MIAMI BEACH, Fla. –

The mother of an 11-year-old girl who was allegedly sexually assaulted by a Miami Beach rabbi said she’s being ostracized by members of the congregation after coming forward to police.

“I’m just so hurt, and my daughter and I are just trying to repair and move forward,” the mother told Local 10 News.

The woman said she’s already being mistreated following Karro’s arrest last month.

“I should pull you out by your hair out of the synagogue. Why are you here?” the woman said people have told her.

Police said Karro used both hands to touch and grab the girl’s buttocks at his Miami Beach art studio, kissing her neck and then instructing her not to say anything.

“Think about a child who comes home to you very scared (saying,) ‘Mom, I have something to tell you,'” the woman said. “And she tells you of such a horrible experience (about) a person that you looked up to as a father figure.”

When arrested, Karro told police he touched the girl in her behind for “cleansing” purposes because she was showing negative energy.

Those who know Karro, who is a substitute rabbi at Shaare Ezra Sephardic Congregation, said they were in disbelief after the arrest.

“I didn’t believe it,” Daniel Lannettone said.

The woman said she and her daughter have been shunned and shut out by the Jewish community in Miami Beach.

“In the beginning, they told me I had to say something,” she said. “But now, I’m told by the rabbis not to say a word — keep silent. Meanwhile, this community already decided I’m making up the story. Our words are nothing.”

The post Mother claims Jewish community shutting her out amid rabbi molestation allegations appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

WSVN-TV – 7NEWS Miami Ft. Lauderdale News, Weather, Deco

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (WSVN) — The mother of an 11-year-old who has accused a South Florida rabbi of inappropriately touching her is speaking out, saying she has been shunned by the Jewish community and has even received bribes to stay quiet.

The mother, who chose to remain anonymous, said the bribes are all in an effort to keep her silent regarding Rabbi Steve Karro. Karro has been accused of molesting her daughter at his Miami Beach art studio. “God forbid if you can just close your eyes and think about a child who comes home to you very scared and says, ‘Mom, I have something to tell you,'” she said. “I know that I have to stand up for my daughter and for this community, maybe for the voices that are scared to speak out. I’m here for you.”

Karro was arrested in late May, accused of kissing the girl on the neck and touching her backside.

Several days before Karro was arrested and after the alleged molestation, surveillance video taken from a Miami Beach restaurant appears to show him, according to the mother and her attorney, standing next to her and handing her an envelope. “He showed up at her place of work with an envelope,” said the mother’s attorney, Jeff Herman. “I can’t talk about what he said or what transpired there, other than to say that that envelope was taken by the mother to the authorities where it was opened, and there was money in that envelope.”

After the arrest, the mother said, the Jewish community has turned their backs on her and her family, going as far as to threaten her inside a synagogue. “I went to the synagogue to listen to a woman’s class, and as soon as I walked in with my daughter and a friend, they started moaning, they started speaking, ‘You have a lot of nerve to be here. I should pull you out by your hair out of the synagogue. Why are you here?'” she said.

According to Herman, the mother also received a phone call by a second rabbi who offered her and her family money to keep quiet. “The rabbi told her, it’s not too late, you can tell them you’re not interested, and stop it and receive money,” he said.

After a news conference outside of the art gallery, Karro’s supporters had their voices heard. “I think he’s a great guy,” said one woman.

“I’m standing right now for my daughter and for the rest of this community to speak and come out,” said the mother, “not to be scared.”

The mother was originally reluctant to speak out on the issue, but said she found it to be her duty to come forward and give others the courage to tell the truth if found in similar situations.

Karro and his attorney did not comment.

The post Mother speaks out regarding rabbi accused of molesting child appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

SPRING VALLEY – A 27-year-old private school bus driver has been charged with molesting a 4-year-old boy, police said Wednesday.

Shlomo Erps, of Nancy Lane, Monsey, was arrested on a felony charge of first-degree sexual abuse, Spring Valley police Detective Robert Bookstein said.

Erps is accused of making sexual contact with a child on the bus for a Spring Valley private school in late May, Bookstein said.

Following a complaint and police investigation, police arrested Erps in early June, Bookstein said.

The boy’s name and the details were not being disclosed. Bookstein said he didn’t know the name of the school or bus company.

Erps has been released on $10,000 bail set by a Spring Valley judge, according to the authorities.

The post School bus driver molested 4-year-old boy: Cops appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

From ABC News

Marine Sgt. Justin Gaertner lost both his legs in a roadside bomb explosion while serving in the Helmand province of Afghanistan on November 26, 2010. No longer able to serve his country in the U.S. military, Justin now has a new mission: Bringing to justice child sexual predators.

He took a risk and signed up for a year-long pilot program run by the Department of Homeland Security, called HERO Corps, where he and other wounded or ill warriors are being trained in the computer forensics needed to track and trap criminals involved in child exploitation.

In an interview with ABC News, Gaertner acknowledged it was a major adjustment, but said “words can’t really describe,” how good it feels to put these guys behind bars. “It’s never ending … [the] despicable things that people are doing to children.”

Last Friday, the Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson personally swore in the third class of 22 HERO Corps graduates.

In 2013, Gaernter graduated in the first HERO Corps class, also known as the Human Exploitation Rescue Operations Corps. The unit was created by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of DHS with a long history of combating cross-border child exploitation and related cyber-crimes. The program was successful enough that it received permanent funding when the HERO Act was signed into law earlier this year.

Courtesy DHS and Justin Gaertner

PHOTO: The Homeland Security Investigations team executes a search warrant with local and federal law enforcement.

The demand for jobs like Gaertner’s with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is astounding. Last year, ICE seized more than 5.2 million gigabytes of data related to child exploitation cases and arrested. That same year the HSI units arrested more than 2,300 child predators on criminal charges.

Justin accompanies special agents on search warrants, dissembling computers, running forensic software and scouring hard drives for illicit data that can be later used in court. He has participated first-hand in the arrest of hundreds of child predators. The raids he conducts are often done early in the morning to ensure the target it at home when it happens.

ABC News photo

PHOTO: Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, stands with 22 graduates of the HERO Corps program at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters in Washington D.C.

Earlier this year, Gaertner helped put away Benjamin Cuadrado for 80 years. The 40 year-old Florida man plead guilty to producing 70 sexually explicit videos of himself having sex with children who were ages two and younger.

In 2014, he helped in the conviction of Melvin Bridgers in a child “sextortion” case. Bridgers was found guilty of extorting 130 young girls over Facebook, using fake profiles to lure them into sending explicit photos of themselves and extorting them with those images for more sexually explicit material, threatening to share the images with their parents.

Courtesy DHS and Justin Gaertner

PHOTO: Sgt. Justin Gaertner with best friend Sgt. Gabriel Martinez, both of whom lost their legs fighting in Afghanistan.

These men and women have a natural desire to contribute, Johnson said at the recent graduation ceremony.

“You want to rebuild, you want to get back into the fight. That strength and character is what we see reflected in the 22 graduates we have here today,” he said.

The post How the US Government Is Training Wounded Warriors to Hunt Child Predators appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

But then, some of the patients who’d lost the most weight quit the treatment and gained back all the weight — faster than they’d lost it. Felitti couldn’t figure out why. So he started asking questions.

First, one person told him she’d been sexually abused as a kid. Then another.

“You know, I remember thinking, ‘Well, my God, this is the second incest case I’ve seen in [then] 23 years of practice,’ ” Felitti says. “And so I started routinely inquiring about childhood sexual abuse, and I was really floored.”

More than half of the 300 or so patients said yes, they too had been abused.

Felitti wondered if he’d discovered one of the keys to some cases of obesity and all the health problems that go along with it.

That possibility made him very curious: What if having a bad childhood could affect health in other ways?

The idea that childhood abuse and neglect could affect adult health was a revelation to Felitti. But a poll released Monday (from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) finds that the public widely believes this to be the case today.

How To Measure The Troubles Of Childhood

As he continued to explore the idea in the 1990s, Felitti got together with an epidemiologist named Dr. Rob Anda, who at the time was on staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They came up with a set of questions to trace, in a larger group, how tough childhood experiences might affect adult health.

They called their work the study of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE.

The 17,000 or so patients in this study were mostly middle-aged white people, upper- and middle-class, from San Diego. Felitti and Anda asked them to think back to their childhoods and list how many of 10 different types of adverse childhood experiences they’d had, including sexual, physical or emotional abuse; neglect; loss of a parent due to death, divorce or incarceration; mental illness in a parent; and drug or alcohol abuse by a parent.

The researchers wanted to get a sense of how being exposed to these different categories of adverse experience early in life might affect long-term health. So, on Felitti and Anda’s score sheet, having undergone any one of those different categories of trauma or neglect before age 18 would add one point to a person’s ACE score. Whether someone had been sexually abused one time, or dozens of times, the experience would count as one point in their study. Being habitually abused, and losing a parent to death, would add up to an ACE score of 2.

Even though Felitti and Anda were just getting a rough measure of the severity of the patients’ experiences, when Anda’s team at the CDC crunched the numbers, he was shocked.

One in 10 of the patients surveyed had grown up with domestic violence. Two in 10 had been sexually abused. Three in 10 had been physically abused.

“Just the sheer scale of the suffering — it was really disturbing to me,” Anda remembers. “I actually … I remember being in my study and I wept.”

And then came the part where he found out what happened to all those people when they grew up: “very dramatic increases in pretty much every one of the major public health problems that we’d included in the study,” he says.

Cancer, addiction, diabetes and stroke (just to name a few) occurred more often among people with high ACE scores.

Now, not everyone who’d had a rough childhood developed a serious illness, of course.

But, according to the findings, adults who had four or more “yeses” to the ACE questions were, in general, twice as likely to have heart disease, compared to people whose ACE score was zero. Women with five or more “yeses” were at least four times as likely to have depression as those with no ACE points.

When ACEs Are Very High

Carol Redding, one of Felitti’s patients, answered yes to every single ACE question, and she ended up with an ACE score of 10. Ten out of 10.

Today Redding lives in a tidy, peaceful house outside San Diego. The walls of her home office are lined with degrees and certificates — at age 58, she’s working on a Ph.D. From the outside, she’s a success.

But inside — in her body as well as her mind, Redding says — she has been battling all her life.

She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result of those childhood experiences. “I had the flashbacks,” she says, “the depression, the anxiety — Oh, my lord! Anxiety, like … if it were a tangible thing living in the house with me, I’d need another room just to house that.”

In childhood, she was diagnosed with high blood pressure. In adulthood, she had a thyroid condition and has survived three different types of cancer: leukemia, breast cancer and lymphoma.

Learning about the ACE study and her own results made Redding wonder if all of that — maybe even the cancer — might be partly connected to her troubled childhood. After so many years, all of a sudden, “all those very confused, very scattered puzzle pieces of my life just locked together in one big, amazingly clear picture,” she says.

This revelation meant so much to Redding that she started a newsletter about the ACE study and later worked for the CDC, publicizing the study’s results.

And she did all that because one big question kept nagging at her: Why didn’t more people know about this research?

Medical Community Initially Skeptical

Anda says that when he and Felitti first published their results in the late 1990s, the response from the medical community was frustrating.

“I thought that people would flock to this information,” Anda says, “and be knocking on our doors, saying, ‘Tell us more. We want to use it.’ And the initial reaction was really — silence.”

In fact, it took a long time to even get the study published. A number of top medical journals rejected the article, Anda says, “because there was intense skepticism.”

Sarah Floud, an epidemiologist at Oxford University in England, says she understands that skepticism and thinks it may still be warranted.

“An association doesn’t necessarily mean that one thing causes the other thing,” says Floud. She thinks doctors and patients should take care not to overinterpret an ACE score — it’s not a crystal ball that predicts health or illness.

Rather, Floud says, this rough indicator of a difficult childhood is just one risk factor in the mix with lots of others, such as your genes, your diet, whether you drink heavily or smoke, for example — factors known to be strongly related to some illnesses, like heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

So if you’re otherwise healthy, not a smoker or a drinker, and not obese, can childhood trauma alone increase the likelihood of diseases like cancer and heart disease?

“I don’t think there’s quite so much evidence for that,” Floud says. “But that’s not to say that it might not be true. It’s just that … that seems to be harder to prove.”

Now, 15 years after the ACE study came out, some scientists are trying to connect the dots — to get a clearer picture of what exactly adverse childhood experiences do to the body and why the study results came out the way they did.

“Well, you’ve reshaped the biology of the child,” says Megan Gunnar, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota who, for more than 30 years, has been studying the ways children respond to stressful experiences. “This is how nature protects us,” Gunnar adds. We all become adapted to living in “the kinds of environments we’re born into.”

And if you have scary, traumatic experiences when you’re small, Gunnar says, your stress response system may, in some cases, be programmed to overreact, influencing the way your mind and body work together. Research in animals and people suggests that the part of the mind that scientists call “executive function” — thought, judgment, self-control — seems to be most affected, she says.

“Over time, especially when you’re young, experiences of neglect and abuse and stress impair those circuits,” Gunnar says. “You’re less able to tell yourself not to eat the ice cream, or smoke the cigarette, or have that additional drink. You’re less capable of regulating your own behavior. And that seems to be terribly important for linking early experiences with later health outcomes.”

This growing body of research indicates that, right now, the health of millions of children is being shaped by abuse and neglect. As they grow up, these children will be more likely than other children to use behaviors like smoking, drinking and overeating to cope with stress.

Preventing childhood trauma in the first place, Felitti, Anda and their proponents now believe, is one of the biggest opportunities to prevent disease — and save billions in health care costs. It’s an opportunity, they say, that American medicine and the health care industry still seem to be missing.

This story is part of the NPR series, What Shapes Health? The series explores social and environmental factors that affect health throughout life. It is inspired, in part, by findings in a poll released Monday by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

In the 1980s, Dr. Vincent Felitti, now director of the California Institute of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, discovered something potentially revolutionary about the ripple effects of child sexual abuse. He discovered it while trying to solve a very different health problem: helping severely obese people lose weight.

