minister Claire Perry said Parliament was full of ‘too many people with the same interests and the same out-of-touch sense of entitlement coming together to protect their own’.

Her damning remarks come amid allegations that a paedophile network was operating in Westminster and was being protected by senior politicians….

Miss Perry added: ‘The other, and more worrying part of the problem is the way that the voices of victims were ignored for so long – children told to keep quiet, ridiculed, or threatened – with tragically the most vulnerable of all being more likely to be targeted for abuse.

‘That, to me, is the real scandal and we must do all we can to make sure that when victims speak out they are heard and action is taken.”….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2688622/Westminster-chumocracy-protected-paedophile-revelations-claims-Cameron-s-advisor-child-abuse.html

 

Jerry Sandusky’s adopted son to detail sexual abuse in Oprah interview, Are Child Sexual Abuse Cases More Common Than We Think?, Ex-senior judge Butler-Sloss to head child sex abuse inquiry, investigation into Knowl View ‘cover-up’

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

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/

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

Myths About the Country Walk Case, Ugandans drum alarms to rescue abducted children (ritual killings), India’s ‘Temple Slaves’ Struggle to Break Free

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

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 

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/