News

by Amber Schultz

Podcast: In the companion podcast to the HBO Original documentary series Allen v. Farrow, award-winning filmmakers Amy Ziering, Kirby Dick and Amy Herdy reveal new details about the sexual abuse allegations against Woody Allen involving Dylan, his then 7-year-old daughter with Mia Farrow.

by Joshua Kendall

Silenced. Australian children are being placed in harm’s way by the legal structure designed to determine their best interests — the family law system

Forced separation affects children’s ability to trust their parents by Ruben Castaneda (US News and World Report)

US officials separated over 2500 children from their parents. This has traumatized the children and disrupted their attachment to their parents, which maylead to longterm problems.

I never got any help, any kind of therapy. I never told anyone
by Junot Díaz (The NewYorker)

Mr. Díaz eloquently describes how being raped at age 8 devastated his life making him hate himself. “That violación. Not enough pages in the world to describe what it did to me. The whole planet could be my inkstand and it still wouldn’t be enough. That shit cracked the planet of me in half, threw me completely out of orbit, into the lightless regions of space where life is not possible.”

Failing Child Sexual Abuse Victims & Protecting Their Predators: Family Courts are as Guilty as Michigan State, US Olympic Officials, and Penn State.

EXCERPT: our family courts are sentencing children to live with their rapists or batterers—despite abundant evidence that would convict the abusers in a criminal court trial! This scandal is deeper and more widespread than the Nassar and Sandusky tragedies.

 “The Silence Breakers” — women who triggered a # MeToo national outcry over sexual harassment

EXCERPT: It became a hashtag, a movement, a reckoning. But it began, as great social change nearly always does, with individual acts of courage. The actor who went public with the story of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s “coercive bargaining” in a Beverly Hills hotel suite two decades earlier. The strawberry picker who heard that story and decided to tell her own. The young engineer whose blog post about the frat-boy culture at Silicon Valley’s highest-flying startup prompted the firing of its founder and 20 other employees. The California lobbyist whose letter campaign spurred more than 140 women in politics to demand that state government “no longer tolerate the perpetrators or enablers” of sexual misconduct. A music superstar’s raw, defiant court testimony about the disc jockey who groped her.

 5 (Misguided) Reasons People Doubt Sexual Misconduct Victims by Shaila Dewan (New York Times)

EXCERPT: She took decades to come forward. She can’t remember exactly what happened. She sent friendly text messages to the same man she says assaulted her. She didn’t fight back.
There are all sorts of reasons women who report sexual misconduct, from unwanted advances by their bosses to groping or forced sex acts, are not believed, and with a steady drumbeat of new reports making headlines, the country is hearing a lot of them.
But some of the most commonly raised causes for doubt, like a long delay in reporting or a foggy recall of events, are the very hallmarks that experts say they would expect to see after a sexual assault.

by Laurie Udesky (an award-winning investigative reporter) 100Reporters

EXCERPT: In family courts throughout the country, evidence that one of the parents is sexually or physically abusing a child is routinely rejected. Instead, perpetrators of abuse are often entrusted with unsupervised visits or joint or sole custody of the children they abuse, putting children in danger of serious, often life-threatening harm, according to children’s advocates.

Our two-year investigation – which includes interviews with more than 30 parents and survivors in California, Ohio, North Carolina, New York, Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, Maryland and New Jersey – uncovered stories of children consigned to suffer years of abuse in fear and silence while the parents who sought to protect them were driven to the brink financially and psychologically. These parents have become increasingly stigmatized by a family court system that not only discounts evidence of abuse but accepts dubious theories used to undermine the protective parents’ credibility.