Felitti, a specialist in preventive medicine, was trying out a new liquid diet treatment among patients at a Kaiser Permanente clinic. And it worked really well. The severely obese patients who stuck to it lost as much as 300 pounds in a year.

“Oh yeah, this was really quite extraordinary,” recalls Felitti.

But then, some of the patients who’d lost the most weight quit the treatment and gained back all the weight — faster than they’d lost it. Felitti couldn’t figure out why. So he started asking questions.

First, one person told him she’d been sexually abused as a kid. Then another.

“You know, I remember thinking, ‘Well, my God, this is the second incest case I’ve seen in [then] 23 years of practice,’ ” Felitti says. “And so I started routinely inquiring about childhood sexual abuse, and I was really floored.”

More than half of the 300 or so patients said yes, they too had been abused.

Felitti wondered if he’d discovered one of the keys to some cases of obesity and all the health problems that go along with it.

That possibility made him very curious: What if having a bad childhood could affect health in other ways?

The idea that childhood abuse and neglect could affect adult health was a revelation to Felitti. But a poll released Monday (from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) finds that the public widely believes this to be the case today.

How To Measure The Troubles Of Childhood

As he continued to explore the idea in the 1990s, Felitti got together with an epidemiologist named Dr. Rob Anda, who at the time was on staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They came up with a set of questions to trace, in a larger group, how tough childhood experiences might affect adult health.

They called their work the study of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE.

The 17,000 or so patients in this study were mostly middle-aged white people, upper- and middle-class, from San Diego. Felitti and Anda asked them to think back to their childhoods and list how many of 10 different types of adverse childhood experiences they’d had, including sexual, physical or emotional abuse; neglect; loss of a parent due to death, divorce or incarceration; mental illness in a parent; and drug or alcohol abuse by a parent.

The researchers wanted to get a sense of how being exposed to these different categories of adverse experience early in life might affect long-term health. So, on Felitti and Anda’s score sheet, having undergone any one of those different categories of trauma or neglect before age 18 would add one point to a person’s ACE score. Whether someone had been sexually abused one time, or dozens of times, the experience would count as one point in their study. Being habitually abused, and losing a parent to death, would add up to an ACE score of 2.

Even though Felitti and Anda were just getting a rough measure of the severity of the patients’ experiences, when Anda’s team at the CDC crunched the numbers, he was shocked.

One in 10 of the patients surveyed had grown up with domestic violence. Two in 10 had been sexually abused. Three in 10 had been physically abused.

“Just the sheer scale of the suffering — it was really disturbing to me,” Anda remembers. “I actually … I remember being in my study and I wept.”

And then came the part where he found out what happened to all those people when they grew up: “very dramatic increases in pretty much every one of the major public health problems that we’d included in the study,” he says.

Cancer, addiction, diabetes and stroke (just to name a few) occurred more often among people with high ACE scores.

Now, not everyone who’d had a rough childhood developed a serious illness, of course.

But, according to the findings, adults who had four or more “yeses” to the ACE questions were, in general, twice as likely to have heart disease, compared to people whose ACE score was zero. Women with five or more “yeses” were at least four times as likely to have depression as those with no ACE points.

When ACEs Are Very High

Carol Redding, one of Felitti’s patients, answered yes to every single ACE question, and she ended up with an ACE score of 10. Ten out of 10.

Today Redding lives in a tidy, peaceful house outside San Diego. The walls of her home office are lined with degrees and certificates — at age 58, she’s working on a Ph.D. From the outside, she’s a success.

But inside — in her body as well as her mind, Redding says — she has been battling all her life.

She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result of those childhood experiences. “I had the flashbacks,” she says, “the depression, the anxiety — Oh, my lord! Anxiety, like … if it were a tangible thing living in the house with me, I’d need another room just to house that.”

In childhood, she was diagnosed with high blood pressure. In adulthood, she had a thyroid condition and has survived three different types of cancer: leukemia, breast cancer and lymphoma.

Learning about the ACE study and her own results made Redding wonder if all of that — maybe even the cancer — might be partly connected to her troubled childhood. After so many years, all of a sudden, “all those very confused, very scattered puzzle pieces of my life just locked together in one big, amazingly clear picture,” she says.

This revelation meant so much to Redding that she started a newsletter about the ACE study and later worked for the CDC, publicizing the study’s results.

And she did all that because one big question kept nagging at her: Why didn’t more people know about this research?

Medical Community Initially Skeptical

Anda says that when he and Felitti first published their results in the late 1990s, the response from the medical community was frustrating.

“I thought that people would flock to this information,” Anda says, “and be knocking on our doors, saying, ‘Tell us more. We want to use it.’ And the initial reaction was really — silence.”

In fact, it took a long time to even get the study published. A number of top medical journals rejected the article, Anda says, “because there was intense skepticism.”

Sarah Floud, an epidemiologist at Oxford University in England, says she understands that skepticism and thinks it may still be warranted.

“An association doesn’t necessarily mean that one thing causes the other thing,” says Floud. She thinks doctors and patients should take care not to overinterpret an ACE score — it’s not a crystal ball that predicts health or illness.

Rather, Floud says, this rough indicator of a difficult childhood is just one risk factor in the mix with lots of others, such as your genes, your diet, whether you drink heavily or smoke, for example — factors known to be strongly related to some illnesses, like heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

So if you’re otherwise healthy, not a smoker or a drinker, and not obese, can childhood trauma alone increase the likelihood of diseases like cancer and heart disease?

“I don’t think there’s quite so much evidence for that,” Floud says. “But that’s not to say that it might not be true. It’s just that … that seems to be harder to prove.”

Now, 15 years after the ACE study came out, some scientists are trying to connect the dots — to get a clearer picture of what exactly adverse childhood experiences do to the body and why the study results came out the way they did.

“Well, you’ve reshaped the biology of the child,” says Megan Gunnar, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota who, for more than 30 years, has been studying the ways children respond to stressful experiences. “This is how nature protects us,” Gunnar adds. We all become adapted to living in “the kinds of environments we’re born into.”

And if you have scary, traumatic experiences when you’re small, Gunnar says, your stress response system may, in some cases, be programmed to overreact, influencing the way your mind and body work together. Research in animals and people suggests that the part of the mind that scientists call “executive function” — thought, judgment, self-control — seems to be most affected, she says.

“Over time, especially when you’re young, experiences of neglect and abuse and stress impair those circuits,” Gunnar says. “You’re less able to tell yourself not to eat the ice cream, or smoke the cigarette, or have that additional drink. You’re less capable of regulating your own behavior. And that seems to be terribly important for linking early experiences with later health outcomes.”

This growing body of research indicates that, right now, the health of millions of children is being shaped by abuse and neglect. As they grow up, these children will be more likely than other children to use behaviors like smoking, drinking and overeating to cope with stress.

Preventing childhood trauma in the first place, Felitti, Anda and their proponents now believe, is one of the biggest opportunities to prevent disease — and save billions in health care costs. It’s an opportunity, they say, that American medicine and the health care industry still seem to be missing.

This story is part of the NPR series, What Shapes Health? The series explores social and environmental factors that affect health throughout life. It is inspired, in part, by findings in a poll released Monday by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The post Can Child Sexual Abuse Affect Long-term Health appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

Mr O’Connell was commenting on a study by the Australian Institute of Criminology of 213 parental child sexual offenders, which found despite a belief that predator stepfathers were more likely to commit offences, there was little difference between them and paedophile biological fathers.

Almost half of the Australian offenders studied were biological fathers, the researchers found.

It is estimated that between 10 and 15 per cent of child sex offending is committed by a parent.

“The study debunks the stranger-danger myth that too often plagues the debate on sex offences and sex offenders,” Mr O’Connell told The Advertiser.

“It also challenges the notion of the family as a safe-haven – it is not for too many children.”

Mr O’Connell said the findings of the study were very important because children who informed on their biological fathers were often not believed.

Also, only 7 per cent of the predators, less than one in ten, abused people outside the family, making it difficult for them to be caught.

“Child-victims need to be heard and believed but also never blamed,” Mr O’Connell said. “They need to be told that they are believed, although there might be some changes in their family’s life thereafter.

UniSA child protection expert Dr Freda Briggs said the vast majority of sexual crimes against children occur in the family home and social environment.

“In our (recent) research with male victims, we found that only 26 out of 200 tried to make a report and only one succeeded,” she said. “No-one wanted to believe them.”

Dr Briggs said added damage was done to children when mothers ignored the victim when they informed on fathers.

“Significant harm results when the mother ignores the abuse,” she said.

“Usually it is because she is emotionally or financially dependent on the abuser or she was abused in childhood and accepts it as something that has to be tolerated.”

Dr Briggs welcomed the AIC study and called on South Australian authorities to record and make public the nature of the relationship between the children and the abuser.

“A problem is that Families SA and, indeed, the national statistics published annually in Child Protection Australia, do not show how many offences involve fathers, stepfathers, de facto parents or mothers,” she said.

Republished 2014 story in The Advertiser.

The post Study challenges the notion of the family as a safe-haven appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

Haaretz Reported:

British prosecutors said on Monday an ageing member of the House of Lords would now face criminal action over accusations of serious historical child sex crimes after they overturned an earlier decision following anger from alleged victims.

Lord Greville Janner, 86, a former Labour member of parliament and ex-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, is accused of more than 20 offences on former residents of children’s homes in the 1970s and 1980s.

In April, Alison Saunders, Britain’s Director of Public Prosecutions said there was evidence to bring charges against Janner, who has always denied any wrongdoing, over 16 allegations of indecent assaults and six other counts.

But she said he was not fit to plead or give evidence because he was suffering from severe dementia and so a trial could not take place.

Britain is holding a wide-ranging inquiry into allegations of abuse by high-profile figures including politicians, several police investigations have begun and critics said the decision added to a perception that the establishment was closing ranks.

Six complainants asked for the matter to be reconsidered using a recently introduced scheme called the Victims’ Right to Review, which allows them to have their cases looked at again. That review concluded it was in the public interest for the case to go before the courts.

“I have always said that in my view this was an extremely difficult and borderline case because of the strong arguments on both sides,” Saunders said.

Allegations against Janner first arose in 1991 when he was named as having abused a teenage boy during a trial of a children’s home manager in Leicestershire, central England, who was jailed for abusing children.

Janner, who was the subject of three investigations between 1991 and 2007, denied the allegations in parliament, but Saunders said both the CPS and police had made mistakes in not acting against him sooner.

“It is a matter of real regret that prosecutions weren’t brought by the police and CPS in the past,” Saunders said.

She said the assumption would be that Janner would be found unfit to plead, and thus there would only be a “trial of the facts”, with the most likely outcome being an absolute discharge which was neither a punishment nor conviction.

Janner’s case has been listed for London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court on August 7, and the CPS said it would be for the court to decide whether he should be excused on medical grounds from attending.

Janner, who served as president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews from 1978 to 1984, also was a vice president of the World Jewish Congress until 2009.

The post Ex-chief of U.K. Jews to face jury over sex abuse charges appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

A 2012 article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell

Ia 2001 book, “Identifying Child Molesters,” the psychologist Carla van Dam tells the story of a young Canadian elementary-school teacher she calls Jeffrey Clay. Clay taught physical education. He was well liked by his students, and often he asked boys in his class to stay after school, to do homework and help him with chores. One day, just before winter break, three of the boys made a confession to their parents. Mr. Clay had touched them under their pants.

The parents went to the principal. He confronted Clay, who denied everything. The principal knew Clay and was convinced by him. In his mind, what it boiled down to, van Dam writes, “is some wild imaginations and the three boys being really close.”

The parents were at a loss. Mr. Clay was beloved. He had started a popular gym club at the school. He was married and was a role model to the boys. He would come to their after-school games. Could he really have abused them? Perhaps he was just overly physical in the way that young men often are. He had a habit, for example, of grabbing boys in the hallway and pulling them toward him, placing his arms over their shoulders and chest. At the gym club, he would pick boys up and turn them upside down, holding them by the legs. Lots of people—especially gym teachers—like to engage in a little horseplay with young boys. It wasn’t until the allegations about Clay emerged that it occurred to anyone to wonder whether he might have been trying to look down the boys’ shorts.

“We weren’t really prepared to call the police and make it into a police investigation,” one of the mothers told van Dam. “It was an indiscretion, as far as we were concerned at this point. It was all vague: ‘Well, he put his hands down there.’ And, ‘Well, it was inside the pants, but fingers went to here.’ We were all still trying to protect Mr. Clay’s reputation, and the possibility this was all blown up out of proportion and there was a mistake.”

The families then learned that there had been a previous complaint by a child against Clay, and they took their case to the school superintendent. He, too, advised caution. “If allegations do not clearly indicate sexual abuse, a gray area exists,” he wrote to them. “The very act of overt investigation carries with it a charge, a conviction, and a sentence, a situation which is repugnant to fair-minded people.” He was responsible not just to the children but also to the professional integrity of his teachers. What did they have? Just the story of three young boys, and young boys do, after all, have wild imaginations.

Clay was kept on. Two months later, after prodding from a couple of social workers, the parents asked the police to investigate. One of the mothers recalls an officer interviewing her son: “He was gentle, but to the point, and he wanted to be shown exactly where Mr. Clay had touched him.” The three boys named other boys who they said had been subjected to Mr. Clay’s advances. Those boys, however, denied everything. A new, more specific allegation against Clay surfaced. He resigned, and went to see a therapist. But still the prosecutor’s office didn’t feel that it had enough evidence to press charges. And within the school there were teachers who felt that Clay was innocent. “I was running into my colleagues who were saying, ‘Did you know that some rotten parents trumped up these charges against this poor man?’ ” one teacher told van Dam. The teacher added, “Not just one person. Many teachers said this.” A psychologist working at the school thought that the community was in the grip of hysteria. The allegations against Clay, he thought, were simply the result of the fact that he was “young and energetic.” Clay threatened to sue. The parents dropped their case.

Clay was a man repeatedly accused of putting his hands down the pants of young boys. Parents complained. Superiors investigated. And what happened? The school psychologist called him a victim of hysteria.

When monsters roam free, we assume that people in positions of authority ought to be able to catch them if only they did their jobs. But that might be wishful thinking. A pedophile, van Dam’s story of Mr. Clay reminds us, is someone adept not just at preying on children but at confusing, deceiving, and charming the adults responsible for those children—which is something to keep in mind in the case of the scandal at Penn State and the conviction, earlier this year, of the former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky on child-molestation charges.

Jerry Sandusky grew up in Washington, Pennsylvania. His father headed the local community recreation center, running sports programs for children. The Sanduskys lived upstairs. “Every door I opened, there was a bat, a basketball, a football somewhere,” Sandusky has recounted. “There was constant activity everywhere. My folks touched a lot of kids.” Sandusky’s son E.J. once described his father as “a frustrated playground director.” Sandusky would organize kickball games in the back yard, and, E.J. said, “Dad would get every single kid involved. We had the largest kickball games in the United States, kickball games with forty kids.” Sandusky and his wife, Dottie, adopted six children, and were foster parents to countless more. “They took in so many foster children that even their closest friends could not keep track of them all,” Joe Posnanski writes in “Paterno,” his new biography of Sandusky’s boss, the former Penn State head coach Joe Paterno. “Children constantly surrounded Sandusky, so much so that they became part of his persona.”

Sandusky was a hugger and a grabber and a cutup. “He liked practical jokes and messing around, knocking a guy’s hat off his head, making prank calls, sneaking up behind people to startle them,” Posnanski goes on. People at Penn State thought of him as “a knucklehead.” Much of Sandusky’s 2000 autobiography, “Touched,” is devoted to stories of his antics: the time he smeared charcoal over the handset of his chemistry teacher’s phone, the time he ran afoul of a lifeguard for horseplay with his children in a public pool. Four and a half pages alone are devoted to water-balloon fights that he orchestrated while in college. “Wherever I went, it seemed like trouble was sure to follow,” Sandusky writes. He was a kid at heart. “I live a good part of my life in a make-believe world,” he continues. “I enjoyed pretending as a kid, and I love doing the same as an adult with these kids. Pretending has always been part of me.” There was a time when one of the kids he was mentoring became “cold and unresponsive” to him. It upset him. He writes:

“You know it’s not right to treat people like this,” I told him. “You should talk to me.” The boy laid into me, screaming from the top of his lungs. “Get out of here! Get out of here!” His voice echoed into the hallway and staff people came rushing into the room. I looked at him with sincere tears in my eyes. “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,” I said quietly as I walked out of the room.

In 1977, Sandusky and his wife started a nonprofit called the Second Mile, to help troubled and disadvantaged boys. At its height, the Second Mile had a budget of millions of dollars and programs that reached tens of thousands of children. Three times, Sandusky was offered head-coaching jobs at other universities. Each time, he said no. The kids came first. “We had a young foster child whose name was Christopher staying with us,” Sandusky writes, of the time he considered whether to accept a job offer from Marshall University:

I spotted Christopher at the bottom of the stairs. He had a ball in his hands, and as he looked at me, he said, “P’ay ball! P’ay ball!”. . . Christopher threw me the ball, and as I tossed it back, I came to the realization that we wouldn’t be able to take him with us. . . . Seeing Christopher at that moment kind of told me all I needed to know.

We now know what Sandusky was really doing with the Second Mile. He was setting up a pipeline of young troubled boys. Just as important, though, he was establishing his bona fides. Psychologists call this “grooming”—the process by which child molesters ingratiate themselves into the communities they wish to exploit. “Many molesters confirmed that they would spend anywhere from two to three years getting established in a new community before molesting any children,” van Dam writes. One pedophile she interviewed would hang out in bars, looking for adults who seemed to be having difficulties at home. He would lend a comforting ear, and then start to help out. As he told van Dam:

I was just a friend doing things a friend would do. Helping them move, going to baseball games with them. What I found myself doing was getting close to the kids, becoming more of a father figure or a mentor, doing things for them that the parents weren’t doing because the parents were out getting drunk all the time. And, of course, it made it easy for me to baby-sit. They’d say, “Oh yeah. We can off-load the kids with Jimmy.”

One of the most remarkable and disturbing descriptions of the grooming process comes from a twenty-two-page autobiography (published as a chapter in a book about pedophilia) by a convicted pedophile named Donald Silva. After graduating from medical school, Silva met a family with a nine-year-old named Eric. He first sexually molested Eric on a ski trip that the two of them took together. But that came only a year after he befriended the family, patiently insinuating himself into the good graces of Eric’s parents. At one point, Eric’s mother ordered an end to the “friendship,” because she thought Silva’s friends had been smoking pot in her son’s presence. But Silva had so won over her husband that, he writes, “this beautiful man found it in his heart to forgive me after I assured him that such a thing would not happen again.” Silva describes an unforgettable night that he and Eric spent together after they were “reunited”:

I had recently broken up with Cathy [his girlfriend] when Evelyn, my future wife, arrived for a visit. In that month, Evelyn met Eric’s family, and she and his mother became good friends. Evelyn stayed with me at my parents’ house, and we enjoyed an active sex life. Eric slept over one night, and the three of us shared a bed for a while. He was going to pretend to be asleep while Evelyn and I made love, but Evelyn declined with him there and went to sleep elsewhere.

To recap: A man uses his new girlfriend to befriend the family of the ten-year-old boy he is molesting. He orchestrates a threesome in a bed in his parents’ house. He asks the girl to have sex with him with the ten-year-old lying beside them. She says no. She leaves him alone with his victim—and then he persuades her to marry him.

The pedophile is often imagined as the dishevelled old man baldly offering candy to preschoolers. But the truth is that most of the time we have no clue what we are dealing with. A fellow-teacher at Mr. Clay’s school, whose son was one of those who complained of being fondled, went directly to Clay after she heard the allegations. “I didn’t do anything to those little boys,” Clay responded. “I’m innocent. . . . Would you and your husband stand beside me if it goes to court?” Of course, they said. People didn’t believe that Clay was a pedophile because people liked Clay—without realizing that Clay was in the business of being likable.

Did anyone at Penn State understand what they were dealing with, either? Here was a man who built a sophisticated, multimillion-dollar, fully integrated grooming operation, outsourcing to child-care professionals the task of locating vulnerable children—all the while playing the role of lovable goofball. “If Sandusky did not have such a human side,” Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum wrote, in 1999, “there would be a temptation around Happy Valley to canonize him.” A week later, Bill Lyon, of the Philadelphia Inquirer, paid tribute to Sandusky’s selflessness. “In more than one motel hallway, whenever you encountered him and offered what sounded like even the vaguest sort of compliment, he would blush and an engaging, lopsided grin of modesty would wrap its way around his face,” Lyon wrote. “He isn’t in this business for recognition. His defense plays out in front of millions. But when he opens the door and invites in another stray, there is no audience. The ennobling measure of the man is that he has chosen the work that is done without public notice.”

In 1990, the Second Mile was awarded one of President George H. W. Bush’s Points of Light awards. After the formal ceremonies were over, Sandusky grabbed the microphone and shouted out, “It’s about time, George!”

“I had reverted back to the days of my mischievous youth,” Sandusky writes, in “Touched.” “I had always professed that someday I would reap the benefits of maturity, but my lifestyle just wouldn’t let me. There were so many things I had done in my life—so many of them crazy and outlandish. . . . My time on this earth has always been unique. At the times when I found myself searching for maturity, I usually came up with insanity.” Years later, at Sandusky’s criminal trial, a Penn State coach said that he saw Sandusky showering with boys all the time—and thought nothing of it. Crazy Jerry and his horseplay. Who knew what he would get up to next?

—-

On the afternoon of May 3, 1998, Sandusky called the home of an eleven-year-old boy he had met through the Second Mile and invited him to a Penn State athletic facility. Sandusky picked him up that evening. The two wrestled and worked out on the exercise machines. Sandusky kissed the boy on the top of his head and said, “I love you.” Sandusky then asked the boy if he wanted to take a shower, and the boy agreed. According to the formal investigation of the Sandusky case, conducted by the law firm of the former F.B.I. director Louis Freeh:

While in the shower, Sandusky wrapped his hands around the boy’s chest and said, “I’m gonna squeeze your guts out.” The boy then washed his body and hair. Sandusky lifted the boy to “get the soap out of” the boy’s hair, bringing the boy’s feet “up pretty high” near Sandusky’s waist. The boy’s back was touching Sandusky’s chest and his feet touched Sandusky’s thigh. The boy felt “weird” and “uncomfortable” during his time in the shower.

This is standard child-molester tradecraft. The successful pedophile does not select his targets arbitrarily. He culls them from a larger pool, testing and probing until he finds the most vulnerable. Clay, for example, first put himself in a place with easy access to children—an elementary school. Then he worked his way through his class. He began by simply asking boys if they wanted to stay after school. “Those who could not do so without parental permission were screened out,” van Dam writes. Children with vigilant parents are too risky. Those who remained were then caressed on the back, first over the shirt and then, if there was no objection from the child, under the shirt. “The child’s response was evaluated by waiting to see what was reported to the parents,” she goes on. “Parents inquiring about this behavior were told by Mr. Clay that he had simply been checking their child for signs of chicken pox. Those children were not targeted further.” The rest were “selected for more contact,” gradually moving below the belt and then to the genitals.

The child molester’s key strategy is one of escalation, desensitizing the target with an ever-expanding touch. In interviews and autobiographies, pedophiles describe their escalation techniques like fly fishermen comparing lures. Consider the child molester van Dam calls Cook:

Some of the little tricks that always work with younger boys are things like always sitting in a sofa, or a chair with big, soft arms if possible. I would sit with my legs well out and my feet flat on the floor. My arms would always be in an “open” position. The younger kids have not developed a “personal space” yet, and when talking with me, will move in very close. If they are showing me something, particularly on paper, it is easy to hold the object in such a way that the child will move in between my legs or even perch on my knee very early on. If the boy sat on my lap, or very close in, leaning against me, I would put my arm around him loosely. As this became a part of our relationship, I would advance to two arms around him, and hold him closer and tighter. . . . Goodbyes would progress from waves, to brief hugs, to kisses on the cheek, to kisses on the mouth in very short order.

Sandusky started with wrestling, to make physical touch seem normal. In the shower, the boy initially turned on a showerhead a few feet from Sandusky. Sandusky told him to use the shower next to him. This was a test. The boy complied. Then came the bear hug. The boy’s back was touching Sandusky’s chest and his feet touched Sandusky’s thigh. Sandusky wanted to see how the boy would react. Was this too much too soon? The boy felt “weird” and “uncomfortable.” Sandusky retreated. The following week, Sandusky showed up at the boy’s home, circling back to test the waters once again. How did the boy feel? Had he told his mother? Was he a promising lead, or too risky? As it turned out, the mother had alerted the University Police Department, and a detective, Ronald Schreffler, was hiding in the house. According to the Freeh report:

Schreffler overheard Sandusky say he had gone to the boy’s baseball game the night before but found the game had been cancelled. The boy’s mother told Sandusky that her son had been acting “different” since they had been together on May 3, 1998 and asked Sandusky if anything had happened that day. Sandusky replied, “[w]e worked out. Did [the boy] say something happened?” Sandusky added that the boy had taken a shower, and said “[m]aybe I worked him too hard.” Sandusky also asked the boy’s mother if he should leave him alone, and she said that would be best. Sandusky then apologized.

A few days later, the mother asked Sandusky to come by the house again; the police were once more in the next room. She questioned him more closely about what had happened in the shower. According to the Freeh report:

Sandusky asked to speak with the son and the mother replied that she did not feel that was a good idea as her son was confused and she did not want Sandusky to attend any of the boy’s baseball games. Sandusky responded, “I understand. I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won’t get it from you. I wish I were dead.”

Put yourself in the mind of the detective hiding in the house. Schreffler was there to gather evidence of sexual abuse. But there was no evidence of sexual abuse. Sandusky didn’t rape the boy in the shower. That was something that might come only after several weeks, if not months. He gave the boy an exploratory bear hug. Now he was back at the boy’s home. But he didn’t seem like an aggressive predator. He was carefully soliciting the mother’s opinion and apologizing, with all his considerable charm. “I wish I were dead,” he says to the mother. Is that an admission of guilt? Or is Sandusky saying how mortified he is that he—savior of young boys—could possibly have alienated a child and his mother? Sandusky had been caught in the subtle, early maneuvers of victim selection, and what Schreffler witnessed was Sandusky aborting his pursuit of the boy, not pressing forward. Sandusky had looked for vulnerability and hadn’t found it.

The episode was, as the parent said of the first allegations against Mr. Clay, “all vague.” The mother saw her son come home from the gym with his hair wet. He told her that he had showered with Sandusky. He seemed upset, and showered again the following morning. The mother called a psychologist, Alycia Chambers, who had been working with her son, and one of her questions to Chambers was “Am I overreacting?” She wasn’t sure what had happened. Nor, for that matter, was her son. Here is the Freeh report again:

Later that day, Chambers met with the boy who told her about the prior day’s events and that he felt “like the luckiest kid in the world” to get to sit on the sidelines at Penn State football games. The boy said that he did not want to get Sandusky in “trouble” and that Sandusky must not have meant anything by his actions. The boy did not want anyone to talk to Sandusky because he might not invite him to any more games.

Chambers wrote a report on the case and gave it to the University Police Department and Child and Youth Services. She thought that Sandusky’s behavior met the definition of a “likely pedophile’s pattern of building trust and gradual introduction of physical touch, within a context of a ‘loving,’ ‘special’ relationship.” But Jerry Lauro, the caseworker assigned to the incident by the Department of Public Welfare in Harrisburg, disagreed. He thought that the incident fell into a “gray” area concerning “boundary issues.” The boy was then evaluated by a counsellor named John Seasock, who concluded, “There seems to be no incident which could be termed as sexual abuse, nor did there appear to be any sequential pattern of logic and behavior which is usually consistent with adults who have difficulty with sexual abuse of children.” Seasock didn’t think Sandusky was grooming. Someone, he concluded, should talk to Sandusky about how to “stay out of such gray area situations in the future.”

Of all those involved in the investigation, only one person—the psychologist Alycia Chambers—recognized Sandusky’s actions for what they were. Here was someone with the full authority and expertise of psychological training, who identified a prominent man with virtually unlimited access to vulnerable children as a “likely pedophile.” But what more could she do? She had told the police. Patient confidentiality constrained her from going to the media, and her responsibility to her client made her wary of turning him into a public victim. Then, there was the fact that two other trained professionals had seen the same evidence she had, and reached the opposite conclusion. She was in the grip of the same uncertainty that afflicts even the best people when confronted with a child molester. She thought Sandusky was suspicious. No one agreed with her. Maybe she decided that she could be wrong.

Lauro and Schreffler—the man who had hidden in the other room—met with Sandusky. He told them that he had hugged the boy but that “there was nothing sexual about it.” He admitted to showering with other boys in the past. He said, “Honest to God, nothing happened.” Everyone knew Sandusky, and everyone knew that he was a bit of a saint and a bit of a knucklehead. For all we know, he quoted those lines from his book: “At the times when I found myself searching for maturity, I usually came up with insanity.” Penn State officials had been apprised of the investigation from the beginning. After the meeting between Lauro, Schreffler, and Sandusky, Gary Schultz, Penn State’s senior vice-president for business and finance, e-mailed Graham Spanier, the university’s president, and Tim Curley, the school’s athletic director, and told them that the investigators were dropping the whole matter. Sandusky, Schultz wrote, “was a little emotional and expressed concern as to how this might have adversely affected the child.”

—

Joe Paterno, Sandusky’s boss, was a football obsessive. He played quarterback at Brooklyn Prep and at Brown University, which he attended on a football scholarship. Aside from a short stint in the Army, he never held a job outside of football. He began at Penn State as an assistant coach in 1950 and never left. He talked and thought football, around the clock. “At night,” Posnanski writes, “he wrote countless notes (all his life, he was a compulsive note-taker) about football ideas he wanted to try, plays he wanted to run, techniques he wanted to teach, improvements he wanted to make, thoughts about leadership that crossed his mind.” Shortly after Paterno arrived in State College, he moved into the basement of a fellow assistant coach, Jim O’Hara. Finally, O’Hara confronted him. “Joe, you’ve been with us ten years. Get the hell out of here.” Paterno, puzzled, replied, “Have I been here that long?”

Paterno was strict and uncompromising. “Even as a boy, when he played quarterback on his high-school football team back in Brooklyn, he would lecture his teammates in his high-pitched squeal when one of them unleashed a swear word,” Posnanski writes. “ ‘Aw gee, come on, guys, keep it clean!’ They thought him a prude even then. He had lived a sheltered life—not by accident but by choice. The Paternos never even watched any television except ‘The Wonderful World of Disney’ on Sunday nights.”

He scripted practices down to the minute. He did not like distractions. “He would scream at us all the time, ‘Would you just let me coach my football team,’ ” a friend tells Posnanski. “That’s all he wanted to do. Every other thing made him crazy.” Once, while hard at work drafting a new defensive scheme, he all but disappeared. “We could have moved out, and he wouldn’t have noticed,” his wife, Sue, said. “He might have noticed when he came out and there was no dinner for him. But he might not even have noticed that. He was in his own world.”

Paterno did not like Sandusky. They argued openly. Paterno found Sandusky’s goofiness exasperating, and the trail of kids following him around irritated Paterno no end. He considered firing Sandusky many times. But, according to Posnanski, he realized that he needed Sandusky—that the emotional, bear-hugging, impulsive knucklehead was a necessary counterpart to his own discipline and austerity. Sandusky never accepted any of the job offers that would have taken him away from Penn State, because he could not leave the Second Mile. But he also stayed because of Paterno. What could be better, for his purposes, than a boss with eyes only for the football field, who dismissed him as an exasperating, impulsive knucklehead? Pedophiles cluster in professions that give them access to vulnerable children—teaching, the clergy, medicine. But Sandusky’s insight, if you want to call it that, was that the culture of football could be the greatest hiding place of all, a place where excessive physicality is the norm, where horseplay is what often passes for wit, where young men shower together after every game and practice, and where those in charge spend their days and nights dreaming only of new defensive schemes.

In 1999, Paterno made it plain to Sandusky that he would not be the next head coach of Penn State. Sandusky retired and took an emeritus position. On February 9, 2001, a former Penn State quarterback named Mike McQueary saw Sandusky in the shower with a young boy at a Penn State athletic facility. What exactly McQueary witnessed is still in dispute. That evening, he spoke to a family friend—a local doctor—and told him he had heard “sexual” sounds. The doctor asked him several times if he had seen any sexual act, and each time McQueary said no. Eleven years later, in his grand-jury testimony and at Sandusky’s criminal trial, McQueary’s memory grew more explicit: he had seen Sandusky raping the boy, he now said. What is clear, though, is that whatever McQueary saw or heard upset him greatly. He went to Paterno. Paterno called Tim Curley, the Penn State athletic director.

Posnanski, in one of his final interviews with Paterno, asked him if he had considered calling the police. “To be honest with you, I didn’t,” Paterno said. “This isn’t my field. I didn’t know what to do. I had not seen anything. Jerry didn’t work for me anymore. I didn’t have anything to do with him. I tried to look through the Penn State guidelines to see what I was supposed to do. It said I was supposed to call Tim [Curley]. So I called him.”

Curley met with McQueary and Paterno. Then he and Gary Schultz, the university’s vice-president for business and finance, went to the Penn State president, Graham Spanier. Here is the Freeh report again:

Spanier said that the men gave him a “heads up” that a member of the Athletic Department staff had reported to Paterno that Sandusky was in an athletic locker room facility showering with one of his Second Mile youth after a workout. Sandusky and the youth, according to Spanier, were “horsing around” or “engaged in horseplay.” Spanier said that the staff member “was not sure what he saw because it was around a corner and indirect.” . . . Spanier said he asked two questions: (i) “Are you sure that it was described to you as horsing around?” and (ii) “Are you sure that that is all that was reported?” According to Spanier, both Schultz and Curley said “yes” to both questions. Spanier said that the men agreed that they were “uncomfortable” with such a situation, that it was inappropriate, and that they did not want it to happen again.

Horsing around in the shower? That was Jerry being Jerry. It did not occur to them that the goofy, horseplaying Sandusky they thought they knew was another of Sandusky’s deceptions. Those who put all their ingenuity and energy into fooling us usually succeed. That is the lesson of a world-class swindler like Bernard Madoff, and of Donald Silva, in his parents’ bed with a ten-year-old boy and the woman he later married—not to mention Jeffrey Clay. Clay, van Dam writes, got his teaching certificate reactivated. He went on to teach the handicapped and take foster children into his home. “Needless to say,” she adds, “his expertise, enthusiasm, and exceptional generosity to those who are needy has been very much appreciated by the community in which he now lives.”

—

Tim Curley and Gary Schultz currently face criminal charges. Graham Spanier was forced out of office last November, a few days after the grand-jury indictment of Sandusky was released. At the same time, someone came to Paterno’s house with an envelope. According to Posnanski:

Paterno opened the envelope; inside was a sheet of Penn State stationery with just a name, John Surma, and a phone number. Surma was the CEO of U.S. Steel and the vice chairman of the State Board of Trustees. Paterno picked up the phone and called the number.

“This is Joe Paterno.”

“This is John Surma. The board of trustees have terminated you effective immediately.”

Paterno hung up the phone before he could hear anything else.

A minute later, Sue called the number. “After sixty-one years,” she said, her voice cracking, “he deserved better.” And then she hung up.

Paterno died two months later. ♦

LIKE Jewish Community Watch on Facebook

The post In Plain View – How child molesters get away with it. appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

Cited from the Five Towns Herald.

If a child says, “My brother wouldn’t let me sleep last night,” “The rabbi wears funny underwear” or “I know somebody who’s being touched in a bad way,” he or she is describing an incident of sexual abuse. 

Prompted by a June 20 incident at the Chabad of the Five Towns in Cedarhurst, in which Yan Kossa, 39, of Far Rockaway, allegedly lured a 7-year-old girl out of the Maple Avenue center and into his car, the Chabad invited Beth Israel social worker Cheryl Friedman to speak on Monday about “keeping kids safe in an unsafe world.” 

Kossa had told the girl he was a friend of her father’s, police said, but he was not. Chabad officials called the police, and Kossa was arrested and charged with unlawful imprisonment and endangering the welfare of a child.
“We need a reminder from the professionals to keep our children safe — any child in today’s society,” Chabad Executive Director Rabbi Zalman Wolowik told the audience. “Call the authorities, not the rabbi. He is not equipped to handle that. It is every parent’s responsibility to watch their own children.”

Friedman said that one out of every five girls and one out of every seven boys in this country are abused before they turn 18, and 90 percent of the abuse is done by someone they know, based on statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate of sibling incest is five times higher than parent-child incest, she added, and 70 percent of abused people who do not receive therapy become abusers. Those numbers are based on research conducted by sociologist David Finkelhor.

“Of all the sexual abuse cases that are reported, only 1 to 3 percent is a false report, and most of those involve divorce cases,” Friedman said, citing New York City Police Department figures.

One huge problem, especially in the Jewish community, she said, is that perpetrators often benefit from more protection than victims. She described an incident in which a family reported abuse and they, not the accused, ended up being ostracized. “Just because it’s someone we know doesn’t mean [children] are safe,” Friedman said, adding that a “creep factor” meter should be turned on. “If someone makes [a child] feel uncomfortable, stay away from them. We have to believe what children tell us. Children cannot make up what they don’t know.” 

Parents should beware of someone who pays more attention than usual to a child, giving him or her more candy than other kids, offering gifts and spending time alone with him or her, Friedman said. If a child begins wetting the bed, is not eating regularly, avoids a particular person and has problems sleeping and/or declining performance in school, these are warning signs that abuse is most likely occurring, she said.

“When a child discloses [abuse], believe what they tell you, listen and support them. Tell them, ‘It isn’t your fault,’” she said. “It is not our job to decide that a crime was committed — that is the job of the police.”
To help keep their children safe, Nassau County Police Detective Vincent Garcia said, parents should teach them what to do if approached by someone they don’t know. 

“They need to understand the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ strangers,” Garcia said. The good strangers include police, security guards and teachers. “If they are approached by a bad stranger who tries to lure or physically pull them away, the thing they can do is get the attention of other adults — running to the nearest home or making enough noise to be heard by someone.”

Woodsburgh resident and Chabad member Brandon Margolis said that sexual abuse is a complicated issue, but boiled it down to two simple thoughts. “You take the practical steps to keep the children safe and you watch your own kids,” he said. “You can’t depend on other people.”

The post Battling sex abuse – At Chabad forum, social worker offers tips for keeping kids safe appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

By Tom Parmenter, Sky News Correspondent

Police forces are still failing too many young victims of sexual abuse, according to a series of new reports – with only one in three cases involving vulnerable children being handled to a good standard.

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary has warned senior officers “risk failing another generation of children” if they don’t reassess their approach.

The police watchdog’s inspections found a case where it took three months to interview a man whose nine-year-old grandson accused him of rape.

In another case, police and social workers agreed, without consulting a doctor, that vaginal bleeding in a four-year-old girl was eczema – despite the child saying she had been sexually assaulted by a relative.

The HMIC’s Chief Inspector, Sir Tom Winsor, said it must be remembered that there are many good, compassionate and hard-working officers deployed in child protection.

However, he added: “Overall, the inspections found considerable inconsistency of the treatment of vulnerable victims by the police.”

Following the Jimmy Savile scandal, and sexual grooming cases in Rochdale, Oxford and Rotherham, police forces around the country have tried to change the way they deal with young victims of sexual abuse.

Chief Constable Simon Bailey, National Policing Lead for Child Protection, said: “The scale of child sexual abuse is staggering.

“By the end of 2015, we anticipate that police will be investigating over 70,000 cases of child sexual abuse – an increase of 88% from 2012.

“We are at a crossroads. We have got to fundamentally change our approach to policing so that our absolute focus is on working proactively with other agencies to protect the public from harm committed online or offline.”

Mr Bailey warned that “no one should underestimate how much of a transformation this is” – as it involves changing the culture of 43 individual organisations.

The HMIC’s reports have predicted the numbers of victims coming forward to report abuse will continue to rise, and called on every senior police officer to ensure no child is allowed to slip through the net.

The post Police Fail Most Child Abuse Victims – Report appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

July 2, 2015 by Hannah Katsman posted in amotherinisrael.com

Please Note: This article contains disturbing and graphic content. The goal of publishing is not sensationalism but rather to expose this story so that others learn from his mistakes.

Last week, Yehuda Shohat and Ariela Sternbuch published a story in Yediot Aharonot about the advice that rabbis give regarding sexual molestation and abuse. Sternbuch called up 27 rabbis and community leaders with a story of how she or her child was sexually abused. In only a few of the cases did the rabbi suggest reporting to the police.

One of the rabbis featured in the Yediot article, Ratzon Arussi, is the chief rabbi of the town of Kiryat Ono. He has a doctorate in law, and teaches on the Jewish legal system at Bar Ilan University. He heads a beit din, or religious court, for resolving monetary disputes.

Below is my translation of the conversation between the reporter and Rabbi Arussi. I translated it from the original recording. A Hebrew transcript of the conversation appears in the Yediot article.

Sternbuch: My friend’s father touched me, really touched me. I wanted to file a complaint, but my mother says it’s not worth it. that it will interfere with shidduchim (finding a marriage match) and such, the question is what does the rabbi say?

Arussi: What environment, not asking the location . . .

Haredit.

-Another question. What do you mean by touching, if I may ask?

-He undressed and touched me in private places.

-Okay, but he did not God forbid get to the act?

-No.

-I mean, he didn’t touch in an intimate place, and . . .

-Yes, he did touch. He did touch me under the skirt, and such.

-But he didn’t touch with something intimate of his to something intimate of yours?

-Yes, with his organ.

-Yes?

-Yes.

-So he did touch in that place with his intimate organ.

-Yes.

-Did you have contact with him before?

-No, I went there, to my friend.

-How did it deteriorate to that situation? Did he know you before? What?

-I’ve been there before, and [my friend] has visited me. We would go into the room.

-Ah, the father of a friend. You visited her as a friend.

-Yes.

-That’s how you know him, and he knows you. So he’s also haredi.

-Yes.

-So he took advantage of an opportunity when his daughter was not present?

-My friend went to the makolet, and he came into the room and closed the door.

-Did you object or anything?

-Yes, yes, I told him that she would come back soon, and that it wasn’t pleasant. [Hebrew: Lo na’im. This is how children are taught to respond to behavior that they don’t like.]

-Listen, unfortunately, your mother is right, even though in this case a complaint should be filed against him, because this went beyond any stam touching. –In fact, in effect, he committed an act. Can you hear me?

-Yes.

-He committed an act upon you. That is why I asked you these questions, and that is a serious thing. I hope, and I’m not God forbid asking out of curiosity, I hope he did not insert his organ, correct?

-Yes. No, he didn’t.

-So you remained a virgin.

-Yes.

-I understand. So there is no question at all of entering.

-Why? . . . No.

-Because if now you are not a virgin, then what he did would bother you. But, if you remained a virgin, and if it is not the level of forcing [Hebrew inus, same root as rape], but seduction [pitui], then your mother is right, but you must break of all contact with that house.

-That’s clear, I don’t go there anymore.

-When did this happen?

-A month ago.

-A month? And when did you tell your mother?

-Immediately.

-How much does it bother you that this happened a month ago and you are only asking me now?

-I don’t know, I’m okay, I’m managing, the question is . . .

-Your friend? Does your friend know?

-I haven’t told her anything. It’s very unpleasant between us. But all of a sudden it occurred to me, maybe he is doing it to her too? To other friends?

-Yes, that’s true. That’s true. And that’s a reason to complain, but your life comes before that of others. Because in the haredi world, this *can* harm you. In a few different realms.  If it stayed on that level, and you stayed a virgin, and there was no forcing, stay away, change yourself, the fact that he succeeded in tempting you on one level . . . you must gather emotional and spiritual strength, to change completely,

-This wasn’t wanted on my part, I tried to move away from him.

-I understand. But he is haredi and you are haredi. Right?

-Yes, he is a yeshiva student.

-He’s a student. He suddenly comes and does something very rare and very, very serious in the haredi world. This needs to shock you, you were warmed up. -On one level he succeeded in tempting you. It’s not a simple thing.

-But I didn’t want it. It’s not that I wanted it.

-I understand. Okay. Strengthen yourself spiritually, very much, don’t file a complaint with the police, and, how old are you today?

17.

-Get away, get out of that environment, and find a good shidduch, as soon as possible.

Rabbi Arussi’s response to the article appeared in the Orthodox website Kippah. Here is my translation:

I’ve received many inquiries regarding the media storm about the journalistic investigation done on the sly regarding a very important question, a haredi young woman who claimed that she was sexually attacked by the father of her friend and the mother of the complainant said not to go to the police, and she was looking for rabbinic advice about whether to go to the police anyway. And she turned to me, and I told her after questioning her, and weighing both sides, and I instructed her not to turn to the police, and then it turned out that they immediately turned to Yediot Acharonot and it turned out that this was a journalistic investigation. I told them my principled and practical approach regarding the case described, and already the next day, [the radio station] Galei Tzahal, on the basis of that article, wanted me to appear [on the program] but since I saw that there was a media “ambush” I refused to reply until I saw the article, because [as they say] someone who has been burned will be wary of lukewarm water.

First let’s determine the basis of the incident, and then we will relate to the phenomenon that is a side effect, but very serious, and relevant to the media ambush and the media’s approach.

This is what happened, as always we get inquiries by telephone, or face to face, of people in crisis, young men and women, old men and women, boys and girls, conflicts between people, many incidents come our way, there is no rest night and day. A week ago the clerk handed me the telephone and a young woman who identified herself as a 17-year-old haredi woman from Bnei Brak who was at her friend’s house, and suddenly the father asked his daughter to go to the corner store and buy a few things before it closed [HK: This detail was not in the taped conversation], and as soon as she went out the father came into the room, (so said the complainant,) locked the door and began to molest the complainant sexually, and she the complainant said that her mother told her not to turn to the police, and now she is asking if she should turn to the police. I apologized for having to ask her intimate questions but I needed to assess her statement. Because I wanted to know whether it was inus (forced, i.e. rape) or pitui (seduction, i.e. consensual). Because if it was inus, I told her, she would have to complain immediately but if it was temptation, or if he could maintain that it was, she will have what to lose because a 17-year-old girl when it comes to shidduchim (finding a groom) etc. there is a limit to how much she can sacrifice herself for the sake of fixing the whole, because to complain to the police is fixing the whole, and that is important, but there is a limit to how much a person needs to sacrifice himself for the sake of fixing the whole. Therefore, when she said that she had objected, I asked her why she didn’t shout. [HK: This also did not appear in the recording.] She said [she told the perpetrator] it wasn’t pleasant for her. And what did he do? So she stayed a virgin so she said, but he touched her in intimate places. It’s a little strange that he did what he did and there was no cry, but it’s correct that there are situations where the girl is in shock. But she said, “lo naim” (it’s not pleasant—this is what children are taught to say to object to something), meaning that she was not in shock, she objected but did not shout. Therefore I told her, based on these specific details, that it is not worth complaining to the police because he could claim that it was temptation even though you said that you objected and there will be what to lose, therefore break off with this house, strengthen yourself spiritually, and hurry to get married before God forbid this will harm you, and in this your mother is right.

As I said, a week later I get a message from Yediot asking for my response, how could I have advised her not to go to the police. I was very surprised that such an intimate, heart-rending conversation would suddenly get published in the media, a strange thing but I understood that we fell into a media “ambush,” and I said to the reporter, listen, I will shorten the way for you, I know what you are looking for. Am I one of those haredi rabbis who as a matter of principle does not turn matters over to the police? My answer is no. In principle I do instruct that men like this must be turned over to the police. But, there are special cases that must be checked to see if a police report will harm the victim or not. Because there are cases when a report will harm her and then one must take into consideration [the caller’s] welfare before correcting the whole. It wasn’t pleasant and I asked questions but I came to the conclusion that in those circumstances, there is a need to be silent to prevent harm in addition to the attack, that is what I replied to her and that is how it ended. As I said, the next day Galei Tzahal already wanted a response, see what a media “ambush” and what a storm surrounding this whole topic, I said I’m sorry, I won’t reply until I see the article, they said, “We’ll send it, we’ll read it to you,” I told them no, I won’t reply until after I have read the article. Therefore I refrained from responding, I was not afraid, but because there was a media “ambush” here and we need to be extremely careful of media people who have one main goal and that is their rating, not tikun olam, and they act in ways that are not appropriate, the way they acted is forbidden from a moral and halachic point of view, one who hits his neighbor in secret is cursed, this is a moral value of Judaism. But Israeli law in its iniquity compares it to something that has no place, let’s say I have a dispute with Ploni, if I come to him and talk to him, engage him in conversation and record him, that’s something else, but here they have no dispute with me, I am doing them a favor for free by giving advice, and she requests a favor from me, and then takes it and publishes it without asking me, that is the accursed hitting his neighbor in secret, this is a moral value of Judaism that we would do well to be loyal to.

But first the main issue, is there room to complain to the police? On principle yes, because if we have a sex offender and he is dangerous, tomorrow or the next day he will harm others, of course, but although this should be the approach in principle, every case needs to be assessed differently, we need to see if the complainant will be badly harmed, or not.

So let’s see, let’s describe a complainant who is very soft and gentle and will not have the means to stand up against all of the inquiries and counter-claims, and she could be badly harmed psychologically from the whole matter, the one who tells her to complain is a criminal, every case is different, therefore that is our position.

There are dear Jews. A Jew called me, he did not consider himself part of the religious camp, a man with connections, very admired, and said to me: “They did you an injustice, I am appalled, I know that you spoke from a pure place for the sake of the girl, I wanted to respond but I recognize this, this is twisted media and if I respond in writing, others will respond and the flames will go up, that is why I came to strengthen you,” and may he be strengthened. I said to him, “Know, my dear friend, when a few girls or women will ask for my help I will be careful, I’ve already instructed my clerks, everyone needs to approach me only by mail or by fax and not by telephone, and if she wants an in-person meeting then only when accompanied by a father, mother, etc. and we will talk, but without that, no. Who will be harmed? Those who want help without revealing their identity. But what to do? The media stifles the possibility of helping people in crisis.”

Yesterday a member of the city council called, a very dear woman, on the surface we are from two very different worlds, her name is Liat Arbel, a member of city council, and she established a women’s forum, and her life’s project is to protect women, including regarding sexual harassment. She came and requested a meeting, and we met yesterday. And we exchanged opinions with great respect, she learned of my pure considerations, and I learned something very important from her, “You should know, rabbi, that when they tell me that someone complains about sexual harassment I don’t accept it, I wait until there is another complaint from a second person, but understand from this, when is there is an instruction or approach in particular sectors not to complain to the police, then what happens? It could be that A was abused, B was abused, C was abused, none of them complains and the sex abuser sits in honor and abuses others.” A wonderful claim that should be considered, of course. I definitely respect that approach but today I don’t have a problem with you regarding the differences between us, I have a problem with the media because it is so vulgar, in your face, agenda-driven, and now every case that will come to me must be via fax or email and then I will check if there is a suspicion that he is a serial abuser or not, based on the circumstances. And our Torah gives us many ways to check the truth. I also said then to the reporter, in the Torah it says that if he caught a young woman in the field and the girl shouted and no one came to help, in the field it is considered rape if it can’t be proven otherwise, in the city it’s considered seduction unless it has been proven otherwise, because there can be rape in the city, therefore I told the reporter that according to the details that the woman told me, during the hours when the shop was operating, and an apartment building, in a haredi city, if she had shouted he would have run far from there as fast as he could, so I am not accusing her, but we have to take into account the fact that, as I said, all he has to do is claim that this was seduction, and this will seriously harm her, this the reporter publicized only part, and there is nothing that can be done, this is the way of the media. [HK: Part of the conversation initially appeared on the TV news segment, but what appeared in Yediot is the entire transcript.]

In reality, our position in these cases is that in principle of course you must turn over to the police, but I can embarrass the non-religious world. According to Jewish law if a man sees his father run red lights all the time and tells him that it’s not okay, you can’t run a red light, and the father continues to do so, according to Jewish law, if he continued to urge his father, and his father didn’t listen, he can complain to the police even though it’s his own father. A non-religious person who will rise up at the storm against us, and will say, if so, then he would also instruct [about the traffic lights] as we instruct in this matter, because there it is talking about the father of the family, and apparently they will decide to overlook it despite the danger to life, etc., so this is something very clear that with us the considerations are relevant and specific, it’s clear, but what can be done, there is an agenda-driven media in which A looks for ratings, B wants to hang the religious public, I’ve seen the headlines in Yediot, “sacrificing victims,” as if we the rabbis are sacrificing victims, in that we say not to go to the police as if it’s consistent that we advise this, we are the ones who sacrifice abuse victims as a result of our actions. But they are the ones who sacrifice victims, the woman is finished after this exposure, not to mention that they sacrifice me as a victim, they sacrifice others who now want my help and I’ll be doubly careful, but the one who sacrifices victims for their ratings and not because of fear of God, meaning we have a vulgar media, with no ethics, nothing matters to it except itself, and all this in order to presumably do tikkun olam. But they tear in a hole in society because it’s as if they are saying, these are the children of darkness?the religious and the haredim, and those are the children of light, and thus they tear a hole in the fabric of society.

Now as a result of these things, in the era of Facebook and WhatsApp etc., a few will rise up and say a few bad things about me without checking and investigating and all this because of incitement. So is this a society that can start a dialog? To try to understand? Look and see, Liat Arbel came, she learned from me, I learned from her, it’s a connection between worlds, there is mutual growth, that helps both the victims and Israeli society. This is the way that leads to the house of God.

If the media will not restrain itself and I don’t mean by enacting laws, it needs to rein itself in, one can’t harm the freedom of speech through legislation, the media needs to abide by ethics, because if not, as said, it is the one sacrificing victims and harming the thing that it is trying to help. The path that goes to the house of God is the path of communication and listening to one another. There is a lot to learn from the Torah of Israel, I am not operating in a vacuum, I am coming in the name of Torah, wisdom with wonderful and strong moral values with life wisdom, this is what I am here for and what I work for and not to get a prize, I don’t get anything for this counseling, every other advisor gets paid for each session and I don’t get anything, only the benefit of doing good. And only a small amount of appreciation and honor for this rabbinic work.

And the Holy One, Blessed Be He should spread His spirit from on high and cast out baseless hatred from within us and instill unlimited love within us and light our eyes with the light of the Torah, and God willing we should first of all be a light unto ourselves, and afterward a light unto the nations.

I’d like to summarize a few of the issues with Rabbi Arussi’s approach:

1. The media’s “agenda” is irrelevant. The public has the right to know how its officials respond to complaints.
2. A chief rabbi of a city is a paid employee of the government, not a volunteer as he implies. Unlike most private therapists, he even has clerks to answer his phone calls.
3. He did not consider whether a victim of sex abuse might need treatment. At no point did he express sorrow about the incident, or inquire about the caller’s emotional state.
4. He told the caller not to report a crime.
5. He made it all about whether or not there was penetration. According to this theory, which abuse advocate Yerachmiel Lopin calls the “penetration fallacy™”, there is no harm done if intercourse did not occur. However, this is merely a justification for protecting the abuser. Penetration is irrelevant as far as Israeli law or trauma to the victim.
6. He fancies himself an expert, yet has little or no training in issues surrounding sex abuse or in questioning abuse victims. The police have specially trained investigators. They know how to ask the right questions in order to determine whether a charge is credible, what kind of help the victim needs, and if the case is prosecutable.

In light of the article, Knesset Member Michal Rosin of Meretz proposed a law, together with the Central Organization of Sex Abuse Victims, to add rabbis to the list of professionals required to report abuse. Failure to report will be punishable by imprisonment. The Religious Ministry would train rabbis on the subject of sex abuse, and act in cooperation with authorities to find the correct way to address the problem.

Coincidentally, the press reported that a yeshiva head from Safed has been arrested on his way out of the country for allegedly raping and molesting two women who had come to him for counseling. One can only wonder how many rabbis this rabbi’s victims consulted with, before the case got to the forum Takana and ultimately to the police.

Click here for more details!

The post Rabbi Defends Not Reporting Sex Abuse – A Mother in Israel blog appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

From the Leadership Council

Few people are aware of the true state of the science on child abuse. Instead, most people’s beliefs have been shaped by common misconceptions and popular myths about this hidden crime. Societal acceptance of these myths assists sex offenders by silencing victims and encouraging public denial about the true nature of sexual assaults against children. The Leadership Council prepared this analysis because we believe that society as a whole benefits when the public has access to accurate information regarding child abuse and other forms of interpersonal violence.

Myth 1:  Normal-appearing, well educated, middle-class people don’t molest children.

One of the public’s most dangerous assumptions is the belief that a person who both appears and acts normal could not be a child molester. Sex offenders are well aware of our propensity for making assumptions about private behavior from one’s public presentation. In fact, as recent reports of abuse by priests have shown, child molesters rely on our misassumptions to deliberately and carefully set and gain access to child victims.

According to Dr. Anna Salter, Ph.D., a foremost expert in sex offenders, “a double life is prevalent among all types of sex offenders . . . . The front that offenders typically offer to the outside world is usually a ‘good person,’ someone who the community believes has a good character and would never do such a thing” (Salter, 2003, p. 34).

In her years of work with sex offenders, Dr. Salter has found they commonly employ a variety of tactics which allow them to gain access to children while concealing their activities. For instance, many seek responsible positions that place them in close proximity with children. They also tend to adopt a pattern of socially responsible and caring behavior in public. Many have practiced and perfected their ability to charm, to be likeable and to radiate a facade of sincerity and truthfulness. This causes parents and others to drop their guard, allowing the sex offender easy and recurring access to children.

In fact, Dr. Salter has found that the life a child molester leads in public may be exemplary, almost surreal in its righteousness. In her book, Dr. Salter presents the following description written by a child molester who had used his position as a church choir director to gain access to boys.

I want to describe a child molester I know very well.  This man was raised by devout Christian parents.  As a child he rarely missed church.   Even after he became an adult he was faithful as a church member.  He was a straight A student in high school and college.  He has been married and has a child of his own.  He coached Little League baseball.  He was a Choir Director at his church.   He never used any illegal drugs.  He never had a drink of alcohol.   He was considered a clean-cut, All-American boy.  Everyone seemed to like him.  He was a volunteer in numerous civic community functions.  He had a well-paying career job.  He was considered “well-to-do” in society.   But from the age of 13-years-old he sexually molested little boys.   He never victimized a stranger.  All of his victims were friends.  . . I know this child molester very well because he is me!!!!

Soon after writing this, the author of this confession was released on parole.  Upon release, he quickly infiltrated a church where he molested children until he was again caught and returned to prison” (Salter, 2003, pp. 36-37).

• Salter, A. C. (2003). Predators: Pedophiles, rapists and other sex offenders: Who they are, how they operate, and how we can protect ourselves and our children . New York: Basic Books.

Myth 2:  People are too quick to believe an abuser is guilty, even if there is no supporting evidence.

In truth, people are too quick to believe that the accused is innocent, even if there is plenty of supporting evidence. According to Dr. Salter, ” Normal , healthy people distort reality to create a kinder, gentler world than actually exists” (p. 177). She notes that in order to find meaning and justice in everyday life, most people assign victims too much blame for their assaults and offenders too little. In truth, it is hard for most people to imagine how any person could sexually abuse a child. Because they can’t imagine a “normal” person doing such a heinous act, they assume that child molesters must be monsters.  If the accused does not fit this stereotype (in other words if he appears to be a normal person), then many people will disbelieve the allegation, believing the accused to be incapable of such act.

• Salter, A. C. (2003). Predators: Pedophiles, rapists and other sex offenders: Who they are, how they operate, and how we can protect ourselves and our children. New York : Basic Books.

Myth 3:  Child molesters molest indiscriminately. 

Not everyone who comes in contact with a child molester will be abused. Although this finding may seem obvious, some interpret the fact that an abuser didn’t molest a particular child in their care to mean that those children who do allege abuse must be lying. In truth, sex offenders tend to carefully pick and set up their victims Thus while sex offenders may feel driven to molest children, they rarely do so indiscriminately or a plan.

Research with sex offenders confirms that they tend to carefully select and “groom” their victims (Conte, Wolf, & Smith, 1989). For instance, Elliott, Browne and Kilcoyne (1995) interviewed with 91 child molesters, the all-male sample reported that they most often chose children who had family problems, were alone, lacked confidence, and were indiscriminate in their trust of others — especially when the child was also perceived to be pretty, “provocatively” dressed, young, or small.

Rather than being a sudden, initially traumatic occurrence, most sex abuse involves a gradual “grooming” process in which the perpetrator skillfully manipulates the child into participating (Berliner & Conte, 1995). To ensure the child’s continuing compliance, sex offenders report using bribes, threats and force (Elliott et al.,1995).

Below, a young pedophile describes the careful planning that went into finding his next victim.

When a person like myself wants to obtain access to a child, you don’t just go up and get the child and sexually molest the child. There’s a process of obtaining the child’s friendship and, in my case, also obtaining the family’s friendship and their trust.  When you get their trust, that’s when the child becomes vulnerable and you can molest the child. (Salter, 2003, p. 42)

• Berliner, L., & Conte, J. R. (1995). The effects of disclosure and intervention on sexually abused children.Child Abuse & Neglect , 19 , 371-84.
• Conte, J. R., Wolf, S., & Smith, T. (1989). What sexual offenders tell us about prevention strategies. Child Abuse & Neglect, 13, 293-301.
• Elliott, M., Browne, K., & Kilcoyne, J. (1995). Child sexual abuse prevention: What offenders tell us. Child Abuse & Neglect. 19 , 579-94.
• Salter, A. C. (2003). Predators: Pedophiles, rapists and other sex offenders . New York : Basic Books.

Myth 4:  Children who are being abused would immediately tell their parents.

The fact victims often fail to disclose their abuse in a timely fashion is frequently used as evidence that an alleged victim’s story should be doubted. Research, however, shows that children who have been sexually assaulted often have considerable difficulty in revealing or discussing their abuse.

Estimates suggest that only 3% of all cases of child sexual abuse (Finkelhor & Dziuba-Leatherman, 1994; Timnick, 1985) and only 12% of rapes involving children are ever reported to police (Hanson et al., 1999). A nationally representative survey of over 3,000 women revealed that of those raped during childhood, 47% did not disclose to anyone for over 5 years post-rape. In fact, 28% of the victims reported that they had never told anyone about their childhood rape prior to the research interview. Moreover, the women who never told often suffered the most serious abuse. For instance, younger age at the time of rape, a family relationship with the perpetrator, and experiencing a series of rapes were all associated with delayed disclosure (Smith et al., 2000).

Sex offenders typically seek to make the victim feel as though he or she caused the offender to act inappropriately, and convince the child that they are the guilty party. As a result, children often have great difficulty sorting out who is responsible for the abuse and frequently blame themselves for what happened. In the end, fears of retribution and abandonment, and feelings of complicity, embarrassment, guilt, and shame all conspire to silence children and inhibit their disclosures of abuse (Pipe & Goodman, 1991; Sauzier, 1989).

Boys seem to have a particularly difficult time dealing with sexual abuse and are even less likely to report it than girls. A review of 5 community-based studies revealed that rates of non-disclosure ranged from 42% to 85% in abused men ( Lyons , 2002). Research with abused males has found that the more severe the abuse, the more likely the boy is to blame himself and the less likely he will disclose the abuse (Hunter et al., 1992). In addition to self-blame, reluctance of boys to disclose abuse may be traced to the social stigma attached to victimization, along with fears that they will be disbelieved or labeled homosexual (Watkins & Bentovim, 1992).

• Finkelhor, D., & Dziuba-Leatherman, J. (1994). Children as Victims of Violence: A National Survey.Pediatrics, 94 (4, :413-420.
• Hanson, R. F., Resnick H. S., Saunders, B. E., Kilpatrick, D. G., & Best, C. (1999). Factors related to the reporting of childhood rape. Child Abuse & Neglect, 23, 559-69.
• Hunter, J. A., Goodwin, D. W., & Wilson, R. J. (1992). Attributions of blame in child sexual abuse victims: An analysis of age and gender influences. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 1, 75-89.
• Kilpatrick, D. G., Edmunds, C. N., & Seymour, A. (1992). Rape in America: A report to the nation . Arlington VA: National Victim Center .
• Lyon, T.D. (2002). Scientific Support for Expert Testimony on Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation. In J.R. Conte (Ed.), Critical issues in child sexual abuse (pp. 107-138). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. (on-line:http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?65+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+97+(Winter+2002 )
• Pipe, M. E., & Goodman, G. S. (1991). Elements of secrecy: Implications for children’s testimony. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 9, 33-41.
• Sauzier, M. (1989). Disclosure of child sexual abuse: For better or for worse. Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 12, 455-69.
• Smith, D. W., Letourneau, E. J., Saunders, B. E., Kilpatrick, D. G., Resnick, H. S., & Best, C. L. (2000). Delay in disclosure of childhood rape: Results from a national survey. Child Abuse & Neglect, 24, 273-87.
• Watkins, B. & Bentovim, A. (1992).  The sexual abuse of male children and adolescents: A review of current research. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 33, 197-248.

Myth 5:  Children who are being abused will show physical evidence of abuse.

A lack of physical evidence of sexual assault is often cited as support that an alleged perpetrator must be innocent. However, research shows that abnormal genital findings are rare even in cases where the abuse has been proven. Some acts, like fondling and oral sex, leave no physical traces. Even injuries from penetration heal very quickly in young children and thus abnormal genital findings are not common, especially if the child is examined more than 48 hours after the abuse. In fact, even with proven penetration in up to 95% of cases, genital examinations will be essentially normal.

In one study, case files and colposcopic photographs of 236 children with perpetrator conviction for sexual abuse, were reviewed. The investigators found that genital findings in the abused girls were normal in 28%, nonspecific in 49%, suspicious in 9%, and abnormal in 14% of cases (Adams, Harper, Knudson, & Revilla, 1994).

An even lower rate of abnormal findings was found in a large scale study of the 2384 children referred for medical evaluation of sexual abuse. The investigators found that only 4% of the children had abnormal examinations at the time of evaluation. Even with a history of severe abuse such as vaginal or anal penetration, the rate of abnormal medical findings was only 5.5% (Heger, Ticson, Velasquez, & Bernier, 2002).

This low rate of abnormal findings was confirmed in a case review of children with proven sexual abuse consisting of 36 pregnant adolescent girls who presented for sexual abuse evaluations. Historical information and photograph documentation were reviewed to determine the presence or absence of genital findings that indicate penetrating trauma. Only 2 of the 36 (5.5%) pregnant girls showed definitive evidence of penetration (Kellogg, Menard, & Santos , 2004).

• Adams, J. A., Harper, K., Knudson, S., & Revilla, J. (1994). Examination findings in legally confirmed child sexual abuse: It’s normal to be normal. Pediatrics, 94 (3), 310-7.
• Heger, A., Ticson, L., Velasquez, O., & Bernier, R. (2002). Children referred for possible sexual abuse: medical findings in 2384 children. Child Abuse & Neglect, 26, 645-59.
• Kellogg, N. D., Menard, S. W., & Santos , A. (2004).  Genital anatomy in pregnant adolescents: ” Normal ” does not mean “nothing happened”. Pediatrics, 113 (1 Pt 1), 67-9.

Myth 6:  Hundreds of innocent men and women have been falsely accused and sent to prison for molesting children.

Over and over again, the media has raised the question whether America is in the midst of a hysterical overreaction to the perceived threat from pedophiles. Actual research, however, shows that, as a whole, our society continues to under-react and under-estimate the scope of the problem.

Prior to the 1980s, child sexual abuse was largely ignored, both by the law and by society as a whole. In the 1980s, when the scope of the problem began to be acknowledged, the police began to arrest adults accused of child abuse. A backlash quickly formed and police and prosecutors were soon accused of conducting “witchhunts.” Although some early cases were handled badly — mainly because the police had little experience in dealing with very young child witnesses — there is little evidence to back the assertion that there was widespread targeting of innocent people.

In fact, research has consistently shown that few abusers are ever identified or incarcerated. Estimates suggest that only 3% of all cases of child sexual abuse (Finkelhor & Dziuba-Leatherman, 1994; Timnick, 1985) and only 12% of rapes involving children are ever reported to police (Hanson et al., 1999).

Further research reveals that of the few cases reported to authorities, relatively few accused offenders are ever investigated or charged. For instance, the first National Incidence Study (Finkelhor, 1983) found that criminal action was taken in only 24% of substantiated cases of child sexual abuse — a finding replicated by Sauzier (1989). After reviewing numerous studies, Bolen (2001) noted that in the end, offenders may be convicted in only 1-2% of cases of suspected abuse known to professionals. And even then, most convicted child molesters spend less than one year in jail.

Based on the high prevalence of sexual crimes against children on our society, it strains credulity to assume that the small number of cases that are actually prosecuted constitute a “witchhunt”, or that somehow mostly innocent people are targeted for prosecution. In fact, statistics suggest quite the opposite: child abusers are rarely identified or prosecuted.

• Bolen. R. M. (2001).  Child sexual abuse: Its scope and our failure . New York: Kluwer Academic.
• Ceci, S. J., & Bruck, M. (1993). The suggestibility of the child witness: A historical review and synthesis.Psychological Bulletin, 113, 403-39.
• Finkelhor, D. (1983). Removing the child – prosecuting the offender in cases of child sexual abuse: Evidence from the national reporting system for child abuse and neglect. Child Abuse & Neglect, 7, 195-205.
• Finkelhor, D., & Dziuba-Leatherman, J. (1994). Children as victims of violence: A national survey.Pediatrics, 94, 413-20.
• Hanson, R. F., Resnick H. S., Saunders, B. E., Kilpatrick, D. G., & Best, C. (1999). Factors related to the reporting of childhood rape. Child Abuse & Neglect, 23, 559-69.
• Kilpatrick, D. G., Edmunds, C. N., & Seymour, A. (1992). Rape in America: A report to the nation. Arlington VA : National Victim Center.
• Sauzier, M. (1989). Disclosure of child sexual abuse: For better or for worse. Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 12, 455-69.
• Timnick, L. (August 15, 1985). The Times poll: Twenty-two percent in survey were child abuse victims. Los Angeles Times, p. 1.

Myth 7:  If asked about abuse, children tend to exaggerate and are prone to making false accusations.

Contrary to the popular misconception that children are prone to exaggerate sexual abuse, research shows that children often minimize and deny, rather than embellish what has happened to them.

In one study, researchers examined 28 cases in which prepubescent children had tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease by forensically accepted procedures. To be included in the study, the children had to have presented for a physical problem with no prior disclosure or suspicion of sexual abuse and were required to have adequate expressive language capabilities. Each of the 28 children was interviewed by a social worker trained in abuse disclosure techniques and use of anatomically correct dolls. Only 12 of the 28 (43%) of the abused children interviewed gave any verbal confirmation of sexual contact (Lawson, & Chaffin, 1992).

Another study involved a perpetrator who pled guilty after videotapes documenting his abuse of ten children were found by authorities. Because of these detailed video recordings, researchers knew exactly what had happened to these children. They were thus able to compare what the children told investigators when they were interviewed to the videotapes. Despite this abundance of hard physical evidence, the researchers found a significant tendency among the children to deny or minimize their experiences. Some children simply did not want to disclose their experiences, some had difficulties remembering them, and one child lacked adequate concepts to understand and describe them. Even when interviews included leading questions, none of the children embellished their accounts or accused the perpetrator of acts that he hadn’t actually committed (Sjoberg & Lindblad, 2002).

Some people believe that recantations are a sure sign that a child lied about the abuse. However, a recent study found that pressure from family members play a significant role in recantations. Mallory et al. (2007) examined the prevalence and predictors of recantation among 2- to 17-year-old child sexual abuse victims. Case files (n = 257) were randomly selected from all substantiated cases resulting in a dependency court filing in a large urban county between 1999 and 2000. Recantation (i.e., denial of abuse postdisclosure) was scored across formal and informal interviews. Cases were also coded for characteristics of the child, family, and abuse. The researchers found a 23.1% recantation rate. The study looked for but did not find evidence that these recantations resulted from potential inclusion of cases involving false allegations. Instead, multivariate analyses supported a filial dependency model of recantation, whereby abuse victims who were more vulnerable to familial adult influences (i.e., younger children, those abused by a parent figure and who lacked support from the nonoffending caregiver) were more likely to recant.

• Lawson, L., & Chaffin, M. (1992). False negatives in sexual abuse disclosure interviews. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 7, 532-42.
• Malloy, L.C. , Lyon, T.D. , & Quas, J.A. (2007). Filial dependency and recantation of child sexual abuse allegations. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 46, 162-70.
• Sjoberg, R. L., & Lindblad, F. (2002). Limited disclosure of sexual abuse in children whose experiences were documented by videotape. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159, 312-4

Myth 8:  By using repeated interviews, therapists or police can easily implant false memories and cause false accusations among children of any age.

Although research has consistently shown that children rarely confabulate about having been abused and false allegations have been found to be rare (Everson & Boat, 1989; Jones & McGraw, 1987; Oates, et al., 2000), the potential for false allegations continues to be an area of great concern in sex abuse cases.

Whenever prominent adults are accused of abuse, we frequently hear allegations improper questioning and suggestions that the child may have invented molestation stories to please probing authority figures. We also hear concerns that inappropriate, suggestive therapies by overzealous clinicians may have shaped or implanted the allegations.

Recent research suggests that these concerns have been greatly exaggerated ( Lyons , 2001). There is now a substantial body of laboratory research which finds that children are quite reluctant to discuss embarrassing events (Lyon, 1999; 2002). Overall, laboratory research using suggestive questioning has consistently shown that negative events, especially events involving a child’s genitals, are relatively difficult to implant in children’s statements. In fact, research shows that children are more likely to fail to report negative experiences that actually did happen to them, than falsely remember ones that did not.

Saywitz, Goodman, Nicholas, and Moan (1991) studied the memory of 72 five and seven-year-old girls for a standardized medical checkup. Half of the children received a vaginal and anal examination as part of the checkup; while the other half of the children received a scoliosis examination of their back instead. The children’s memories were later solicited through free recall, anatomically detailed doll demonstration, and direct and misleading questions. The vast majority of vaginal and anal touch went unreported in free recall and doll demonstration, and was only disclosed when children were asked direct, doll-aided questions. The children who received a scoliosis exam never falsely reported genital touch in free recall or doll demonstration; and false reports were rare in response to direct questions.

It is also important to point out that many abused children exhibit post-traumatic and behavioral symptoms. To date no laboratory or clinical research supports the notion that children can falsely remember elaborate details of sexual abuse perpetrated by a trusted teacher, corroborate each other’s stories in independent interviews, and develop post-traumatic symptoms — based solely on police interviews or suggestive therapy.

CLICK FOR MORE INFORMATION

• Ceci, S. J., & Bruck, M. (1993). The suggestibility of the child witness: A historical review and synthesis.Psychological Bulletin, 113 , 403-39.
• Everson, M.D., & Boat, B. W. (1989). False allegations of sexual abuse by children and adolescents. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. 28 : 230-5.
• Jones, D. P. H., & McGraw, J. M. (1987). Reliable and fictitious accounts of sexual abuse to children.Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2, 27-45.
• Lawson, L., & Chaffin, M. (1992). False negatives in sexual abuse disclosure interviews. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 7 , 532-42.
• Lyon, T.D. (1999). The new wave of suggestibility research: A critique. Cornell Law Review, 84 , 1004-1087.
• Lyon, T.D. (2001). Let’s not exaggerate the suggestibility of children. Court Review, 28 (3), 12-14. (on-line:http://aja.ncsc.dni.us/courtrv/cr38-3/CR38-3Lyon.pdf )
• Lyon, T.D. (2002). Scientific Support for Expert Testimony on Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation. In J.R. Conte (Ed.), Critical issues in child sexual abuse (pp. 107-138). Newbury Park , CA : Sage. (on-line:http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?65+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+97+(Winter+2002 )
• Oates, R. K., Jones, D. P., Denson, D., Sirotnak, A., Gary, N., & Krugman, R. D. (2000). Erroneous concerns about child sexual abuse. Child Abuse & Neglect, 24 , 149-57.
• Pezdek, K., & C. Roe. (1997). The suggestibility of children’s memory for being touched: Planting, erasing, and changing memories. Law and Human Behavior, 21, 95-106.
• Saywitz, K. J., Goodman, G. S., Nicholas, E., & Moan, S. F. (1991). Children’s memories of a physical examination involving genital touch: Implications for reports of child sexual abuse. Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology, 59 , 682-91.
• Sjoberg, R. L., & Lindblad, F. (2002). Limited disclosure of sexual abuse in children whose experiences were documented by videotape. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159 , 312-4.

The post Eight Common Myths About Child Sexual Abuse appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

State lawmakers voted Monday to close a loophole that allowed the Los Angeles school district last year to avoid penalties in a lawsuit involving a 14-year-old student who said she was sexually assaulted by a teacher.

Legislation that now goes to the governor would bar adults sued by minors over sexual assault allegations and who are in positions of authority from using the defense the child consented to the sexual contact.

It also would prohibit those sued in such civil cases from raising a minor’s sexual history as a defense.

“We are one step closer to protecting our children against abuse and inconsistencies in the legal system,” said Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens), bill’s author.

Last year, a court found against a student who sued the Los Angeles Unified School District alleging negligence and asserting that she suffered emotional trauma when she was 14 and was sexually abused by her 28-year-old teacher at Edison Middle School.

District officials argued that school staff did not know about the abuse and that the teacher and eighth-grade student took steps to conceal their months-long sexual relationship.

The teacher was sentenced to three years in prison in a criminal case. But in the later civil suit, a jury found for the school district, partly because the student allegedly consented to sexual activities with her teacher.

Criminal law is clear that minors cannot consent to sexual acts. But civil law is less clear, and courts have ruled in civil cases that minors consented.

“Differences between civil and penal code when it comes to matters of consent are dangerous and threaten to let sexual predators off the hook for child abuse and negligence,” Lara said.

Assemblyman Mark Stone (D-Scotts Valley) said on the Assembly floor Monday that the bill “protects child victims of sexual predators and sexual abuse.”

The Assembly passed the bill, SB 14, on a 75-0 vote. It had already passed the state Senate.

Also Monday, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that prohibits school districts from purging a teacher’s personnel file of credible complaints about, substantiated investigations into or discipline for egregious misconduct, including sexual abuse of students.

Assemblyman David Hadley (R-Manhattan Beach) said his bill would preserve records for administrators to detect behavioral patterns that suggest children may be at risk. It would help criminal prosecutors when new acts are alleged. The measure is AB 1452.

Meanwhile, the Assembly approved a bill that would allow a child 13 or younger who is a witness in a violent felony to testify by closed-circuit television.

Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) introduced the measure in response to a Fresno case in which a child had to take the stand to testify face-to-face against a man accused of killing her father.

The proposal, SB 176, was previously approved by the Senate but goes back there for approval of minor amendments.

The post California Assembly votes to strengthen law protecting sexually abused students appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

All donations made to Jewish Community Watch from July 7 at 3pm (EDT) till July 8 at 3pm will be matched by three groups of donors.

Since its founding in 2011, Jewish Community Watch (JCW) has made a name for itself as a result of its bold approach to combating child sexual abuse in the orthodox Jewish community. Operating under the motto of “Educate, Prevent, Heal,” JCW provides therapy and supports survivors, educates parents and schools, and investigates and exposes abusers within the Orthodox community.

Last July, JCW raised over $150,000 over a 24 hour span using the Charidy crowdfunding platform, which quadruples the impact of the donations by the organization finding three groups of donors who match every dollar donated until the goal is reached. Charidy campaigns last for only 24 hours and require the goal to be reached or else the organization receives nothing.

JCW’s 2015 campaign will begin at 3pm EDT on July 7. The matching donors are Eli Nash, the Arora Nash Foundation, David Schottenstein, Yosef Gurwitz, Chaim M. Hazzan, Mark Horowitz, Chana Holtzberg, Ryan Shapiro, and a gift in loving memory of Yitzhak Meir.

Over the past year, JCW has grown exponentially. Nine events were held across the United States and Israel that were directed towards spreading awareness and education of child sexual abuse and were attended by over 3,300 people. JCW’s comprehensive website lists abusers in the orthodox community, presents educational resources for parents and survivors, and offers resources for survivors to get the help they need. Since its 2014 launch, it has generated 220,848 unique visitors who viewed 1,078,718 total pages. The 31 educational videos that were created have been viewed a total of 261,171 times so far.

The other primary focus of JCW is to provide support and therapy for survivors of sexual abuse and to assist them on their road to healing. Over 1,000 survivors reached out to JCW throughout the past year and JCW has helped them by referring them to therapy and offered subsidies, filing police reports, and by offering moral support.

As more people become aware of the incredible work that JCW is doing, more victims are reaching out to them for assistance. For this reason, JCW will continue to grow, by creating new programs such as an online support community that will be monitored by JCW staff and therapists on their website as well as by creating a “Find Help Near You” resource tab online that will speedily locate a list of nearby therapists, treatment centers, and support groups that are tailored for the orthodox community. With these plans and more JCW looks towards the future.

“JCW never intended to be a large organization,” said Jewish Community Watch’s founder Meyer Seewald. “It was born out of need to stop the epidemic of child sexual abuse and coverups. But once we started this mission we began to see an even greater need to expand in order to help even more people. As the number of cases that we receive grows, our organization needs to respond in turn in order to help victims on a broader, deeper scale.

“Beyond the money, every person who donates is choosing to make a statement that they stand for uncompromisingly protecting our children against abuse and that they stand with survivors. This is tremendously empowering for survivors and for JCW. And as a community, we can remain proud, knowing that so many thousands of people are taking a stand by creating awareness of this epidemic through going to events and by offering support to its victims.”

You can view the matching campaign and make a donation here: https://www.charidy.com/jcw500k

The post Jewish Community Watch to Raise $500,000 Over 24 Hours appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

By Zalmi Orimland

I was once a victim of sexual abuse. This is my story how I am now living as a survivor of sexual abuse.

I grew up as an orthodox frum boy and was extremely conscientious about the laws, always wanting to do what hashem wanted of me and what I was told was the “right thing”. I did not know much about sex and for a long part of my childhood, I was very innocent and naive.

Here is the story of how that all changed:

I grew up in Israel but went to schools that were mostly attended by Americans. I was sometimes mocked for being an Israeli and felt very left out. There was an older boy in the school who always made me feel special by giving me attention. One Friday night after the Shabbos meal, he asked to speak with me. I walked with him and we ended up in my room. As we spoke, he began to introduce sex into the conversation. Asking me if I’m ever aroused and questions of that nature. Next thing I know, he placed his hands on my private parts – I froze. I was so nervous, my heart began to beat but I was unable to move. He told me this is very normal for people to do, they just don’t talk about it. I guess that was my cue not to tell anyone.

The next Friday night, the same thing repeated itself only this time it escalated even further. This time he gave me oral sex. I had known nothing about sex until the week before and here he was introducing me to it in the darkest way possible. I demanded to leave and I returned to the meal. Again he reminded me that I was not tell anyone about this.

The next week it continued even further. He took me back to my room after the meal and this time forced me to perform oral sex on him. I told him I couldn’t breathe but he wouldn’t stop. This went on for some time but it is difficult to continue writing this out. As I am writing this, I can’t stop crying. I was never the same after what he did to me. I became a stranger to myself. My life changed forever. I can’t even remember the last time I was able to sleep without having a nightmare about this strange man forcing himself on me.

I began to drink and alcohol became a real escape for me. I attempted to commit suicide multiple times but was unsuccessful.

Every Friday night, I am reminded again of what he did to me. I can not enjoy a Friday night anymore. Impossible. It’s always filled with memories of the abuse.

For years, I’ve asked myself “why me?” What did I do at such a young age to deserve the hell? I want to feel like a normal person. I want to feel loved.

All this changed thanks to JCW. Victims began speaking up and I started realizing that I am not alone. I saw others trying to live a better life and I too wanted to become a survivor.

At around the same time, someone finally had the guts to ask me what is wrong. They said they knew I was hiding something from them. I had so much anger and so much hate – there must be something they don’t know about me. Thank G-d for this man! I began crying and couldn’t stop and I let it all out. I told him the story I just told you.

He encouraged me to get help and I began doing so. Shortly thereafter, I was introduced to JCW and shared my story with them. It took them 2 hours to get hold of my abuser. He admitted to everything and I felt tremendously vindicated. I started crying like a young child. At that moment, I felt like my life changed forever. I was scared for so long that my abuser would deny what he did to me. But he did not. 2 or 3 weeks after JCW spoke to my abuser, he came to California, where I now live, and I met with him 1 on 1.

Leading up to that day, I was so nervous but I was ready when it came. I let everything out on him. All the hell he put me through; the baggage he forced me to carry for so long. It is now his to carry. The shame is on him – it is no longer on me.

In short, I walked into the room a victim and walked out a survivor. I felt like a bomb that was inside me finally dropped. I left that room determined to change and not wanting to run away from life anymore.

Thankfully, I was introduced to JCW and they helped me to get justice from my abuser. I have no words to thank JCW for literally changing my life forever! I no longer feel perpetually lonely, judged, hated and shameful.

They gave me the hope that I can get better and become a normal person again. I no longer need to lead my life feeling hunted.

It is now time to put the past in the past and let it go. I can help myself; I can help others. I will not let anything get in my way. It is no longer “why me”, it is “Try me”! Bring it on! I am ready to face the world.

Life can be beautiful but we need to change our perspective sometimes. Peace and love to all victims of sexual abuse. We can become survivors and live a life we never thought possible. I am proof of that.

Thank you JCW for giving me and so many victims another chance at life.

To all victims: Please share the pain that you have with someone else you trust. It is crazy how much some people really care. Call JCW. They are amazing. It took me a long time to open up but once I did, I feel like I am out of a cage

I was locked in for years. I wish I came out of it earlier but it’s never too late!

The post The shame is now his, not mine. A story of abuse and healing. appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

By Avremi Rosenthal

I would like to share something with you that most, if not all don’t know about me.

I am a victim/survivor of child sexual abuse and I have been for the past 21 years of my life.

Back in November of last year, I attended the first JCW event in south Florida.

That night, my life turned upside down. Going to the event that night was the worst and best thing I’ve ever done, the emotions, pain, anger, and memories it brought up were overwhelming.

The next day I spoke to Meyer Seewald, the director of JCW.

I told him what I was going through and I expressed that I needed therapy but I couldn’t afford it.

Without hesitation he’s said “Don’t worry Avremi, how much can you afford” I told him an amount which was way below the fee per this particular therapist charged, JCW covered the rest.

My point is, whether you agree or disagree of how JCW runs their organization, they save lives! literally.

I’m passionate about this organization because I don’t want my children to have to go through the emotional trauma that I’ve been through. I’m passionate about this organization because I don’t want my children coming to me and my wife when they’re 27 years old, telling the story they’ve hidden and suppressed for 20 years, like I did a few months back to my parents.

The post Another survivor speaks up appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

The post ‘Utter hypocrite’ Todros Grynhaus jailed for 13 years for sex assaults appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

By Thomas G. Plante

News of an FBI raid at the Indiana home of Subway spokesman Jared Fogle stunned the public on Tuesday. No charges have been filed against Fogle and authorities have remained mum on what they’re looking for, though a “shocked” and “very concerned” Subway said in a statement that it believes the search “is related to a prior investigation of a former Jared Foundation employee” — the organization’s executive director was arrested on federal child pornography charges this spring. The sandwich chain also announcedthe end of its relationship with Fogle.

After evaluating and treating clerical sex offenders in the Catholic Church, as well as treating a variety of men troubled with pornography and other sexual problems for about 30 years, I find myself saddened but certainly not shocked by such investigations.

The public typically maintains a highly stereotypical and largely inaccurate view of pedophiles, defined as adults or teens 16 and up who are sexually stimulated by pre-pubescent children (typically 11 and under). We imagine pedophiles as creepy men with shifty eyes, stubble and a trench coat. We think they lurk around schools and playgrounds, waiting to snatch children. We think of these men as despicable lowlifes whom we can spot when we meet them, which is why news of sex crimes against children are invariably met with disbelief. “Stunned” parents and community members say the same thing: “He never seemed like that type of person.” In my three decades working with many men who sexually violate children and teens, I’ve never met one person who fit “that type.”

Pedophiles come in all shapes and sizes and from all walks of life. Some are rich and others poor; some are highly educated while others aren’t; some are very socially skilled and delightful conversationalists and some more reticent. So often we hear that people would never in a million years expect so-and-so to harm children, be a pedophile or engage in child pornography because they’re charming, clean cut, fun to be around, successful in their careers, have a nice family life, and so forth. We wonder how such a winner could be a pedophile.

Perhaps that’s why news that Fogle could be associated with a child pornography investigation has been so sensational. After all, we really like him. His terrific and well-known story of losing 245 pounds through a simple exercise program and eating Subway sandwiches, along with his wholesome and sincere persona, made him a popular spokesman — famous and admired. He sure doesn’t look and seem like a pedophile, right?

Contrary to public perception, pedophiles are often married or in a committed relationship; they are not more likely to be gay, even if they victimize boys; and their education, religious identification and intellectual functioning isn’t significantly different from the general population, according to leading researchers. Most of what we know about pedophiles is from those who get caught and are then incarcerated, which doesn’t represent the entire population of offenders — those who don’t match the stereotype or who have more resources often just don’t get caught.

It’s important to mention that not all pedophiles engage with child pornography, and some who engage with child pornography never physically violate a child. Yet too often one thing leads to another, and needs for further stimulation and sexual satisfaction means going from their pornographic viewing activities to actual engagement with real children in the real world, though the exact overlap between these activities is difficult to ascertain. This is one of the many reasons why child pornography use is alarming and disturbing.

Dateline NBC’s controversial show “To Catch a Predator” has actually provided much material to dispel the myth of the low-life pedophile. The show lures unsuspecting men to a home where they anticipate a 13-year-old girl waiting for them, ready to have sex. Men from all walks of life including pillars of society, find themselves ambushed by host Chris Hansen before they are dramatically arrested by local law enforcement. But even the popularity of the show hasn’t really altered the stereotype that most people maintain about pedophiles.

And quality research and best clinical practice clearly inform us that this stereotype is not only unhelpful and incorrect, but also dangerous. If we assume a child molester looks and acts one way, then we won’t see the warning signs and won’t suspect those who don’t match that image. This is especially dangerous since people that we admire, including leaders in the community, can get away with much when it comes to victimizing children. The friendly cleric or youth group leader, the engaging teacher and the dedicated coach all don’t fit the stereotype of a pedophile, but they do have easy access to and trust with children and their parents. Research tells us that about 80 percent of pedophiles are not strangers to the child they molest but are actually family members: stepfathers, uncles, older brothers, cousins. Additionally, many so-called “pedophiles” don’t target young children at all. In fact, most of these crimes against minors are committed against teens. About 90 percent of all known cases of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church during the past 60 years have involved teens, not young children. And the percentage of clerical offenders in the Church (4 percent during the past 60 years) is actually lower than rate of public school teachers during the same time period (about 5 percent).

Whether Jared Fogle ends up being charged, today’s news provides an important teaching moment to reconsider who might engage in sexual crimes with children and youth. Understanding that anyone, even the nice guys, could harm children will better help our society ensure that policies, procedures and practices are in place to keep children safe from sexual predators. While we don’t want to create a climate of paranoia, we do need to use the best science and practice to do all that we can to ensure that our kids are safe from sexual crimes.

Thomas G. Plante is is the Augustin Cardinal Bea, S.J. University Professor at Santa Clara University, Clinical Adjunct Professor in Psychiatry at Stanford University, and author of several books on clergy sexual abuse including, “Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: A Decade of Crisis, 2002-2012.”

The post We’re shocked by every nice guy caught with child porn. But we shouldn’t be. appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette

As director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, David Finkelhor understands the impact sexual abuse by a parent has on children and how they respond.

Abuse typically begins when the child is 7 to 9 years old and can continue until the early teens. That’s when the child has become more independent with the ability to resist, avoid the father or gain sufficient courage to disclose the abuse. By then, however, the abusive relationship may have persisted for six or seven years.

Younger siblings complicate the situation.

The teen might decide to disclose what’s happening or allow the abusive relationship to continue to prevent the father’s attention from turning to the siblings. Sometimes the young teen begins bribing the father while allowing the abuse to continue.

“The real issue is getting the kids to disclose it and finding ways to help families understand that they can get through the agony of disclosing it to authorities and get some help,” said Mr. Finkelhor, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire. “It is very devastating, and once it is going on, it is a completely preoccupying situation, with the kid thinking about it, the shame, the guilt and trying to avoid it. It is hard to be a child in the ordinary sense. It is very corrosive to child development.”

Today, he said, there’s “tremendously greater awareness” of such crimes with offenders recognizing they can be caught and relatives and mothers more likely to spot signs of abuse. Fewer families nowadays have “autocratic family constellations” in which the wife is intimidated into keeping quiet.

Children also have received more education about abuse.

Nowadays, images the father or stepfather might download due to his sexual interest in other children make prosecution easier, Mr. Finkelhor said. Stepfathers are well represented in family sex abuse crimes.

“It is the kind of crime that inspires a tremendous revulsion and anger, so there is a strong punitive streak in people’s feelings about it,” he said. “On the other hand, the recidivism rate is pretty low for incestuous abusers as compared with other child abusers.”

The victims often develop ambivalent feelings toward the offender. “They are angry,” he said. “They want it to stop and want support and want people to say it’s wrong and they want an apology. Some are quite angry, but many don’t support lengthy incarceration.”

He said he considers the 40-to-80-year prison sentence for the Allegheny County father convicted of abusing a daughter an unusually lengthy one, especially if it didn’t include violence and brutality. When such cases reach the criminal system, he said, 80 to 90 percent end with plea deals.

Although family sex crimes are down 60 percent since 1992, sexual abuse remains a far too common occurrence for girls, he said.

“We just published a new study that shows 1 in 4 17-year-old girls has been sexually abused in life,” Mr. Finkelhor said. “The majority occurred in adolescent years and happened with peers or people slightly older. About 10 percent of those occurred at the hands of adults.

“In my estimation, something in the order of less than 1 percent of the female population has been molested by the father or stepfather,” he continued. “But this particular type of abuse is a particularly severe form in that it is so damaging to the fundamental relationship children have to their basic support system.”

The post Researcher discusses complications of sexual abuse within families appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.

A former principal accused of molesting students at an ultra-Orthodox Jewish school in Melbourne has had her extradition hearing to Australia delayed.

Malka Leifer fled to Israel just hours after allegations of sexual abuse at the Adass Israel School in Elsternwick first surfaced in 2008, and has been there ever since.

It is understood Ms Leifer could face dozens of charges of indecent assault and rape if she ever returns to Melbourne.

Ms Leifer was first placed under house arrest in Israel last September but nearly a year later there still has not been an initial hearing on her extradition petition.

On Wednesday, her lawyers successfully argued in a Jerusalem court for yet another delay to her case, claiming she is suffering from “psychosis and stress”.

Lawyer Yehuda Fried denied dragging the case out.

“I don’t accept the word excuses. We are conducting a court procedure,” he said outside the court.

“The Israeli law confirms that anyone in a psychotic state cannot be subject to legal proceedings.”

He told reporters he was willing to spend years fighting the extradition and would appeal all the way up to the Israeli High court and Minister for Justice if necessary.

Attorney-General George Brandis’s department said in statement: “Australia made a request to Israel for Ms Leifer’s extradition as she is wanted to face prosecution in Victoria for 74 sexual assault offences.

“As the matter remains before the courts in Israel, it would not be appropriate to comment further.”

Abuse whistleblower Manny Waks is visiting Israel to bring attention to the issue of child sexual abuse in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities.

He said he was dismayed the extradition process was taking so long.

“I’ve been in contact with a number of complainants in this case and its something I know they are taking in a very difficult way,” he said.

Dr Yitzhak Kadman, the executive director of Israeli children’s right advocacy organisation National Council for the Child, said he believed Ms Leifer had “very good lawyers”.

Dr Kadman said he was worried Israel’s powerful ultra-Orthodox community was protecting Ms Leifer and helping to fund her legal case.

“We are aware of how many people tried to create pressure on this case. We think she is well connected. The prosecutor has told us, without getting into details, that there was a lot of pressure not to even release her name,” he told the ABC.

“We don’t think that Israel should be a country of refuge for suspects of child sex abuse, paedophiles.”

In a statement the Israeli ministry of justice told the ABC: “There has been a number of delays to this case caused by the defendant. The Ministry of Justice is doing everything it can to move this case along.”

Ms Leifer’s case has been adjourned until October 26.

The post Malka Leifer: Former Melbourne Jewish school principal wins further delay in fight against extradition from Israel on abuse allegations appeared first on Jewish Community Watch.